skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making piracy easy has been super-helpful. Libgen doesn't have (anywhere near) everything but it's great for surveying a field and picking up some portion of the must-have resources.

> access to almost all of the world's knowledge for free

I'd guess we've got access to ~10% of it (but it's a good 10%!) for free, ~30% paid (but usually piratable!), and the remainder unavailable as a paid electronic resource but maybe (often not) as a paid paper one and maybe (often not) available pirated—maybe you can at least locate or learn of its existence with the Web, but possibly it's totally unknown to the Web outside of maybe a reference in some books that happen to be digitized (this does actually happen, though you do usually have to get a little obscure before it does, but sometimes not as obscure as one might think).

[EDIT] to be clear I think the Web is an excellent research tool, however an awful lot of its value in that role is from piracy (saving me, say, having to inter-library-loan or buy a book just to find the books that book name-drops in its preface, or to read one relevant chapter, or to see the book's index so I can find out whether I need it in the first place). I think its containing anything like "all the world's knowledge", even for liberal values of "all", is far from true, and there's a risk of thinking if something exists it's probably available as a digital resource delivered over the Web (far from true), and if it doesn't then surely it's at least possible to find out about its existence on the Web (also not true), and if neither of those are true it must be something of no value whatsoever to anyone or wildly obscure (not true).

[EDIT EDIT] then even if it is on the web, it can be really hard to find something that's not on one of a few major sites using search. More so than it used to be. It can take so damn long that pirating and reading a book on the topic on Libgen can be faster than finding the same info on the open web, even if it's there, which is pretty damning of the state of web indexing. As I wrote in another comment on this thread, it was once possible to be fairly sure when one had reached the edge of Google's knowledge and the thing you're looking for was not in its index—such certainty is now almost impossible, mostly because of how Google search (and seemingly all other web search tools) has changed, not because of increased total content.
Why do you think I’m talking about the US? There’s a whole world out there.
I'm sure it already does. All of those companies selling information to the police are probably selling it to well-connected private entities as well. Or hell, the mercenaries may just own these tech companies outright: look at the devos family.
That Notion API is pretty slick. His example of using it for task management and dashboards is wild. May have to give that a whirl.
I am a huge fan of Simon Tatham's puzzles. His developer documentation [0] is absolutely amazing. All the puzzles are written in very high quality C with, in my opinion, a perfect ratio of comments to code [1].

I was hooked on his Tents [2] puzzle for a few weeks, then I started modifying the code to automatically fill in squares based on the tricks I found for adding constraints. Before I knew it, I had written a complete solver! Now I don't have to waste my time on it and I can get back to work :)

[0]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/

[1]: https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=blob;f=tents...

[2]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tent...
In golang, X is a subtype of interface{}. But []X isn't a subtype of []interface{} (according to the compiler).
Doesn't this violate the above subsitution principle ?
U.S. companies discover the dark side of a Covid-19 business boom
Fascinating -- surprised Slack was willing to go into this level of detail.
Yes, but that is A LOT easier to filter and detect, because then it'll be using the XHR API and HTTP protocol, whereas WebRTC allows free-form protocols.
Proportionally, it might not be much better today. Maybe 1/100,000 books is exactly the piece of information you need. Certainly the rest of the books aren't total crap either, they at least passed that bar of getting the book published and making some sense. I wouldn't be surprised if the signal to noise ratio on the internet today wasn't 1/billion web pages with all the automatic SEO crap and misinformation out there today. The sites and resources you listed are popular in tech circles, but are not mainstream at all. Then again if they were, they probably wouldn't exist as we know them, if at all.
This seems awesome and it weirds me out how many anti posts there are... is it better this whole thing just be one sided? Maybe nobody read the article, it's not like they're filtering anything. They're just doing the opposite of spreading disinformation, to the best of their abilities.
> Microsoft will pursue its long term business interests.

Just like all positive sum games, open source is in everyone's interests, including Microsoft's. Egoistic alturism: serving your own interests [through] serving everyone else's interests.

All the people here railing on how Microsoft is destroying open source clearly don't understand the very premise of the thing that they think they are defending.
Another distinct motive is wanting to hinder facial recognition. Previously, wearing a mask would automatically lump you in with criminals. Now it has been normalized. I look forward to wearing a mask for errands long after the pandemic necessitates, especially when I can return to using cash.

PS With a sample of 7 out of 7 wearing masks, it's nice to see that even criminals have more care for society than the population at large does!
Agreed.

And bluntly, even if they're not, they'll be treated as they are by the people they're trying to target. I'd question if this actually achieves anything and if there's any actually reliable data on efficacy.
I could see an argument (similar to for assert()) to omit such a check in most production builds. Maybe you could enable it for a small amount of hosts, so that if it does happen with any frequency, somebody sees it somewhere.

