skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The linked article/statistics is this: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/

It might seem that the countries with no lockdown are doing better than those with lockdown from the graph alone. However, that interpretation is very biased and I want to repeat a trope: correlation is not causation.

It is hinted that no lockdown has fewer deaths than lockdown "If anything, these are are clustered at the lower end of death rates", but as it follows up "but the evidence is far from conclusive". It could be that countries with no lockdown have fewer deaths because there's no lockdown, but it could also mean absolutely anything. It could mean that those countries that are hit worst issue a lockdown (such as UK, that was trying to avoid the lockdown until it got very bad, then issued it), or that they are unrelated, or ...
Maybe the University of California system should primarily serve the people of California.
Nice username
I’ve worked in an office essentially every weekday since 2007.

I can’t wait to get back to one. For me, working from home is awful. For you, it’s not. Different people are different.

Mostly it’s the isolation that gets to me. I’m used to working with people.
Some of the issues seems to be because some of these students transferred the HEIC file to their computers then tried to upload them by changing the extension of the file.
I've heard enough of these machine learning buzzword bingos every week when things like this happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again.
I actually think people putting their stimulus checks into the stock market is better than the existing QE system.

Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.
I think it would be painfully slow to have it learn in real time, especially if a grad student had to put the ball in between every game like what is demoed.
My current employer would lose a lot of employees if they did that. People are already super stoked for when they can finally stop doing this remote work thing and be back at the office full-time. Not all, but a lot. They'll also lose people if they go back to "remote cannot work, you cannot do part-time remote", so they'll have the option to do a little bit of remote work, but set up in a way that makes it unviable in practice (e.g. meetings spread out over the whole week and held in a way that makes remote participation impossible)
Ask HN: Is reverse engineering a saleable skill?
Wanting to make (for purely personal use) CLI tools out of commonly used apps, I got into discovering undocumented APIs a couple years ago and it's been a lot of fun.

Recently, I got into decompiling android apps and hunting through source code to find how their security works and mimicking it on my end.

The pay-off is so little (e.g. instacart automated delivery, jimmy johns cli ordering etc.), but I'm absolutely in love with the process.

My day job is an odd mixture of managing operations and logistics at our warehouses and writing code (python/django), so I have limited exposure to software companies.

There was a recent thread on unofficial APIs, so I ask --

Is this a skill that saleable in any way? Are there roles for this kind of thing?
we send an application where you can enter an invite code. use hacktheworld to skip the waitlist and get matched with other HN/YC peeps. otherwise you can choose to be matched by industry+seniority -or- income.
Alternatively: I was thrown off by the new tab behavior in Tree-Style Tabs and didn't want the complexity of a tree of tabs. Vertical Tabs Reloaded[0] gives me the "tabs in a sidebar to the left" without the complexity.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
I’m pretty sure I’ve tried dumpall before but honestly cannot remember but you’re right do use dump.

I’ll give dumpall a go today. I do still feel this could be improved in PostgreSQL because there’s sooo many blog posts who suggest dump and none of them work.
Do you honestly believe that it's a reach to state that both are called maui?
He also related this story in his interview with the Computer History Museum: https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=662

I'm still upset that, at 48:36, Forstall offered to give his thoughts on what we could be doing with AI that we're not, but Markoff decided to move on.
I'm unsure that any of these students wanted to take their AP exams on their phone or computer. That this is a new problem suggests that this is something they've been newly forced to deal with.

It's certainly not a well engineered user experience. Passing a physics test should require physics knowledge, not knowledge of image formats. I think understanding of image formats is actually fairly obscure outside of technical circles.
> Developers not understanding CORS is simply all the more reason why it's good that CORS defaults to secure behavior whenever possible. The harder you make it for ignorant developers to shoot themselves (and their users) in the foot, the better.

Right, but not understanding something doesn't mean it is more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot -- in fact it's the opposite. The zoom vulnerability is an example of this, or every developer that just imports `cors()` middleware and runs it because "otherwise it gives some CORS error".

I'd rather an approach that is simple to understand, gives flexibility to the developers, and makes it crystal clear to them what their responsibilities are.
Ouch. This comment is cutting. The truth can be that way sometimes, no?

Probably the only thing I take issue with is your second point. No matter how much companies talk about how much of a "talent shortage" there is, the mythical "overpaid engineer" in an area with high competition density is a lot rarer than they'd appear. To even get and keep a median salary job that lets you move there (and stay there), you're competing with (and often have to lose to) a lot of folks.

