skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, most employees are replaceable.

No, the same is not true of people.

My family and close friends cannot be replaced. Not quickly, not easily, not without lasting damage.

Yes, there may be some economic benefits in the long term to "letting people die."

No, there will definitely be severe short term shocks to the economy to following that strategy. 1-5% of the population dying (even when skewed towards particular demographics) means that almost everyone will know someone that's died, several someones that have ended up in ICU, several someones that have suffered badly, and several someones that just had nothing happen at all.

If you ignore the second order effects of that ("I don't want to go to work because I don't want to end up in ICU like my buddy Dave"), the economic damage in the short term then becomes even more severe. The loss of confidence in the government becomes more severe. The willingness to return to the workforce reduces significantly.
Bangalorean here. What I saw was everyone followed the lockdown guidelines very well when it was put in.

A bit worried now as it has relaxed, and the numbers are growing. Not sure if the rate is lower or higher than similar cities. Anyone have data?
This looks awesome and seems to have tons of potential! I guess the main barrier here for adoption is that non-technical people might be too intimidated to learn how to utilize this properly. Maybe if the interface would be retooled to cater even to non-technical courses as well this could become a new standard for online learning.
Lots of hydroxychloroquine studies or preprints have been published, and they mostly observe that the effect is close to zero (in good or in bad), either because there is no effect, or the study size was too small to detect other than large effects. But this now infamous study was the only one to suggest a clear and large negative effect.
Do you think health is that binary? Either you're in perfect health or you drop dead?

A serious case of COVID-19 can take months, possibly years to recover from. It's quite likely it will leave people with permanent health problems. Nothing about that is good for the economy.

But even if it was, I'd object to "let's kill people because it's good for the economy" in a strongest possible way. Any government that thinks about the people in those terms deserved to be overthrown in a revolution.
The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC, but this’d still be extremely useful for quick replies.

I wonder if the iPhone will accept photos over MAP....
Its not about the mortality rate, its about the psychological toll which is unparalleled: cops commit suicide at higher rates than any other profession. On a daily basis they deal directly with more violence and horror then most of us are ever likely to encounter over a lifetime. They do this for low pay, on behalf of people they do not know, in a society that increasingly despises them. Most of them are fine people indeed and no one is arguing that the ones who are not should be protected.
And with "qualified" near-absolute immunity (since grand juries side with police almost all of the time), they can legally steal and destroy property of people and punch, choke, taze, shoot, and run-over them with impunity.

The police are a lawless mafia serving a feudal, totalitarian, klepto-plutocratic apartheid with prison plantations.
Well, yes? That is, the phrase "all lives matter" seems like it's often used as a way to take control away from the discussion about largely devalued and forgotten black lives.

If you want an explanation better than "Oh well, you know", you might start with the criticism section of its Wikipedia entry, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Lives_Matter#Criticism .
It’s not about Blue/Green bubbles. Everything messes up once you have one person in a group that isn’t on iMessage - including reactions to messages. Instead of getting an icon on top of message you get “John Doe liked ‘We will be there soon’”.
Most of the workers time is spent not working. In the literal, it is more likely than not that when they got the virus they were not at work.

They'd need solid actual evidence to even meet a "more likely than not" standard.
From what I have seen it's the cops that are beating up old ladies.
Staying closed for longer saves lives. There is, of course, a trade-off, but saying it does nothing is wrong.

First thing is the whole "flattening the curve" thing. The less cases on a given time, the better treatment is. So even if the number of cases will ultimately be the same, it is better if happens over a long period of time.

There is also a simple mathematical argument. Let's take this simplistic model :

- Start with 1024 cases

- The pandemic will last for 6 months until a treatment is found

- Every "open" (O) month will cause the number of cases to double

- Every "lockdown" (L) month will cause the number of cases to halve

- To avoid overwhelming the health care system, we automatically go into lockdown when the number of cases reach 4096

Open early model:
O(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096)
Cumulative cases: 18432

Open late model:
L(512) L(256) O(512) O(1024) O(2048) O(4096)
Cumulative cases: 8448

In both cases we have the same number of lockdown months and the same number of cases in the end (that's a property of multiplication), but the cumulative number of cases is lower when we open later.

The parameters are wrong, but the logic is the same no matter the values you choose. For example I used a very optimistic 6 months for the time before we have a cure, that's just to make the calculation shorter, you will get the same kind of result by making it 4 years.

