skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They may be revenue generators indeed, but anyway I see this as yet another symptom of a failed setup in the core: research and education should be fully funded by the taxpayer directly instead of indirectly via saddling youth with decades of debt or by sports activities that have nothing to do with academia.

Academia should be academia and only dedicated to further scientific knowledge and teaching, not to spend boatloads of time and resources to hunt for half year grant money or sports revenue. Just imagine all the management time of what is consumed by sports go to helping the professors deal with grants/funding issues - that would be a major boost for science if scientists could actually do science things instead of management things!
JavaScript God Mode
Measuring excess mortality: the case of England during the Covid-19 Pandemic [pdf]
> I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do.

I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and Slack are). The decision hinges on whether the extra cost results in extra income or reduced cost elsewhere. In practice people still use these programs so it seems the reduced income is minimal. What's more, the "extra cost" of a more efficient program is not just extra expense spent on developers - it's hard to hire developers so you probably wouldn't just hire an extra developer or two and get the same feature set with greater efficiency. Instead, that "extra cost" is an oppotunity cost: a reduced rate of implementing functionality.

In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's how the market works.
Idk about the interactive thing.

Personally having a bunch of fancy tools like that makes it harder to keep a flow of (try problem, get it wrong, figure out why, repeat) but I guess I’ve never tried that with a math book. In college I always found it was best to study math with a dumb pdf and a notebook.
How to Deliver Better Outcomes in the Time of a Crisis?
In this case DD is essentially acting like a ticket scalper. And since DD screwed themselves, is there even a law broken?
Having something in common is good. Managers are expected to work 9.5 hours per day and be available 24/7 to recieve calls/texts/emails on their phones. So even if they have kids, they need to put in 50 hours a week, which isn't too bad I guess.
I respectfully disagree that Jenkins is a perfect pair with anything. Time to move on from Jenkins, folks; there are far better options nowadays.
I remember the time when I self referred the shit out of doordash, caviar few years back only to stop because I started feeling bad about it.
> But I work with people who write books. And I read their books. I don't read them like some kind of expert oracle distributing the blessed texts. I read them as a work of documentation from a friend or colleague, so I don't really feel this veneer of expertise is necessary.

Yes, you feel that way. You feel like you're a rational person who values humility, whose judgement isn't clouded by the effects that I am describing.

Well, maybe you really are that person. It doesn't matter. We cannot assume that the buyers are such noble beings.
There's been rumours

The notion that anyone is steering the UK towards the quirky US model is simple fear-mongering.

Even the partisan article you cite only talks about privatisation of elements of the NHS.

A mixed public/private health care model can be effective policy. The Australian system serves as an example of this.

The NHS is an inefficient mess, despite the efforts of so many of its staff. It is reasonable that we should be able to debate policy models. The tone of the Guardian article does not assist reasonable debate.
Backup works android->android and iOS->iOS but not if you want to cross the lines; guess you don’t care about that... but:

If you use Google’s backup for WhatsApp, it is NOT encrypted. Your local backup IS encrypted. It’s not your data - you can’t have it except through the app. But google can (and does) have that data for likely 95% of android WhatsApp users; E2E with this state of affairs is not very useful. (I assume the iOS situation is similar, but don’t know for sure)

Also, a copy of your phone book, continuous IP (and likely location) and all your conversation metadata is stored on Facebook’s servers even if you don’t use the google drive backup.

Yes, WhatsApp is useful and works well, But the E2E aspect is false safety. For many practical purposes, you should assume there’s No encryption. For the purposes that inconvenience you, it’s obviously there.
Impact of long-duration space missions at ISS on astronaut microbiome
From Counter-Strike to keyboard shortcuts
First the Dutch, then the Spanish, who got kicked out by the British around the Argentine independence.

Most of the time that the islands were inhabited the people that lived there were British.

While the Spanish hold no colonies in South America anymore, the British do.

The Argentines would have been the logical successors to the Spanish and Britain invaded Argentina as well.

It’s hard to find the good guys in this story but it would be really hard to the people that currently live on the islands to become part of Argentina
Yes, maybe Sweden's policy is bad but that does not change the fact that our Healthcare system was not overwhelmed. The Swedish policy did exactly what our experts thought, slowed down the sprwad just enough to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed.