Social participation in that world and the learning of what gets rewarded and punished during your formative years helps condition you towards going about solving problems a given way, and alters you as a person. I am sure that I would be different if I spent the early formative years of my career in SV instead of NYC. I'd be solving different problems with different people and moving up career wise through different maneuvers.

So here's my question: will the pivot towards remote work diffuse or further reinforce hub centrality for current tech hubs? To be honest, I'm kind of mentally split on this one. Here's what I could imagine along both sides:

For concentration:

- Lacking differentiation, areas outside of tech hubs will become increasingly commodified (one giant suburb), stratified and divided into castes
- Executives will tend to cluster around hub centers, middle managers around suburbs, ICs around exurbs and further; moving up will require "moving inwards"
- Customer and capital consolidation into cities will continue
- City lifestyle will continue being a status symbol synonymous with affluence, success, clout and social standing

For diffusion:
- Propped up by inflated prices out of line with their underlying assets, hubs will crash economically when people have the option to work there without living there
- Companies seeking to evade the "geography tax" will learn to work remotely to gain an edge in OpEx over competitors that don't and through lower margins gradually beat competitors that don't adapt into submission
- Natural disasters, climate change and pandemics have/will continue to spark continued interest in the "retreat from society"
- The pioneer spirit will come into vogue again, as enterprising contrarians try to rough it on the frontier once more, taking risks on developing fringe territory to capitalize off the nonlinear value they add (this, along with DoD funds/braintrust, was how SV began)

I don't know. It's hard to reason about what the outcome will be at this point. Greater flexibility seems like it would lead to heterogeneity. But as always, there are nonlinear second order effects that we can't think of now that will doubtless seem obvious in retrospect. What do other folks think?
My first programming language, started self-learning it in the early 90s, great intro language.
You can get a part-time job as a bus driver.
> Have you got any sources on these claims about France, Italy and Spain? Never heard of this.

I'm one, I worked on the first Permaculture farm in Italy, (Modena) and it was nearly entirely funded by some incredibly underfunded Ag subsidies, and the elderly Mother's pension/retirement fund. It's labour pool was mainly made up of volunteers and apprentices like myself besides the 50 year old son who came back from Germany after a messy divorce.

When I arrived the eldest son (and to much lesser extent the youngest of his children, an 11 year old boy) had to do what was done by both parents and his siblings now entirely by himself. So Sales figures were less than optimal, even if the produce was amazing he'd be way too exhausted to do all of the farming duties throughout the day, so trying to get more exposure by going to more Farmer's Markets was out of the question.

Labour was the really needed part of the equation, once we got the Team organized and with solid schedules we were able to expand to 3-5 farmer's market a week as opposed to the single Saturday morning one that had been done for the past few years. The costs of transport and fees for the stands were higher but that was overcome with a larger volume of deliverable goods, as less was perished by sitting in the non-electric storage area after weekly harvest and we started to re-supply some local restaurants with our excess along the way to the farmers markets, too.

After I left we had turned sales around to a 10-year high, reached back when most of the family (2 parents and 5 late teen/early 20s children and a grandparent) could work with only just 3 extra men and myself in the fields in the morning and then going to farmer markets in the afternoons.

Suffice it to say, I met hundreds of people operating with some variation of that model at what I can best describe as an 'underground Farmer's Market,' where it felt more like a carnival than a typical one it was entirely 'Industry only,' some local chefs from the surrounding area arrived, too. Someone with a stand near us said they saw Massimo Bottura at one I didn't attend as I had to help in the fields that day.

In short, its a thing. WWOOF [1], the network I used for my apprenticeship, has most of the farms listed operating like that for decades now. I met lots of volunteers and apprentices in France, Italy, and Spain and much of Europe as far as parts of sub-Sahara Africa.

With that said, I think the majority of Farm labour should become automated and instead of making more Farm laborers alone, its best to offer people with limited opportunities in the City other opportunities to own farms with low cost barriers to the these tools. Land, especially between 'LA and Mississippi' is severely under utilized. On a road trip to Kansas City we could go 100 miles across Kansas before we saw anything remotely looking like it was inhabited by Humans.

1: https://wwoof.net/
In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school.

University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being accepted via application while already attending school.

Highly competitive programs included Business and Engineering, but this even spilled over into less popular STEM variants like Math. Their CS program was and is the most competitive of these. At its worst an application round would have ~2000 applications and only ~600 open slots.

During my time there, I met a handful of students that had applied every session for the last few years to no avail. The opportunity cost is enormous. It's both a waste of time and money on the part of the students to spend multiple years wasted taking intermediate courses, retaking major-application required courses and reapplying. That's why the administration is slowly converting over to deciding major on admission, too much visible grievance on the part of students.

