skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think this wired article [1] really covers the signifigance of these results. Some of the issues are the results are not nationwide (Santa Clara County only), the studies weren't peer reviewed before the twitter analysis happened, there may be issues with testing method accuracy, etc.

For future consideration by others, while the Stanford paper was pre-peer review the deluge of Twitter and media articles denouncing the results based on those limitations is as bad or worse than the drawbacks of the original research. Given that multiple papers from groups around the world have produced similar or more drastic results from serological testing, it seems most likely the Stanford researchers were more correct than wrong and the Twitter crowd (included many scientists) were more incorrect. The wisdom of the crowds is not always that wise. It was largely people disagreeing with the Stanford results for various non-scientific reasons using the limitations as a way to invalidate the entirety of the results rather than understand that the issues would most probably only affect the range of the results but even accounting for that still indicated order of magnitude lower infection fatality rate than assumed from the known case rate at the time. The same reasoning should apply to the early research from Imperial College that had (IMHO) even more serious limitations, but even their results weren't completely invalidated and the current numbers are still within their estimated ranges.

Similar logical failures happened when the WHO stated that there wasn't evidence that getting infected would result in immunity. While technically true and worth investigating, taking it as a justification to extend lockdown or denounce states planning to reopen was unfounded given the paucity of data showing people don't develop some degree of resistance to sars-cov-2 virus after infection. Given there are few viruses that can elude the immune system and prevent immunity, the prior knowledge by itself strongly indicates some level of immunity will be formed. None of the traits of a lingering viral infections were there, aside from a few anomalous results from Wuhan or South Korea. Luckily, later research showed those possible cases of relapse were due to false positives, but it was also a highly likely outcome based on the known of prior information about viruses and the immune system.
More likely, they would do what Netflix is doing when faced with the same problem (time-limited licenses): they would commission more original music from cheaper, less-known (and likely younger) artists.

Honestly, I can survive the thought of not having a Bowie song in every other production.
Mixing in users asking and answering questions keeps developers honest... ehh I mean kept. You also don't go blabbering about lunch on topical irc channels.
> You just need to pay the amount that enables you to get the workers you need.

That depends on where these workers already live or are willing to live. You can't get enough applicants from Silicon Valley if you pay too little, you get way more remote applicants than you need if you pay too much.

> The "fair" thing to do is to pay people without regard to location and let them decide for themselves whether it is worth it to live in a HCOL area or not.

That's just not how pricing works. If I can work from anywhere without even having to commute, I'll be willing to do that for far less money. I don't think that's unfair at all, after all my quality of life will be as good or better.
Transparent caches are always a mistake - there are only two hard problems in computer science, after all. The problem isn't untrusted code (because untrusted data is equivalent, and virtually everyone processes untrusted data at some point), the problem is hardware that's too clever by half, because it tries to guess what you meant instead of just doing what you told it.
If you don't want Hyper-V, you can run easily run docker in virtualbox with boot2docker, using docker-machine. Or you can setup a docker linux vm in vmware.
Also highly recommended is „Engineering a simple, efficient code-generator generator“ (1992) by Fraser, Hansen and Proebsting.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/151640.151642
It is a paranoid stance. But if you are a developer in a large company, think about how likely it is that your computer has (direct or not) access to data/funds worth more than $100k to someone, and what kind of exploits that money can buy.
My take :

At some point in the mid-to-distant future, most human labor (certainly white collar labor) will potentially be automated away, with remaining blue collar labor not far behind (the physical interface, e.g. general purpose robots that are superior to humans in non-static environments will probably come last).

Until that point, the demand for a technically literate workforce will continue to grow, simply because the number of potential areas of application will also continue to grow. With every new digital encroachment on our analogue lives, we find new business verticals that previously simply didn't exist. I don't see that trend abetting anytime soon. Put differently, it's not like software development ends with webapps. For every domain that gets commoditized, there will almost guaranteed be new ones in need of hands on skilled labor. There will of course be some developers who aren't as effectively able to reposition themselves for new verticals (we've all probably heard some anecdote of a C programmer who simply couldn't grok OOP, etc.), but by and large it's difficult for me to see the demand for human-generated bespoke software development dissipating until we get close to that mythical land of general AI.