But what it did not take into account was stopping the spread from getting into care homes, which is the most likely explanation for our bad numbers. Our elder care was, unlike our hospitals, entirely unprepared for a pandemic.
How does the author know it isn't the driver that will get the short end of the stick here? To put it differently, what would happen if the restaurant mistakenly charged the driver who is picking up the food more than listed and then the driver pays that mistaken amount with Doordash's credit card? Will they be penalized/fired once Doordash discovers the accounting error?
I think you're both right, there are two separate types of customers making the same choice. One group is more price-conscious, the other is more effort-conscious. I'm personally in the other group - I have less time and patience than money to spend on deliveries, so I'll pick an option based on seamlessness. E.g. I've been ordering food for years on aggregator websites instead of calling the restaurants, because this way I can input my order on a computer (vs. talking to a busy person in a noisy room over crappy cellular connection, which often enough ends in errors), and I can prepay the order. I don't carry much cash on me, and I don't enjoy the hassle of using it. And while some restaurants will allow paying by card on recepit, it usually involves one or two payment terminals shared between a bunch of drivers, which leads to longer delivery times and all sorts of other problems (I've had drivers forget or not be informed about the need to take a terminal with them). I'll gladly accept 10-20% higher price to avoid dealing with any of that.

It's a similar story for rideshares; I think the major benefit they offer over regular taxi is seamless payment that (almost) always works, and is always available.
Crew microbiome may influence microbial composition of ISS habitable surfaces
That can never ever happen in Europe. You can't just go ask Vodafone for a new sim with the same number because you lost it. You must be American.
Sounds like they have less than 2 years professional experience, period. That might influence other results even more when it's not about experienced developers who have recently started python, but about developers who have recently started their job.
The pandemic downturn might yield a new startup wave
That’s a “brown M&M”, not a “poison pill”.
It's really just accelerating what was going to happen in a decade or so anyway when the demographic bulge passed. Colleges are to some extent wildly overprovisioned, as well as overextended, and many were starting to fail before SHTF.
Browsers send tons of information to all sorts of in-page components. If the attacker is incompetent, it's not that difficult to narrow down their location.

I wonder if CDNs can be used as "standard candles" for in-page scripts to measure latencies to multiple known network locations and infer a position from there across multiple sessions with different exit points. How many exit-point/latency pairs would I need to figure out the actual origin of a request?
This. Can't stress points 2 and 3 enough. Remember Segment [1], one of YC's most successful companies, started out as a small open source tool on Github. But even though it was small and had basically no features, the enterprise loved it and asked for more. That's how they realized that they hit a nerve.

So writing and releasing OSS may not lead to direct monetization opportunities, but it can be a great way to get in touch with enterprises and to get demand readings quickly.

[1] https://segment.com/
> From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve (sic) they morphed into thought-culling money making machines.

How did you come to that conclusion? I would agree on the money-making machine part, but I had rather a different and mostly positive college experience on the education side, both in undergrad and graduate school.
And who says that Google won't do that?

Now is the perfect time to get more censorship in place, be it for commercial or policial reasons.
Most Spotify user-hours are probably office workers or students pumping music into headphones while working. If anything it's a productivity application because it trades flagrantly unnecessary resource usage (streaming the same songs over and over) for users' time (no more dicking around crafting the perfect iPod).

On the topic of flagrantly unnecessary resource usage...

My first child was born six months ago. Newborns (we discovered) sleep better with white noise. So of course we found a three hour white noise track on Spotify and played it from our phones for every nap, never bothering to download it.
What's your theory as to why Sweden is among the worst countries in the world for infection rates and deaths per capita, as opposed to e.g. Germany which implemented effective lockdowns early?

I know the UK royally botched its coronavirus response (waiting until the virus was spreading far too quickly before doing anything at all), although I do not know about France and Italy.
Couchsurfing die at some point long ago. I forget exactly what happened, but globally all their volunteers per city left.
With few exceptions, I can't think of a good reason to serve up regional dialects of English and I can't imagine anyone approving the translation of a site into UK, US, Australian, Canadian, Indian English or any other regional dialect.

English speakers are quite capable of understanding regional dialects and I would guess there are few instances when a user could be confused by a dialect not local to them.

Do we then have to go down the route of translating to northern English dialect over Scottish English? etc.?