But not every "unthinkable" case being reached represents a security problem as it does in this case. So in the general case of how to approach such assert-type checks, an abort might take down the process when not necessary, turning it into a DoS.

Edit: I am not sure if my friend the downvoter realizes I am not trying to justify legit security bugs, just talking abstractly about varying approaches to handling asserts for unforeseen or "allegedly impossible" circumstances.
With the advent of IUDs, I would be surprised to see many “accidents” anymore. No one in my social circles has accidentally had a kid.
I wouldn't be surprised if in various post-mortems we will conclude that advising against face masks even though they do 'work' was a mistake.

It's understandable that our governments might advise against their use because of limited availability, but I think 'doing PR' on this issue hasn't really helped when it comes to our trust in said government in our information age.

Perhaps it would have been better for the government to be honest from the start, explain that they believe masks are crucial for care workers and of relatively limited use to the rest of us, and either leave it at that, or actively disallow ownership and usage if necessary.

Lying about the whole thing just feeds the flames of a public that already has a large amount of skeptics.
Yes, but even in a single pole cable would not be too short. After all we're considering bootstrapping, and moving tons of copper to the Moon doesn't sound cheap. I've heard there are points which the sunlight never reach, but not about permanent sunlight.
If you're not running truly massive amounts of data through it, then PCIe 4.0 provides no benefit over PCIe 3.0 anyway.
I think you underappreciate libvirt here. The qemu command line interface is really quite ugly and awkward to use. You might imagine that, in wrapping it, libvirt might fail to make it worse. But they actually succeeded!

(To be fair, if you're stuck for ideas for making something nastier, wrapping it in XML isn't a crazy starting point.)
It’s not pointless if you are entertained by your own perhaps useless creation.
Thanks for writing it!

I've shared that with a lot of people, because it's a great introduction to stepping through the abstraction of QEMU (or libvirt or whatever) and seeing what KVM can do. There's some good articles that start from VMx on up, which are fun too, but much more involved than KVM.

In general, this is a kind of technical content I'd like to see more of: here's a lower-level API, what can I do with it?
The Visitor pattern uses inheritance in a rigorously controlled way to implement a glorified switch() statement. The underlying issue with implementation inheritance is that it does not have sensible semantics in the general case: it introduces all sorts of long-range and unpredictable couplings (failures of modularity) between a base object and its future "derived" versions. Pure interface inheritance does not have this issue, because it inherently decouples the interface from its implementations.
> There was a massive growth of population and a dramatic shift in ideology with the appearance of fertility iconography.

Interesting! Does anyone know if these two tend to go together often?
I see Piccirillo's paper was published in the Annals of Mathematics in February. Anyone know if Conway got to see it before he passed?
Because you can have a recurving antenna in there with it? Better still, a £20 software defined radio so you can see the spectrum
It's not an accident. Nation-states spent an awful lot of time and money building up professional armies precisely because they had long experience depending on mercenaries. They knew that there were only two ways depending on mercenaries ever ended: either the country couldn't pay the mercenaries enough, in which case they sold them out to a higher bidder; or it could, in which case the mercenaries would eventually get tired of only getting part of the country's wealth, so they'd overthrow the government and take all of it. Professional armies let the nation-state escape this trap.

Unfortunately professional armies fail the one test that matters these days, which is the number of opportunities they provide for private actors to siphon money into their own pockets. So we have decided to ignore the lessons of history, because private profit today is worth social collapse tomorrow.
Second Life might not be. I argue OpenSim would be more lasting because:

* The model of UC Berkeley can then be Open Sourced and used by anyone in an Open Source OpenSim server, either run by themselves or hosted commercially at their choice. Some of the privately hosted virtual world events I have taken part in that would benefit from that big of an accurate model of a campus are Tornado emergency response virtual world drills for training, active shooter virtual world training, virtual world career fair.

* Hypergrid on OpenSim would allow the UC Berkely virtual world campus to be hosted by UC Berkeley and have anyone from another OpenSim virtual world teleport to the campus and visit it.

