skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It will surely increase China's influence over the WHO itself, but so what? It will substantially decrease the influence of the WHO in general. It is likely that Australia and other countries will cut funding as well.

The real story may well end up be that China used the WHO to benefit them at the expense of everyone else, severely damaging the reputation of the WHO.

If it were up to me, I would do the same thing as Trump. I'm not saying that Trump isn't distracting people, but that does not mean he is wrong about the WHO. China has a lot of influence over the WHO, and the actions of the WHO benefited China while slowing down the rest of the world's response to the pandemic.

At best, the WHO is dangerously ineffective. But seeing as how China groomed their leader, who had previously helped China cover up cholera outbreaks outside of their factories, it seems likely that the WHO was just helping buy China time while they stocked up on supplies, while it spread.

I'm curious, can anyone defend the WHO, or justify giving them money? Let China pay them all they want. It is essentially just the de-facto CHO at this point.
Good questions, and you are onto something here for sure. This wasn't too long ago, around 2014-2015.

This was all for a weather radar app, and you are correct, there really weren't any SLA's, but we had to handle very high loads. We did make use of cloud services for some pieces of the system (there was a database and a small API for some minor bookkeeping, mostly around users). I included those costs in my estimate of monthly expenses. We had lots of caches, for all our JSON and for things like user authentication, which saved us from having to really figure out the database side. The caches were typically push-based, so we didn't let user requests get to the disc, if we could help it.

The vast majority of requests were for those images though, which required moving lots of clumsy geographic data into the GPUs to render map tiles (at high-def and high zooms as well), so the requests were still somewhat costly to serve, even if they didn't hit a database. We were able to get away with a small footprint in the datacenter by making heavy use of CDN caching. Cache lifetimes for the latest weather images were often measured in seconds, and getting those timings right was crucial. Screwing up cache lifetimes would rapidly swamp the system with requests, but the software was good at continuing to keep latency low under heavy load, and degrading gracefully. In fact, the vast majority of bandwidth usage in the datacenters was actually not requests, but streaming geographic data from various government sources. We regularly had 50-100MB/s coming in, and we stored all of it in memory. The GPU machines had 100-200GB of memory, and we used all of it. We had to cycle through that memory pretty rapidly as well, so making sure allocations were low and memory was freed up on time was important.

It may not sound like we had much redundancy, but with all the caches, and each machine being quite powerful, it was better than it sounds in that regard. We often took machines in an out of nginx. The way the graceful degradation worked, we would prioritize the imagery from higher zooms (more zoomed out) so the worst that would happen on a typically day is that some very zoomed in images, in places few people were looking, might be slow or time out.

So, in the end, you are correct, the situations are different. The bank had to store things for a lot longer, and had to uphold more stringent SLA's and the like. That said, I still think they were flushing a lot of cash down the toilet, and making things over complicated :).
Show HN: Implementation of Simple File-System Based on Inode from Scratch
You compare the actual length.

Not the raw number, with unit ignored.

What's wrong with the analogy? Please explain.
Cool to see a well-loved, gold standard of an open source project reach a milestone like this. That said, the few cherry picked commits on that page were not particularly interesting (atleast to me, not a db expert by any means), and the color coding is inscrutable.
Definitely William Gibson
I've been using a gopher mirror to browse HN on my phone recently, and I love it. Quick page loads, legible text, and easy navigation.
u/tptacek has made this argument a lot before. It's a fallacious argument because we can all see that when government X says JUMP, the companies they order either JUMP or EXIT, and when those companies lack an EXIT option, they always JUMP. The reason for this is that no cryptography can beat the rubber hose, and no cryptographic protocol can either.

No PKI, whether loose like WebPKI, rooted like DNSSEC (or as PKI was intended to be), or with multiple roots sharing subtrees (e.g., as DNSSEC would be if, say, Russia decided to require Russians to use Russian roots that happen to sign com and such as they are), can possibly get around the fact that the certification authorities that make it up are subject to the jurisdiction of some government. It's why we all don't want the CN NIC in our trust anchor sets, for example, or only want it if name-constrained.

There is not getting around this. So u/tptacek doesn't trust the DNS root, but so what, why should he trust any WebPKI CA at all, or all of them? Any one of them can be compromised by the end of a gun, and then all who have it in the trust anchors will be compromised too.