No, you serve up whatever variation of English that is local to you. The rest of us native English speakers will get by just fine, unlike if I was on holiday in Mexico and was served up Spanish. I wouldn't have a clue.
Or you can just not drop an app that just became the victim of corporate censorship.
If you are a tourist you will get charged more if you hail a taxi from most Indian airports.
I got that information from a friend who wasn't even supposed to tell me. I wouldn't jeopardize them. They didn't say it necessarily means a lower rating. It's that they will compare you apples to apples with the output of your colleagues who did not take leave. If you took 6 weeks of paid parental leave, then your story point count will be about 15% lower than theirs.
Whatsapp has replaced SMS as the defacto standard mobile messenger for 98% of users in Europe (or many other places). It doesn't matter if they do things badly, there is no way around them at the moment.
Sorry, I can't look it up right now, but trying to reconstruct it in my head it must've been something like

y = (f(x1), f(x2), f(x3))

vs

y = f(x1, x2, x3)

Not entirely sure anymore though. But it was something about causing side effects but throwing away return values with the ,-operator and involved function calls, I think
Author of Sakura.css [0] here linked in the article. Thanks for the link ^_^, new.css looks super great!

A bit more on "WHY" you'd want to use a classless theme:

* Quick prototyping, especially when working on backend sites and can't yet be bothered to fidget with css/html.

* Building a quick (but pretty) site/blog for your best friend or aunt!

* Works amazingly with markdown generated HTML content. So it's a perfect match when rendering markdown but don't want to customise the rendering process to include specific classes.

* Using it as a placeholder: I almost always start a project with sakura.css, just drop the link tag and you’re done. Start working on features instantly.Once I’ve built the flows/components a bit I replace it with something like tailwind! There is no friction to this workflow as sakura and sisters are all classless anyways, so you can replace it easily.

[0]: https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura
How is giving 25 people bread, water and shelter and most of all a job they enjoy not impressive?
Just do something that the enterprise world cares about. Remember Segment [1], one of YC's most successful companies, started out as a small open source tool on Github [2]. But even though it was small and had basically no features, the enterprise loved it and asked for more. That's how they realized that they hit a nerve.

So writing and releasing OSS may not lead to direct monetization opportunities, but it can be a great way to get in touch with enterprises and to get demand readings quickly.

[1] https://segment.com/
[2] https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js
It would be illegal to penalize the drivers, at least financially. I doubt the driver is given the choice of not buying the food based on price. If Doordash did have some way to penalize them, they could just bounce over to Grubhub or others. Doordash is advertising food at a given price - they must sell it at that price, regardless of price of purchase.
Iirc Linus from Linus tech tips benchmarked a pc build like the one suggested in the article. It didn't come out great.

But even for simple tasks, those CPUs might not even have hardware accelerated crypto (aes-ni instruction set iirc).

And are probably less efficient than modern CPUs.

Long story short: I wouldn't bother unless performances power bills are not a problem.
Currently the studies can't tell if HCQ is effective or not because all of them have been wasted opportunities for many different reasons, from too few patients, to absence of controls, to too late administration (the NEJM paper and the Lancet paper on lopinavir/ritonavir tell important lessons on this topic). We're in the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" territory.

I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense (after all there's an effect in vitro), but of course there's no guarantee it will work properly (work as in "higher efficacy than placebo or other treatments") in vivo.

The reason for my comment is that the announcement by the "government official" (who was not the first, the first being the eccentric Dr.Raoult) turned what should have been scientific debate into a political flamefest (at least in the media). And science (aka, proper, randomized clinical trials) got lost in the way (at some point the U of Minnesota trial struggled to get new people).

I personally don't have any particular love for HCQ: chances are, like remedisivir, that if there is an effect, it is small. But I want to point out that so far science is still out on this one.
I have this dream where I'd be able to write an application once in Rust (be it simple game, CRUD, chat, whatever) , target WASM and have users be able to run it (via browser) on desktop, android, or iOS and not have to write the program 4-6 times for different OS's.

However - seeing some people diving into the WASM details makes me wonder whether it will be the way the browser implement WebAssembly that stops us from doing something like this, not rust's lack of a GUI framework.

So far the best I've seen/read on this topic is this session from a Rust meetup where Azriel Hoh walked an audience through what was involved with porting an existing Rust game to webassembly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YQGwb4_AvA
Nice to see an open source audio fingerprint. I once interviewed at Mediaguide (now defunct?) who scanned radio broadcasts so they could sell reporting to advertisers when their ads ran, and record labels when their songs played. There's probably a ton more applications.
That's why I never watch any video on logged in YouTube that may not interest me. Better right click and use anonymous window.
Surely Google's automated tools wouldn't automatically suspend an app that has 5 stars and over 500,000 reviews

.... surely
> Didn't China require any foreign company to be controlled by Chinese to get access to the Chinese market?