Regarding the need for a lasting contribution.. A typical graduation doesn't need it, other than a motivating speech. This though involved making something. I am of the firm belief that if you are going to make something you should make it to be a contribution to the world's body of knowledge, if possible - doubly so if you are making it as part of academia and likely funded in part by grants.
There’s a certain minimum people should have though, like a stable residence such as house, which is a stretch for many, many young people.
Given recent headlines, I wondered for a moment whether Masayoshi Son had served in the U.S. Special Forces.
Lovely Week with Elixir
https://www.meta.org/
maybe.

but also, there’s a classic pattern of articles which look back and describe a timeline of “past, present, future” where future starts tomorrow due to this thing I’m excited about today.
As a Czech person I disagree and prefer our country to be called Czech Republic. "Czechia" sounds similar to "Chechnya" and in the case of the terrorist attacks during Boston Marathon in 2013 (in which at least one Chechnyan was involved), people confused Czech Republic with Chechnya. I can for example remember people from USA threatening Czech Republic on Twitter for something that has not been committed by a Czech person.

Moreover, the words "Czech Republic" sound better to me than just "Czechia". But that is just my opinion.
That edit makes it hard to get the context, and potentially changes the meaning. Unedited, it's clear he's shocked and repeating the title that the almanac changed to. In the edited version, it sounds like Ooh la la is his reaction to what is in the magazine.
Ever since learned that owls are mostly made up of feathers, I haven't been the same.
Exactly the case for me. I just routed facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I realized that I was going there out of habit and I always felt worse when I was done. It's been one of the best things I've done this year.
I'm in the camp that has slowly lost respect for Musk over the years via his tweeting, but it's certainly not a complete loss of respect.

I would say I've downgraded him from one of the coolest figures in engineering history to one of the coolest figures in engineering history who is also a pretty flawed person. But who isn't?
Cambridge University will hold its lectures online next year
Screens are optimized for energy efficiency, so their emissions are restricted to a narrow range of visible frequencies. They don’t even really cover the whole range of colors, but mix them by combining RGB, which isn’t the real thing. Eg you can make something looking like violet light by mixing blue and red, but it’s not the same thing as the „real“ violet.

Sunlight, however, is a wild mix of broadband EM emissions across basically the whole spectrum, as you‘d expect from a glowing ball of plasma (halogen bulbs are actually similar in that regard, they need and do have a UV filter). About a third of the sun’s emitted energy hits the earth’s surface as near infrared light, and then there is UV etc.

Near infrared light is very beneficial, the mitochondria in our cells can increase their energy output as a direct consequence of receiving photons in that frequency range. There are lots of studies that showed improvement of many health conditions following near infrared or red light therapy. I wouldn’t be surprised if NIR light helped prevent myopia too.
time well spent, imo
Does seem a bit of a pointless feature, especially as that very minimal boilerplate is auto-generated by any decent IDE anyway.

And I used to primarily work in scripting languages like Ruby where you'd get this 'feature' out of the box (although usually ended up writing a 'Program' class and a constructor/main method anyway for the scoping)
I figured it was a Google thing. Still being worried about Microsoft sounds like that classic Guardian article about the unending Myspace monopoly. But the EEE philosophy is all over Google now.
This seems quite sensationalist.
> It's always just a matter of perspective

Straight-up lying does exist. And to quote the article:

“We must persuade the general public that fake news and disinformation are simply not a question of different opinions, but a planned campaign organized by foreign actors,” Kučík said. “This is a serious matter.”
dont these features allow web apps to compete with native mobile apps? I really don't like the app or play store... so if that is one way to get away from them, that is a good thing.
Canada’s first university in the North, Yukon University
Thanks for the nice "whataboutism" example. Bonus points for obviously being smart enough to get the point, but missing it on purpose just to do the whataboutism routine.
The numbers I've seen are different: more like 90% over and more importantly, something like 80%-90% of cases with confounding co-morbidities (the original Italian figure was something like 12% of people with no co-morbidities).

I mean I think you need to review the data because your argument is just strange. Look at the EuroMOMO data for instance:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

In the 16-64 age group excess death per week went up by a total of about 1000 more excess deaths for multiple European countries aggregated than e.g. the flu season of 2017 or 2018. The total population in these graphs is over 100 million so this is practically meaningless, it's not a sign of any kind of danger. The numbers don't start getting (relatively) big until the 65+ age group, and even then, they're still not big relative to the actual population sizes in question. Only prior flu seasons.

That's excess death. W.R.T. deaths coded as COVID there's also the somewhat newer problem of nonsensical COVID death reports, caused by repeatedly relaxed standards for reporting. At first you needed to have clearly died of the disease. Then anyone who tested positive and died was reported as a COVID death, leading to stories of "COVID deaths" of people with terminal leukemia, alcohol poisoning, etc. That's the of/with issue we're discussing. Then the standards were relaxed again to allow mere suspicion of COVID to be reported as a COVID death. This has been happening around the world, e.g. in France:

https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nomb...