Now, on the payscale side I do agree with the author that the push towards remote work will definitely have an impact on many of our salaries that are currently tightly bound to geography. That seems fairly evident, to be honest. I live in northern Europe where our salaries are quite good relative to other parts of the continent, but you can still find high quality engineers for <$100k USD - many of whom are on par with FAANG developers being paid >$200k in SFBA or Seattle and the like. The further east / south you go, the lower the current salaries are. It seems logical that decentralization of work will lead to a flattening of the income curve - raising some incomes, lowering others - as we increasingly all enter the same digital playing field. That said, wages - like housing prices - are to use econ parlance 'sticky downwards' so if I were still a SV developer I wouldn't start losing sleep yet.
The mobile versions are a shitshow, they clearly have lower priority - probably because the main source of revenue for PT at the moment is the vpn contracts it tries to sell at every turn, which is really a desktop thing.
You just about perfectly described 75-95% of Excel sheets that run an enormous amount of business processes around the world.
As someone who has spent the last month fighting ansible and puppet: automation in software does not mean less work.

IMO: there’s an inverse relationship between maintainability and ease of use. Config files are extremely easy for large groups of people to maintain but it sucks making changes to them. As an individual I’ve found it’s often easier to rewrite the application myself to do what I need than to edit complex config files.
BVSelect – VanillaJS Fully Customizable SelectBox
Top companies in Data Lake Market are making rapid shifts in their strategies
A data lake is usually a single store of all enterprise data including raw copies of source system data and transformed data used for tasks such as reporting, visualization, advanced analytics and machine learning.
Until there is a sufficient market of remote jobs, I'm going to live in consideration of the risk that losing a remote job will require compromise and returning to work in an office. Job turnover cannot be ignored.
I have been working from home since the 90s and that allowed us to move around wherever we wanted; I don't like to live in cities so we live (and lived) mostly in mountains and forests in southern/eastern EU (currently Portugal) and SE Asia. I would definitely recommend both. I did the nomad thing (as in; a lot of travel) but that's really not good for large stretches/focused bouts of work, at least not for me, so now moving is actual moving.
How do they disable DoH? They block TLS over that port?
The author mentions the annoyance of having to pull 16 sd cards from his camera array and extracting the files one by one.

Maybe a wifi enabled sd card is what's needed?

Edit: cool, there's even a hack that adds auto ftp uploading of new files to a specific brand of wifi enabled sd cards

https://bitbucket.org/harbortronics/flashair-ftp-upload/src/...
Wat-Sharp: A C# Wrapper Around Wat to Unit Test Your C# Godot Games
GDScript has not been enough for the size of my project. I swear to god if I get another "cyclic reference" error I'm going do something drastic! So I decided to eventually switch to C#.

However I ran into issues when trying to use established C# Unit Testing Frameworks like x or n Unit. I don't understand the absolute specifics but the gist is that these established systems don't work well (if at all sometimes) with Godot's Managed API.

So being the dev that works far too much on their own tools instead of their game, I ended up adding a C# Wrapper around WAT (My GDScript Unit Testing Plugin).

Installing WAT-Sharp

Add "addons/WAT" from the Github to your addons folder

Include the following files in your csproj file

addons\WAT\core\assertions\Assertions.cs

addons\WAT\core\test\Recorder.cs

addons\WAT\core\test\Test.cs

C# API Differences

You still inherit from WAT.Test

Use the [Test] Attribute instead of prefixing your method names with test

Use public override String Title() instead of func title()

Use public override Start() instead of func start()

Use public override Pre() instead of func pre()

Use public override Post() instead of func post()

Use public override End() instead of func end()

Use Describe() instead of describe()

Assertions are PascalCase (Check addons/WAT/core/assertions/Assertions.cs if you're stuck)

Use await ToSignal(until_timeout/signal) to use Yield Methods

Use the [RunWith(args)] Attribute for parameterized tests (and pass them via the call)

PoolArray Assertions were removed

TestSuiteOfSuites doesn't exist (yet)

Test Doubles don't exist in C# (I'm not as familler with C# enough to do this properly)

Examples

You can find examples of tests in WAT-Sharp's own test suite at https://github.com/CodeDarigan/WATSharp/tree/master/tests which should hopefully help clear up any confusion.
Cloud Development Environment
Earth’s magnetic field is mysteriously weakening
Interesting. In NZ about 5-10% of places seem to disable contactless payments in an effort to cut costs (most corner shops), while chip+pin works for as little as $1 payment.
As a counter point about reliability, I've been tunnelling my HTTP traffic (and DNS) through SSH (to get around corporate restrictions and monitoring) for 10 years or so - I don't think I've ever had any reliability issues.
Ask HN: VPN Solution Open Source
I need to implement a VPN in the office that is easy to maintain from the Administration perspective. My company currently has ~50 employees and a standalone ubuntu with openvpn and a single key shared across the whole team, without authentication.

I was looking for some solution with an UI that I could either create/revoke keys, or have a single key + username/password and logs.

Anyone has any recommendations for such a scenario?
>I am worried about my posture and health.