The only case where the two strategies give out the same result is if you expect no cure will be found and go for herd immunity. I hope we won't get to that because it will mean millions of death in the US alone.
I don’t think so based on what we are seeing in the link. It isn’t really a blur at that point.
That world is called Europe :) Taxation is indirect, gasoline is taxed.
> Message craze is a purely American phenomenon

This is mistaken. I'm in the EU and do not know a single person using SMS, nor Whatsapp, they use iMessage, however, bigtime.

Whatsapp used to be a thing, but that has been over for some time. Now, most are using Messenger, Snap, and Telegram.

And iMessage is not a craze or a phenomenon, it is a simple convenience; it's on your phone already. For most people using it, it is not even a deliberate choice. The younger generation grew up with it, they do not even really know the difference between SMS and iMessage, except that if the bubble is green, the other user does not have an iPhone.

The older generation remembers SMS, so they still tend to call it SMS, even though they are using iMessage.

Android users are in the minority around here, well, at least between family, friends, and at work.
Well, we've seen similar proposals now. The Lt-Governor of Texas suggested old people would be happy to die for the economy.
APL-likes have been a fascination of mine for some years, but sadly at a distance. For those of you working in these languages, what do you use them /for/? What industries and/or kinds of applications do you write? Why are these languages used for them vs others?

I'm looking for some inspiration. (I think) I'd love to use one "for real"/"in anger" for something but are they too niche to use as CV/Resume enhancement?
The Beatles – Yellow Submarine
> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect.

Are there historical examples when radical philosophical scepticism changed the way science is done? Descartes, with his "evil demon", Hume, the solipsism of George Berkeley — they all have valid points, and they all have pointed out contradictions in things we call knowledge, with sufficient force to have been immortalised in textbooks on the history of philosophy, but they haven't changed the practice of engineering and science, I don't think.
The Wakefield argument is weaker than it should be. Wasn't his paper retracted because of its funding source, not because of specific errors in the paper itself? At least that's what Wikipedia's article on Wakefield claims. And of the co-authors, they asked for retraction because of the stink in the press over the funding, again, not because of actual errors in the science. Those don't actually seem like valid reasons for retraction, on their face.

It had 12 co-authors so that's a lot of peer review to start with, before whatever the Lancet applied.
You are not alone:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcdXczfIFl9pOHZRCKCss_g/vid...
has a lot of rants about raising kids in the US. (so many that I can't find the one I originally watched)
I was going to make a joke, but I've edited it to point out that Australia's care and consideration for Aboriginal artefacts is a disgrace.

To save you a click:

'Mining giant Rio Tinto has apologised for blowing up 46,000-year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia dating back to the last Ice Age.

The Juukan Gorge caves, in the Pilbara region, were destroyed last Sunday as Rio Tinto expanded an iron ore project agreed with the authorities.

Many prehistoric artefacts have been found at the remote heritage site.'

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-52869502

This is relevant because it happened last week.
You seem to see people only as labour resources. I strongly object to that view.
I got the information, that you did very well, compared to your desastrous neighbour spain and given that spain was your neighbour.
Small talk is the foreplay of human discourse. Frankly most people's inconsequential talk is more interesting to me than their views on Big Topics where we mostly adhere to some tribal imperative.
They should simply explain what convolution they are using, and it would be easy to know.
Trump said it out loud didn't he? That the republican party would cease to exist, or similar, if voting-by-mail were widely allowed.
Onion Hosting – Hidden services provider
> Their E2EE design will make it impossible for Zoom employees to enter E2EE meetings without permission

If this is acceptable to view a meeting without permission under abuse pretense, then it's also possible to do so even if someone's doing nothing wrong.

Even worse, if their system is compromised, a bad actor could monitor free users' meetings without any protections. And what is stopping those bad actors from getting a paid subscription, or maliciously gaining access to a paid account? Or these bad actors could use another system that doesn't compromise (Signal) or host their own.

Security comes in layers and logs. A system without these layers and accountability isn't secure. Zoom isn't secure, and is using law enforcement as a scapegoat and pretense to keep their security low.
In general, India has dealt unexpectedly well with this health crisis, given it's lack of resources for health care (compared to other large economies).

Bengaluru, in particular, is better off because of relatively lesser number of ghettos compared to other major cities in the country.

Considering it's a hub significantly driven by ITES money, what would be more interesting to watch is how does it come out of it, now that it's quite evident that IT processionals can quite capably work from home.