"a positive case in a residence immediately transforms all of the people in the residence into "confirmed cases", which will therefore be counted in COVID-19 statistics .... if a resident (or an employee) coughs, all the occupants of the residence become “possible cases”, and are counted in COVID-19 statistics."

In the USA it's even worse - hospitals started being paid more money if deaths were coded that way; at a time when they badly need the money.

So the numbers here are really quite meaningless but what we can say, is that neither Cambridge staff nor students are in any great danger from this, unless they are really quite old but by then of course, many different diseases and problems are a danger to them and simply tripping on the steps of the lecture hall could also create a dangerous situation. So they would need to be quite careful even in normal times.
Not that it matters, but I think it's much more likely he chose Rust specifically for the language features over Go. A lot of Rust's type-system and semantics are inspired by ML-family languages which are well-known to be great for writing parsers, etc.
I see such "not really useful" projects much as I do fine art. There's not much measurable use to the world in most painting, sculpture, or music in and of itself - but done well, it brings enjoyment to both the creator and appreciative observers. Count me as an appreciative observer in many such cases.
Mammoth Biosciences partners with GSK to develop handheld CRISPR-based Covid-19
> There is no intent for anyone in the Linux world to start coding for the DX12 API.

I took that to mean that the developers on Linux are the people who won’t switch to DX even if it was ported.
Also: https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos
That comment got downvoted???

I guess that either the BSD folks really like things the way they are or people really don't like Carmack.

Weird to see it downvoted. Would love to know why.
I enjoy such articles as well, especially when the lower-level API is something that most people only use through one piece of complex high-level software.

Similarly, it's fun to study containers starting with "unshare" and "clone".
+1 "It isn’t just about the picture. Anybody can draw a picture. Design really comes down to understanding who you’re designing for, the needs of the person that you’re designing for."
So apparently blue light is not actually damaging to your eyes. It's a myth touted by eyeglass manufacturers to swell you the extra blue blocking features. On the other hand, blue light has been shown to not be great for sleep. But it does not damage the eyes.

Think about how we have had a large part of our field of view as blue from the sky over Millenia. Why would it be damaging to the eyes?
My wife is Czech and just said nobody cares.
> How do you recreate the key on a broken phone?

What you're looking for appears to be an unencrypted backup, which has clear security implications that Signal (quite reasonably, in my opinion) chose to avoid given that it is storing a file on your local device memory. Honestly, if you don't want to keep track of an encryption key and still want to retain your message history, maybe you don't care that much about your messaging privacy (which is fine). There are plenty of apps that serve this use case.

> Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it.

Again, I think this is a conscious choice. Their design decisions appear to work well for those who don't know much about technology but still want a private messaging platform. Allowing unsafe key storage methods instead of (for example) writing it down on a piece of paper might encourage users to take that easier route and Signal wants to lean towards privacy even if that means losing message history.

> Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew.

I agree that this can make things complicated, but based on the comments here a good number of users don't want a cloud storage solution and would prefer to lose their messages. In any case, this is easy to work around because a Android allows for decent file management, so any one of the hundreds of file sync apps can work for you here.
Discoverability is still hard when noise increases by the day, and search engines have become useless to find anything meaningful that isn't playing the SEO game.
https://archive.md/c67BE
Brian Ryall is working on one: https://github.com/bryall/fava-envelope

discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beancount/RXvOvHHdse...
How do you find cards? That's what really gets in the way for me.

How do you manage hundreds of cards? Dragging each card one at a time takes forever. If you want to make a change to a bunch of cards, do you open each card, edit it, close it, open the next card, etc. -- doesn't that take ages? Isn't it frustrating not being able to just drag 20 rows of a spreadsheet at once, or paste/format 20 cells at once?

> How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects?

How do you get an overview when you can't see anything? In Trello I feel like I'm blind -- all the cards are scrolling off the bottom of the screen and the columns are off to the right. Instead of a single line of text maybe 20 pixels high, every card is a stack of labels, dates, a few lines of text, little icons and profile avatars. The minimal card is 100 or more pixels high, which means that only about 5 to 8 cards will fit vertically with all the other detritus packed into the UI.

How about an objective metric: in a given column of your Trello board, what fraction of the column can you see at once? Like what percentage of the vertical scrollbar track is the draggable part? For me it's about 5 to 10%.
yes, that is too loud for all but one of the 20 or so apartments I've lived in.

I once lived in an apartment where the manager told me don't worry about sound including running the washing machine late at night because the walls are double concrete with a gap between to be sound dampening. That's the only apartment that's been quiet. All others it was easy to hear conversations from neighboring apartments including the one I'm in now (T_T)
Facebook 5-Day Winning Streak Sends Shares to All Time High
If you're using HTTP/2 this problem goes away.