That aside, if it's competitive enough, it turns into a second college admissions process. Students retake the core classes required for an application like they would retake the SAT or ACT. Never mind that they passed CS 142 with a 3.4, only a 4.0 will get them in so they waste a quarter perfecting the most basic java programs for content they learned a few months prior. Students also try to engineer around the competition: a common refrain was that the equivalent courses at community college were much easier, but given the same weight in the admissions process so students would go to another college to take an easier course just to have a better shot at their dream major.

The point is that the competition for these colleges will come to a head somewhere. If it's not the college application process then it will be at the school itself. It can be managed, but putting it off till later leads to a greater burden on the losers of this process. They are faced with the choice of changing majors, changing schools or persisting with the hope that maybe the fifth application will be different than the fourth.

Fostering this kind of environment was a mistake on the part of UW. Perhaps it would have been better if they restricted applications to first years and weeded them out completely from the start like they do in your area, but letting the college admissions process do it might be much more efficient on the part of both the schools and the students.
I grew up in SB, moved away in 95. Went back last summer for a wedding in La Jolla. Town sure has changed. House prices are crazy as ever, and even the poorer parts of town had crazy prices for housing. But it has the best Mex restaurant in SoCal (Tony's Jacal).
Great idea! I would love to be able to constrain the language/ecosystem either as part of the query or as a filter. I find myself working in one language and doing a lot of searches for it, then switching languages and doing a lot of searches for that one, etc.
Not to be negative but this reminds me of Python 3, where they want to make a largely but not completely compatible new C++. Like Python 3, it would be great to get a bunch of things fixed and force people to use the new, better, way of doing things. But, this comes with complications.

I am a C++ and Python developer. I did C++ for 20 years then python for 9, then C++14/17 for 3. I really like the new C++ and think it could be made into a better language while still retaining the deterministic performance.

What we don't want is Python 2 to Python 3 situation. That might mean calling it a new language.
I wish Forstall would do a long form oral history with the Computer History Museum (usually around 2-3 hours) even if there was that shorter interview on stage there in 2017. He has a gift for storytelling.
Born Again: SoftBank Is Big Beneficiary of Feds Bond Program
Yes I know that's the case in this instance. I was doing further reading and found a couple other informants/whistleblowers were also burned by the Intercept, and the person who owns and founded it (Pierre Omidyar) has said some very suspicious things about how whistleblowers ought to be treated by the press.
No, I tried conda once, but it downloaded gigs and gigs of data, and I have enough trouble trying to keep nix under control.
If it's so dangerous that it should be banned, let legislatures pass laws banning it, and let YouTube enforce those laws.
cause small banks and credit unions are bigger than paypal?
> The relevant question is, do SAT scores correlate with wealth more or less than whatever [...]

Well, no, because the SAT correlates with wealth while plausibly having claim on being an objective measure.

When little Johnny gets an internship as his daddy's company, that obviously correlates with wealth, and admissions committees can discount it. When little Susie is on a groundbreaking paper from mommy's lab, that obviously correlates with wealth (not necessarily financial), and admissions committees can discount it.

Other activities can be more easily/obviously/readily discounted for wealth, while the SAT's correlation with wealth is harder to account for.
Chip Wars: Holding Out on Huawei
Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction.

How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?
I can second this. Had a recruiter reach out, asked if they were going to support mostly remote, the answer was no.
Since we're talking about extensions, can I suggest my own Tip Tab [1] for visually navigate and manage tabs? Just updated it after a year of break. I mostly use it for quick search and keyboard navigation (ctrl-shift-F, type search term, Tab Tab Tab Enter to jump to the tab). Also use the predefined search terms like, mail, news, finance, etc, to quickly filter down the tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/
Take a look here: https://lobste.rs/s/dji0it/experimental_search_engine_for#c_...
I just tested an approach to deny access to WebSockets in the browser. This only applies if the JavaScript and the page comes from a location you both control and your goal is to limit access from third party scripts and you don't have access to the page's server to add a Content Security Policy (CSP) rule restricting web socket addresses/ports to specified rules.

TypeScript code:

const sock:WebSocketLocal = (function local_socket():WebSocketLocal {
// A minor security circumvention.
const socket:WebSocketLocal = <WebSocketLocal>WebSocket;
WebSocket = null;
return socket;
}());

TypeScript definitions (index.d.ts):

interface WebSocketLocal extends WebSocket {
new (address:string): WebSocket;
}

If the 'sock' variable is not globally scoped it cannot be globally accessed. This means third party scripts must know the name of the variable and be able to access the scope where the variable is declared, because the global variable name "WebSockets" is reassigned to null and any attempts to access it will break those third party scripts.
You can audit the code of a Firefox extension by unzipping the .xpi file in the extensions directory within your browser profile directory.