Sure, there's CT (certificate transparency), but there is nothing so PKIX-specific to CT that it couldn't be applied to DNSSEC, and anyways, I'm unconvinced that it's enough. There comes a point where certain governments don't even care if they leave evidence of their nasty behavior for all to see -- when push comes to shove, any government with jurisdiction over you can end your happiness and even your life. Oh? The world can see? But what can the world do for, e.g., HK? A big fat not much.
Italian magistrates target Uber Italia over alleged rider exploitation
Don't some of those old dyes have heavy metal toxins in them, or is that not a concern?
Which part are you saying is nonsense? You just repeated what the article was saying.
On top of that, it wouldn't be like the hospitals would be business as usual if the lockdown didn't occur. Models mostly showed they would have had their hands full with covid cases (and therefore still not handling normal cases and elective stuff). Additionally many people going to hospitals for whatever reason would likely end up exposed to COVID.
Kind of apples to oranges. Take the difference in salary between a college graduate and a high school graduate over those 40 years. Factor in inflation. Invest that at a 7% return. I'm sure it will easily dwarf $2.25M.

Why don't people have millions invested by the time they retire? Because no matter how much money people make (up to a certain point, depending on the person), they spend it. If you give the average high school graduate $150K and tell them to invest it for 40 years, I pretty much guarantee that it will be gone long before the 40 years are up.

To be fair, I don't have millions invested and I'm scarily close to retirement. So I'm not trying to be critical of others ;-)
I like the spirit of this movement and would love to see concrete descriptions and examples of the best alternatives to frameworks. For instance, would a recommended alternative be a certain set of loosely coupled libraries? Vanilla JS plus DOM API? Software patterns that mirror a framework but avoid using the framework itself?

A showcase of successful real life applications would also make frameworkless more compelling.
yes, thanks, thats what I meant. While I'm here, something I've always wondered about the multiple worlds interpretation is where does the energy come from for all these parallel universes? Like if each possible event causes a split then haven't we just doubled the energy we started with? since we've created a whole new universe.
How did namespaces in ES4 differ from namespaces in Java?
Malta seized $1.1B of counterfeit Libyan currency, allegedly printed in Russia
The author absolutely didn't come through for me.

"Wait, isn't air pollution from wood burning as bad or worse than coal?"

"Wait, don't the carbon emissions from biofuels like wood concentrate in the atmosphere and cause global warming even though it's technically renewable but system dynamics matter and the fact that you can burn a log that took 20 years to grow in an hour is a fundamental problem?"

Yeah this is a terrible idea.
> In particular, the police ride them during public events.

Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
Following this article I would have to say my 2-year-old is obviously also a hacker and we should not imitate him because we have to spend all our time standing next to him ready to save his life when he does something really stupid to get the result he wants, but not well.
I think this document reverberates a feel that people uses what’s trending without considering its tradeoffs. This article is more on point about this subject: https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-n...
How is it anti-science when they are literally quoting a report from the Norwegian public health authority: ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’

Are you saying that their public health authority is anti-science?
> The whole fundamental concept of innovation is that there is no plan.

Definitely not true.

> What there is clear evidence of, is you generally reach your goal faster if you're more risk tolerant.

If budget is unlimited, perhaps. In real life, not so much.
I’m also surprised — it feels both like a long time and yet not that long at all. SQLite felt like it had been around forever when Rails adopted it to make development environments simpler, and I remember finding it easy to use when writing iPhone apps for the first time. It was remarkably stable at an early age, it seems.

I still think it’s a shame we never got SQLite into the browser because every browser implemented the same backend and therefore “it wasn’t a standard” — https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ (note the box in red) Chrome still supports it, but not in “modern” places like web workers: https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23348621
While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals.

Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.
Your argument is nonsense. There's nothing so special about WebPKI CAs or DNS zone operators. Both -as all entities- are subject to the jurisdiction of some national government in this here world. See my reply to u/tialaramex's reply to you above.
We also have Roberts to thank for Citizens United, which flooded the political landscape with dark money and made the current GOP strategy viable.
This was my first thought as well, but it turns out not to be the case. Using curl in a VPN turns out roughly the same results. I suppose it's possible that enough people have found out and sought out the relevant news that the engine is making the association though.
How dare they indeed? It wasn't in the amendment. No one voted for that.
What a noble piece of software.
Where can you use SQLite?

Embedded Systems: Yes

Raspberry Pi : Yes

Mobile Apps. : Yes

Desktop Apps : Yes

Browsers : No

Servers : Yes

Supercomputers : Yes
You must not be trying very hard. Open the report and zoom in on the graph if you want better resolution. Its pretty clear that the red bars are deaths, the blue bars are cases, and the grey curve is the R0 (range).
> What gouging does in an emergency is allocate the needed supplies to where they are needed the most.