Would bengaluru still hold the crown of the IT of india or this will finally incentivize the breaking down of budding metro cities?
> The inability to control clusters like Dharavi in Mumbai, Koyambedu market in Chennai and the Tablighi Jamaat conference in Delhi, led to these respective city administrations losing control over COVID-19

Being a bit unfair to Chennai there, which was bombarded with both Tablighi Jamaat cluster and Koyambedu (one of Asia's largest vegetable markets)

Also Chennai is testing highest in both units and per capita amongst Indian cities, and death rate is at 0.8% compated to 2.3% for Bangalore which is not mentioned.
Although I think we probably agree in most respects, I want to offer a slightly different perspective on some of the points you raised. While it has become a sort of trope to dismiss postmodernist texts as difficult (true) and obscurantist (here I disagree), there is usually a pretty good reason for why these texts are written a certain way. For example, Derrida's writing style is heavily linked to and inspired by the difficulty to pin down the blind spot that he thinks is always part of our metaphysical tradition. If you follow his 'argument' far enough to agree that there is no privileged outside from which we could see this blind spot (since this shift of perspective would then introduce another blind spot), then it absolutely makes sense to adopt his always-shifting, always-destabilizing mode of writing.

In technical fields, we usually expect people to immersive themselves in a particular vocabulary to be able to understand difficult technical books, yet in philosophy we often expect these texts to be readily accessible to laypeople. Why? Derrida's work emerged from a tradition heavily influenced by Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and others, all difficult authors in their own right. Of course we might find it disappointing that these texts are not accessible to the general public in a way that, say, Russell's popular writings were, but isn't that nevertheless an absolutely valid choice on the part of the author?

Also, it should be pointed out that the so called postmodernists were not the first to employ a very difficult writing style that we might on first glance perceive as obscurantist: Heidegger is a good example of someone who coined a ton of neologisms because he thought it necessary to escape the traditional discourse. You might not buy his argument (I'm not sure I do), but Heidegger felt he had a good reason to distance himself from the existing discourse.

Are the main texts of postmodernism dense and hard to understand? Sure. Should they be a required reading for everyone? Of course not. But I don't think they are necessarily negative and I don't agree that they have no 'recommendation for what anybody should actually do'. Even Derrida, arguably the most deconstructive and 'negative' of the bunch, can be applied in a myriad of 'positive' ways, this is doubly true for authors like Deleuze & Guattari, for example. I think it ultimately depends on whether you view a critique of political or social structures as purely negative. I would argue that such a critique offers an avenue for change, by enabling us to see the status quo as something that can be attacked, rethought and then reformed.

But those are just my 2 cents on why I like (some of) the postmodernist authors. I think it's absolutely fine if not everyone buys into their thinking, I would just wish for a more honest engagement before dismissing them out of hand.
Blame Google for never getting messaging right and having multiple chat apps at the sane time.

I’m buying my parents an iPad just because every other type video chat is more convoluted than just clicking on FaceTime from contacts.
Are you sure its the only clear answer? There is nothing else that can explain this?
The political will for prevention is missing, but the will (and money) for the cure will come quickly. Wall Street will pay once the wet elevators stop working, Presidents, Prime Ministers and politicians will find the will once they spend a summer with heat exhaustion at their vacation homes. We're seeing a lot more acceptance now that the sky is gray with ash.

Fixing the problem is not up for debate, but that will be so only after the problem clearly presents itself, not a minute before. This is same principle as a concrete manufacturer's stock going up after a tsunami – we will need to fix the problem, even if we're too lazy or short-sighted to prevent it.
It might be a bit unorthodox and I would possibly get flagged for writing this but I found the ideas of Kaczynski on impact of technology on us very profound and thought-provoking[0]. I try to separate the "art" from the "artist" and do not condone his violent actions thereafter. But this idea has been around in various shapes where people debate if its true that techonology is evolving at a much faster rate than our minds can evolve to cope with its impacts.

It was very insightful for me to do an introspection of how I interact with techonology and broadly with consumerism and change some aspects of it to focus on what is really meaningful to me.

[0] http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
[1] audiobook: https://youtu.be/n5ITyifcYy8
In case anyone feels like playing around with it, a friend and I made a project to do auto-blurring of faces with OpenCV a few years ago, with both iOS and node frontends ..

iOS module:

https://gitlab.com/seclorum/groupie/-/tree/master/ios/groupi...