If this is a concern may I ask why this wasn't dealt with at all before covid19? I'm guessing but think it is fair to say you've probably used your desk & chair prior to this WFH covid19 but that same setup existed then as it does today.
Dam Deal
Textual is the best and it's free software. (I think it's in brew cask)
If facebook employees can't figure out some way to... I don't know, "Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates" they'd be able to organize and solve their problems.

There's an incredible power in "No", but most of us aren't French and know very little about how to handle kings.
I don't think word processors are the right analogy.

In your example programmers are the monks or the press makers. At some point we're not needed any more (at least at the same scale) since word processors have already been built.
I don't see anything about I/O in this guide.

Can anyone recommend a guide which explains how to actually do I/O using asyncio: how to accept connections, how to write to and read from a socket?
Guinness Is Falsely Copyright Claiming Hundreds of Speedrunning Videos
> I've also had more physical injuries working remotely

That's surprising to me. Why not take half an hour after lunch and go for a walk? Your commute is 10 seconds now that the distance between your bed and office desk is much smaller. Why not leave your desk and use that saved commuting time to go for a run, or a walk or lift some weights or do 7 min HIIT or unroll a yoga mat and do some yoga? You can always hop back on your chair and work till you fall asleep.
Buy Disposable Masks, Wholesale KN95 Mask USA With – Fast Shipping
At www.usa-masks.com you can order wholesale disposable Face Masks With FDA and CE certification, us stock available for immediate delivery
Ask HN: What timezone do you use in conversation with a distributed team?
We are scattered around there world, originally with a core group on the west coast. So we kind of use PT + relative time, like...

"Let's sync about X at 1pm PT in ~3 hours"

Which works okay, but I don't love how it forces the non west coast people to do the extra time conversion step all the time. Not that that's so hard, but it is not so egalitarian as I would like to be striving for.

So we are wondering about switching to UTC in conversation. Has anyone tried that? Or used any tools that were actually effective at normalizing time references in conversation? How do you do it?
Technology like HDCP, which only serves to annoy legitimate users, should be illegal.

One can get HDCP bypass solutions no money at all, but the technology should never have existed in the first place.

Worse yet, despite failing so horribly, development is still going into it, with major players like Netflix pushing it as well.
Microservice Architecture Based on Spring Cloud Netflix
I think we just stretched the 'unix' model in the wrong direction -- attempts to solve every problem, at every layer, all of the time. Trying to be everything to everyone never works out very well.

It would have been better to preserve users (UIDs) as the 'security' boundary for data.
Leaving processes (PIDs) to offer the containment for safety (virtual memory etc.), and specifically not security of data.

Then this specific case would only need the cache flushed on context switching between UIDs, but not all processes.

Attempts to retro-fit security of data between processes are resulting in as much a negative as a positive -- eg. performance loss; or usability issues like regular users on Linux gdb'ing their own processes now has to be explicitly enabled by root.

Of course, the new thing is all this untrusted code we're running; understood.

I would suggest to preserve UIDs as the security boundary for data, then direct these issues through a mechanism that makes it as easy for an unprivileged user to 'fork' a UID for a purpose, just as they fork() a process. This gives a clear role to UIDs/PIDs and a sandboxing capability that makes use of all the existing implementation and boundaries.
As before, you're exaggerating the extent of social distancing that anyone is
discussing will have to be adhered to in the long term. It makes sense that
some aspects of social life, as well as economic life, that are currently
restricted will have to be supported with looser regulations if we are to keep
to social distancing in the long term.

But you seem to be advocating for abandoning social distancing altogether and
just letting everyone do whatever they please, without any rules at all. Or
am I misrepresenting your comments in this thread?

You have repeated a few times that there is no exit plan (do you mean an exit
from the lockdown or from social distancing rules?). Indeed, there is no such
thing currently in the UK where I understand we both live because the current
government is a travelling circus run by a band of incompetent clowns (and
don't let me get started on the opposition). However, again, that is no reason
to advocate for just letting everyone run wild and do whatever they please,
regardless of whether it puts others in danger or not.

Other EU countries, many of which had severe outbreaks of the disease, like
Spain, France and Italy, have managed to enter and exit their lockdowns and to
establish new social distancing guidelines, all in an orderly fashion. Yet
other EU countries, like Greece and Germany have managed to impose a lockdown
early enough to avoid the worst of the disease and are also now exiting their
lockdowns and imposing social distancing measures again in an orderly fashion.
It is my undestanding that in every such case, social distancing measures and
even the lifting of the lockdown are provisional and can be expected to either
loosen up or tighten down in the future, depending on how the pandemic
progresses in those countries (and outside) and always with a mind to allow
social and economic life to go on as freely as possible which is of course
everyone's aim.