This kind if Econ 101 over-simplification is easy to disprove. There were people with stockpiles of N95 masks while medical workers couldn't get them, for example.

Unregulated markets don't care about need. Prices are a function of want (not just need), disposable income, and opportunity. That doesn't end up favoring the most needy.
Biofuel is almost as bad as coal from a carbon emission point of view. Lifecycle emissions are about 740 gCO₂-eq/kWh, c.f. 840 for coal (Source: Schlomer 2014 IPCC meta-analysis). The problem is that you can burn a log that took 20 years to accumulate carbon in 1 hour. Sure it renews, eventually. But if lots of people do this the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere would equilibriate at a level inconsistent with solving climate change.

And the particulate air pollution from wood is a true killer.

This concept is deeply flawed because of carbon emissions and air pollution.
If you want to be sophisticated, it's "octopoda". Slightly less, "octopods". Correct, "octopuses".
I can't find the reference, but there was a recent dutch preprint on a study from 1985-2020, studying four other coronaviruses and reinfection. Immunity lasted 6-12 months, reinfection was correlated with symptoms. Unclear if symptoms were as severe, or merely symptomatic.

Antibodies 50% gone by six months, 75% by a year.

Also highly seasonal, for what it's worth. Only 10 patients, all in the Netherlands, but a long study period.
Wait till they hear about district heating from large central power plants.
What do you mean? It sort of negates the implicit discretion that one would hope for by redacting the name of someone involved. Seems kind of akin to Facebook revealing the sexual identity of someone who hasn't revealed that to certain people.
They do help for those things, and not for HIV. But which caused them to be deployed?
And a bunch of choppers:

https://mobile.twitter.com/SkyCirclesMPLS
Indeed. Really, felons currently serving their sentence should be able to vote. It's your only protection against the government throwing its political opponents in prison.

If we had a magical, objective, 100% accurate way of determining whether judgments are fair and punishments are appropriate, then maybe it would make sense to suspend the voting rights of criminals. But we don't, and the only check on whether the criminal justice system is doing the right thing is the popular ballot. Allowing the criminal justice system to disenfranchise people is an obvious loophole.

Besides, what are we worried about? That criminals would vote to legalize their own crimes? If more than half the population are criminals, it's not clear that any sort of government is going to work at all....
I heard the creator Richard Hipp speak at a conference a few years back and I absolutely loved listening to him . He is humble and seems a bit of a throwback compared to Silicon Valley tech moguls .
May the genius and simplicity of SQLite shine on .
This part of the article is nonsense:

> Since that time, there has been ample evidence that wavefunction collapse is not driven by conscious observers alone. In fact, every interaction a quantum particle makes can collapse its state. Careful analysis reveals that the Schrodinger Cat "experiment" would play out in the real world as follows: as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter, it collapses from its non-decayed/decayed state into one definite state. The Geiger counter gets definitely triggered and the Cat gets definitely killed. Or the Geiger counter gets definitely not triggered and the cat is definitely alive. But both don't happen.
Reportedly George Floyd and Derek Chauvin May Have Known Each Other
> A good chunk of the heat is going to go right up the chimney

It's probably not much.. but I imagine you could boost the efficiency by lining the chimney with copper tube and running water through it, using the waste heat there to heat this water. Then use your TEG as a heat-exchanger between that loop and another loop connected to your "domestic water heater" or other cold water supply.
Sony – PS5 games show off on 4th June
No, he doesn’t.

What happened here is that they failed to predict the limits, which means their model was worse than they thought it was.

It happens all the time in many fields. It is still a failure because it means you are not quite there as much as you thought you were.
Typo. 33 not 23.
Germany to reintroduce military rabbis for the first time since 1930s
> the protesters want mob justice

ah, unlike the Georgian good ol' boys who got their mob justice by successfully lynching that jogger who dared to be black in a sundown town a few months back.

> The cops were immediately fired and are now being investigated. Justice is being served.

any organization that allows the type of person capable of the callous murder at hand here to hold the power that this officer did in his community needs to be taken to task as a whole. your daring to assert "justice is being served" is equivalent to volkswagen blaming it all on the rogue engineer during their emissions debacle a few years back. you're letting the true powers that be off the hook. and i've got no issues with them necessarily. but if you want to have power, you better keep yourself to a mighty high standard or someone else will do it for you and i won’t be shedding any tears on your behalf.