Main node.js app:

https://gitlab.com/seclorum/groupie/
Interesting, but why is it a newsletter?
> ... If you gave everyone a Lamborghini, the value of a Lamborghini would plummet ...

If your argument is that the person with a Lamborghini isn't materially better off in a real sense and that wealth inequality is therefore a social construction then I am profoundly confused if you are also aligned with the article's thesis that pitchforks are going to be involved due to wealth inequality.

The logical conclusion of that line of thought is to destroy the Lamborghini to promote wealth equality, which is stupid.
I’m no expert here but wouldn’t that go against the E-privacy Directive 2009/136/EC, according to which you must:

Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies?
"For example, an algorithm may analyze the relative position, size, and/or shape of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw" etc, says Wikipedia.

You can reconstruct a plausible face by deblurring, ie. one that looks sharp and human. But if you want to identify someone having a plausible picture with a pair of eyes in a plausible position doesn't help, you need a fairly accurate assessment of the distance between the correct eyes, and that's susceptible to loss of information during blurring.
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How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper
I downvoted because I don't think this anecdote relates to peaceful times at all.
This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might alter our cognition.

Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
This is like when 12 year old me decided not to go to bed on time and pointed out its impossible to go to bed at exactly 9, no matter what I did I'd always be a nano second early or late...
I also use Thunderbird Portable to backup my G Suite. Great tool, been using for years without issue. I open once a week and just let it sync.
Kernel 5.7: Forging ahead, despite Covid-19
Seems like it might be better to pressure HN to fix a clear bug by continuing to use this formatting though.
Interesting that % of registered voters that vote in the US is incredibly high (86%) even if the number of registered voters is low (hence the low % of eligible voters actually voting). 86% is right up there with countries like Belgium and Australia where voting is compulsory and the obligation to vote (or turn up at a polling place…) is enforced.

Switzerland seems odd on the face of it to me - what explains low turnout for registered voters? Too many elections/votes? Voter fatigue?
I've used this https://gource.io/ for a good overview of group work then the build in analytics. Most of what I do is to download and run the code on my local machine, but I also ask for unit tests which help with the grading. All code is mainly C++ / OpenGL with python sometimes.
We did ok, not a miracle. As mentioned, we had about half the deaths of Sweden, which is touted as the worst possible thing they could have done, and have triple or more than other countries (listed above).

Seems either people had very low expectations of Portugal, or are just using the Portugal is almost the same as Spain idea and expected the same results (even though we were affected later, if we were first, we would probably see something similar)
Show HN: America
Chennai is looking troublesome. ~1000 cases yesterday with a 7m pop compared to ~1200 in Mumbai with 18m pop. Granted, Chennai is testing the highest in number of tests and per capita in Indian big cities and death rate is at 0.8%. ( compared to approx 2.3% for even Bangalore)
MMS and SMS are extremely unreliable, especially if you were out of the coverage area when a message was sent (half the time I only receive some of a conversation and have to try to interpret what happened). RCS is supposed to fix this, but no carrier seems intent on sunsetting SMS to force Apple’s hand. At least with iMessage, I’ll eventually get the message (they’ll hold it server side, encrypted, until I get back online).

I still use SMS a lot, because it’s more important to me that I can talk and send pictures to people than worrying about them being on a certain platform or app (Discord’s notifications aren’t great on mobile if you haven’t opened the app for a while). But it’s super annoying, and if Apple made iMessage an open standard (they probably won’t, since people buy iPhones for it), I think many people on Android would move to it.
Are any of the people in the video speaking for FHM? A lot of experts have said different things, and some of them have at one point or the other been paid by FHM. That doesn’t mean they speak for, or represents, FHM.
Spain porn star held after man dies in toad venom ritual
A delivery truck can transport half a dozen cubic meters or hundreds of kilograms of packages with ease. Replacing it with drones increases the noise level quite a bit.
That's sort of a lazy-loading thing. It doesn't make sense to expend the energy to provide a detailed explanation up front, if there isn't a clear indication that anyone actually needs it.

If I guessed right about the troll, the troll understands very well. If I guessed wrong, the commenter would likely protest and explain—in which case I could correct things. In either case, a detailed up-front explanation isn't a good use of energy. It would make sense if it were free, but it's not free—it's expensive. These comments are hard to write! I'm happy to pay the cost, but only if it's clear that there's one or more users who value the explanation. Does that make sense?
http://n-gate.com/about/

Oh my, that is glorious! Thank you for introducing me to this website, on top of notcurses :)