This has been explained like hundreds of times on HN. If you truly believe such nonsense, there are one simple question to ask - what Chinese business entity is control Microsoft/Apple/Intel when they enjoyed all those revenues from the Chinese market.
Are people still doing this?! Haven't seen it in a while but it was one of the worst web trends of the last few years.
That’s effective on an individual level, but tricky to enforce at an organizational level. It’s not like it would be wise for the DoD to log into Strava and setup a privacy fence around every sensitive location.
I don't know about the US, but I had the same misconception in Brazil until I ended up training government employees. What I encountered was an extremely motivated and intelligent crowd that, even though they were underpaid, were motivated by a desire to make things work. It stuck with me that, while some companies had the best talent money could buy, these agencies had the best people no money would ever buy.

Besides, even a small government deals with amounts of data that rival larger enterprises.
This is handy, I think theres one for Chrome too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/
Scott's article devastated IIT. Lot's of people stopped looking at IIT after it appeared. Here is a related question: has IIT ever lead to an interesting neurobiological insight? Has IIT suggested an interesting research hypothesis that has been proven or disproven? In other words: is IIT an interesting scientific methodology? Short answer: no.
So what if they are? Will they talk back if I send them to the anode?
This is called a "tare weight", FYI.
Oh, for sure, you can still find yourself in a situation where that kind of heavyweight design pattern is appropriate. And if you do, then by all means uses it. I think they're just saying don't jump straight to the top of the tower of abstraction when the first step or two up the staircase will do what you want.
I work on a desktop CAD / CAM application, and I need every one of the 12 cores and 32 GB RAM on my windows workstation. I know this because I also have a mac workstation with lower specs (16 GB RAM, don't know offhand how many cores) and developing on it is intolerable (let's play "wait an hour to see if clang will compile my changes" - I know, I know, I should read the C++ standard more carefully so I'm not disappointed to discover that MSVC was overly permissive).

Parenthetically, we do use Slack and I am double-dipping on a lot of heavy functionality by having both Spacemacs (which I use for code editing and navigating / search within files) and Visual Studio (which I use for building, debugging, and jump-to-definition) open at the same time.
I love the idea of finding and playing games that me and my friends own. But, to be honest I do not play games too often. Isn't there any build-in solution for that? It seems like obvious problem.

I don't know, maybe I am just wrong.
What about google podcasts which literally lists and plays the same podcasts about covid?
> in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.

...or because your browser defaults to sending en-US even though you're using a Danish-localized browser on a Danish operating system, as described by the parent comment.
Exactly that. And while I hope this won't work because it's mostly trying to insert itself between a landowner and their neighbourhood farmer, there's probably enough less personal relationships in this space for Tillable to find a foothold, from which they'll continue "disrupting" the space.

(Worth remembering that disrupting evokes, particualrly in this context, the picture of a disruptor - a weapon used by evil Klingons and sneaky Romulans.)

Your explanation makes me think of a paraphrase I like to post: the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is to separate good men from it with enoungh layers of indirection.
Everybody's starting to figure out that to get affordable development you need:

1. fast development (both Python and node)

2. boring platform where it's usually OK to leave smth unupgraded for >5 yrs (Python wins here hands down)

3. cheap devs (good Node.js devs have a lot of option to "jump around" between front and back and frameworks so higher room for leverage ...with Python you can hire cheapest newly grads since it's now taught in most unis)

...on top of this:

- performance in terms of "requests served per CPU power" does NOT matter for most apps (and when it does caching saves most situations) - and if it does, modern Python can deliver now (async is mature)

- using same stack as ML and datasci comes as a bonus - you can have backend-full-stack-devs jumping between data pipelines, APIs/web, ML models, data analysis code etc. who can stay separate from frontend-full-stack-devs doing web frontends + mobile hybrid etc.

It would be great if we could also standardize on a static high performance language common to all (eg. usable for special-performance-sensitive-code either standalone services or Python-modules or node-modules) ...this area's a mess, too much overlap, duplicated work, and too hard for devs to jump from one ecosystem to another (Rust and C++ as lib/extension langs... Java/Kotlin or Go or C#/F# for standalone services... now Swift an option too...).
A ~5k star project of mine brings in an average of maybe ~$15 of donations per year, so I suspect you’re already outperforming the median donation/star (or I’m way underperforming).
Seems to me the scandal is that US military bases allowed people in protected areas to upload GPS traces of their activities, more so than strava showing these along with millions of other traces in their activity maps...
The answer is JIT'ing JS.

For each of your Electron apps there is a little compiler chugging away.
How to Build a Cybersecurity Career [2019 Update]