"the funny thing" is that cops want to be worshipped as saints because of how dangerous and important the job is but, after incidents such as the Floyd murder, never come out as a group for the need for reform, for the need for them to do their jobs better. They wrap themselves in the brand of protectors of the community, but when they fail to do so, and in fact cause harm to the community, suddenly the chauvinism falls away. It's increasingly clear that "protect & serve" more often than not means protect private property, serve the establishment. And they have the nerve to act like heroes. I think a lot of us are exhausted by the hypocrisy and grandstanding at this point.
Powers of Two (2017)
Step 1 - have some very basic thing that provides some essential value, Step 2 - scale quickly and dominate the market, Step 3 - settle into viability.

Capital deployed effectively is effective that it can be distracting is one of the risks. Also, in growth phase, usually growth and getting to mass-market is more important than sustainability. If you're the new Twitter, you want to get to 500M users or whatever as quickly as you can.
>"You look back upon those years fondly as it's turned you into the programmer you are today. An unparalleled Abyss Gazer, an Eldritch One, one who makes mortal men fear and worship the code you've wrought upon this world that holds the very foundations of it together..."

That is some great writing; some great prose!

Perhaps in another life, one where they didn't have computers -- you would have considered becoming a Writer?

Like if you wrote a SciFi novel... I (and probably a lot of other people!) would read it!
WebSQL was an attempt at supporting sqlite in the browser. Now, you can use it via wasm!
Is the wait nearly over?

BTW, how do they pronounce the name?
Browsers: yes

https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js
It's hard to guess what's sort of curiosity was leading you, but there's a mirror (unofficial, yet reasonably current) on GitHub.
Don't tell that to all the React developers, you might get banned from working in web!
Maybe?

I’m not sure that prophylactics really would be the deciding factor. Condoms are older than you might think, but on the other hand usage rates are still relatively low.

And humanity keeps bouncing back from things: for example, the plague (multiple times!)

I think the relatively long incubation time is probably what would have made it especially bad if it had taken hold earlier - say, in the 1800s when our understanding would have been limited and our ability to track it worse. It might have been much, much worse then.
Yet, you are probably deploying on an operating system that is a clone of another operating system that was started in the early 70ies.
Taking some arbitrary definition of the word "hacker" and interpreting that rather freely makes the title look like click-bait.
Here's a concrete example from about a month ago: sanitation workers in New Orleans went on strike, so the state ordered prisoners to pick up trash instead. Quite convenient to have a bunch of laborers that you can order around. https://www.wdsu.com/article/livingston-work-release-inmates...
Lavabit used to not be able to do that, and Protonmail can't either still... (To be fair, Lavabit _could have_ made changes so they could do that, but the owner refused when law enforcement asked him to do that fpr Snowden's email, and risked very real threats of jail instead. I don't think Protonmail have been tested lie that yet, but they have at least incorporated outside of US jurisdiction,which changes their risk in some important ways...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
Its stil based on a problem highly related to prime numbers.
This is really beautiful. Are prints available?
There may be mismeasured or even unseen variables in the broad, ultra-complex system that you are overlooking.
Buy and sell art/jewelry to a third party who really, really likes your taste in art/jewelry.
So anybody doing k8s onprem? How is it going/working?
As the author mentions, defaults can play a significant role. In particular, it would probably help for ssh-keygen to default to ed25519.
I tried playing one of his open source games (typebomb) and then tried finding the source and for the life of me I couldn't.
What I’m saying is that it’s best to get to the point where you can reason more directly about voltage, current, charge, inductance etc.

Part of that is getting comfortable with the maths, and the way that’s visualised is just equations, graphs and sometimes things like diagrams of fields or heatmaps. I work in RF so we do antenna simulations and things like that, and the software generates radiation pattern diagrams in 2D, or in 3D heatmaps showing the energy density. It just doesn’t work to, say, try and think of what would happen if an antenna was spraying water out or something.
> The problem is when you need to duplicate that server or restore it due to some error, you have no idea what all the changes you made are.

A text file with some setup notes is enough for simple needs, or something like Ansible if its more complex. A lot of web apps aren't much more than some files, a database, and maybe a config file or three (all of which should be versioned and backed up).
adding in covid-19
https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2562261/
> maybe web developers will have to vote with their codebases as standards bodies write and distribute polyfills to encourage their spec to “win”

I think WASM gives some real possibilities here. I'm not sure how polyfiling WASM will look like.