Not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
A lot of comments are arguing about whether the software should have been modified to accept the HEIC format.

Let's go with "no" for the sake of argument. They probably can't accept an mp3 of me singing my answers, either. But!

If I upload an HEIC, an mp3, a keynote file, or anything else unacceptable... Why doesn't the site provide an immediate "File format not accepted, please upload .gif, .jpg, or .png" message?

According to the article, the software would actually just hang. I think there's room to argue about whether they need to support the default format of an extremely significant platform for students. I think there's room to argue whether they should know enough about INPUT tags to let the browser help with this.

But while we're arguing about those questions, can't we all agree that simply hanging without providing a useful error message, and without giving the student an opportunity to re-upload their image... Is unacceptably poor software design for an institution that holds people's future in their hands?

I don't know about you, but if I were an American college student, I'd now be wondering what else they have kind of slapped together without thinking through graceful error handling?
Until you mentioned it, I had no idea that so many embassies ran libraries. Thank you for teaching me something new.
Firebase Emulator – a local first UI to boost your productivity
What if I could pay on a per-article basis?

https://piszek.com/2020/05/19/micropayments/
I recall GW-Basic as well. I ended up with a bunch of random software from my dad at the time. One of the included items was a basic compiler. Showed me how much faster compiled code could be.

I then went on to use the various Borland products.
That sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out, thanks.
Wouldn't a UBI w/ land value tax + VAT and no income tax possibly be a better way to control inflation, maybe ease the burden of tax-filing, and also provide a cushion for lower incomes and middle class families?
AI advances to better detect hate speech
I'll give an alternative perspective from someone who just did the whole college admissions thing. While measuring ability to cram isn't perfect, I'd hate to be measured purely based on performance over the years. While I did well and pulled straight As in some very hard classes, just knowing I was under such a microscope from day one in high school would be pretty brutally stressful and might prevent me from participating in as many extra-curriculars.
Consider all the government spending that currently goes to companies (tax credits, subsidies, etc.) and how that money further goes into people's pockets as (at $1000/mo, close to minimum) wage. I don't have hard numbers but this is probably not much different from the overall cost of UBI. All UBI does is cut out the middleman. Especially post-recession, many companies only survive because they run at a loss for a while and soak up investments to stay afloat. If we are to believe capitalists, we should structure the economy to discourage corporate grifters. UBI would do exactly that and replace costs that currently support the grifting behavior.

I'm perplexed by how often people assume that spending will only increase with the introduction of UBI, when there are many existing pathways for capital to travel that will become obsolete when UBI is enacted, and can be diverted to funding UBI instead.
Am actually totally digging JS DOS, the emscripten build of the DOSBox emulator. The performance is phenomenal in the browser, including vsync. Here is an example (CPU intensive) of multiple 64k demos running simultaneously on a single web page ;)

https://js-dos.com/6.22/64k/index.html
Is there a daycare where you can drop off the kids before heading into the speakeasy?
They probably do, though: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/cats-rival-dogs-many...
True that it was a band-aid, but the Magic was a massive increase in the national debt[1]. Be careful wishing for any more.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/08/national-d...
War is Peace.

Freedom is Slavery.

Less is More.
I worked on electronically herding cows 10+ years ago and talked with Temple Grandin about it. She thought the idea of relying on sensors alone to monitor animal health was a bad idea. Unless the sensors can detect every possible disease and problem that a rancher or vet can detect in person, the risk is that some animal problems will go unnoticed by the sensors and the animals will suffer. Also the ranchers may not care about that if it reduces costs and profits remain the same, so using sensors could cost lots of animal misery.

The same is true of using sensors to monitor the health of people. Many ideas that the food industry has used to engineer foods for people have come from the cattle industry (who have a big interest in stuffing more food into cows) so testing sensors on cows may be a first step towards using them on people.
PTFO 8-8695: Two Stars, Two Signals, No Planet
Error in the list: it should be Shopify not Spotify.
How To Make (almost) Anything
Sadly, it's not. I've had lots students who would use the Opera VPN or one of the "free" anti-virus providers VPNs because they got sold (by adds or dumb friends) that it would be safer.

You seriously over-estimate the "tech-savviness" of the average student and that really is part of the issue I'm pointing out here.