I don't understand why it is not possible to do the same thing in the UK or
why, like you say it's madness or antisocial etc etc.
I don't know why people think Slack is a remote working tool. The reason slack is popular, is it was better than hipchat, which was better than gchat/hangouts/lync, which was better than IRC. It solves a specific problem, but when you try to shoehorn it in as your solution to remote-everything, of course it fails.
This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.
Apply anti-trust law as is currently written for starters. Standard Oil and Ma Bell were split for less egregious offenses than we've seen from Alphabet/Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In Standard Oil's case, vertical integration across markets was enough, and pretty much everyone in Big Tech is guilty of this.
Huh, can you assign seating on Zoom?

Say, "this is how I want the grid to be arranged", and maintain that arrangement over many meetings, with absent people blank and not repacked?
> I am finding it increasingly ironic how WFH is no longer being perceived as the panacea of productivity and happiness that it once was.

Forced WFH is very different from planned WFH. There are quite a list of things you might not have with Forced WFH, that isn't an issue with planned WFH, because it's, well, planned:

* a dedicated "work" space, be it a room, a desk you can convert, or even a desk at all. The couch/bed/random chair will have to do. You just can't buy it either if you are living in a small appartment.

* childcare (if applies). Though luck for single parents.

* reliable internet connection, or an internet connection at all.

* reliable phone line , or the capability to use a phone at all (dead zones are still a thing).

* organizational structure to support remote work, including working communication tools

Note: every single item applies to at least a coworker (small team of 10 persons) or my close family.
Ask HN: Can ever a Toaster be considered having a life?
> Life is a characteristic that distinguishes physical entities that have biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased, or because they never had such functions and are classified as inanimate. [Wikipedia]

Even biological processes are a set of instructions that a body/vessel perform for a desired outcome.

So does that mean if we attach other equipment handling process' like signaling and self-sustaining, we can come close to call a Toaster possessing a "Life"?
And really don't want to work for any of the "next facebook" startups or companies that parrot every practice they read facebook may do.
When?? How did I miss that?
Not that far-fetched, though. Corvids, for example, are known to hold grudges against specific humans who have done them wrong.
How is that a limitation? The person speaking should have focus and even then can you guarantee that everyone is going to use video? The side bar chat is a good feature for running conversations while another is presenting.

FWIW We are still dealing with the four persons on screen limitation and even then there is a good chance of no one having video. Management wisely decided against forcing the issue. Plus throw in that many times we end up with someone sharing their screen.
Even Bazel doesn't support spaces in file names!
Exactly. Just 30 minutes ago I observed delays between me typing text and the text appearing in Slack's text input box. With my bare eyes on an idle system with 32GB RAM and a quad-core i7-6700! It isn't even rare. That's just absurd.

Back around 2012 I would have Empathy (XMPP) always on and I would use GNOME's wonderful "reply in notification" UI to talk to people. It felt snappy and its resource use wasn't noticeable on a laptop with 4GB RAM and a dual-core CPU. Modern chat apps are crap.
Hadn't seem them before, very interesting. Vielen dank.
It becomes only more complicated with nested virtualization techniques. Especially if you develop close 'to the metal'.

I'm in 3D and image processing software, often with GPU interface requirements involved. I can reconcile some aspects in the virtual environments, but yet in the single case not all of them. On top of each other and according to experience, difficulties multiply.
Of course, I've looked at everything. Given how expensive modern GPUs are, it is best to use their resources for deep learning rather than augmentation. That way you also get to pipeline augmentation: while GPU is doing the forward/backward pass, the CPU is also cranking out the next batch, so in a way, you're utilizing the resources better.

Another issue is, DALI only supports a subset of augmentations that e.g. Albumentations supports, and I'd much rather be working on the "neural" bits than wrestling with augmentation algorithms.
It depends on your definition of "Life".

One can modify one's definition of Life so that a sufficiently sophisticated toaster is alive, or one can try to build a sufficiently sophisticated toaster, until our currently accepted definition of Life applies to it.
Show HN: Colour Developers Entry for John Hunter Excellence in Plotting Contest
Agreed, i probably should edit it.
NY really appears to be an outlier for the US. An IFR of roughly 1.4% does appear more inline with that for older sicker populations. There may also be other factors such as a more deadly viral strain, older population vs the rest of the US, genetic makeup of the population being more prone to covid-19, or differences in healthcare access and or application.

It really seems the fatality rate for covid-19 is bi-modal. Recognizing that seems critical to putting resources into finding the underlying reasons to respond with correct solutions for any given area.
17 Must-see Locations in Eve Online
Note to the unwary: If you ever find yourself in that part of the world, be prepared for everything you see to be accurately describable as "the most beautiful".

The entire south island of New Zealand is "the most beautiful"!
Isn't the official language in Belize is English?
Aren't South America's routers accessible by the agencies collaborating with the US Govt.?