skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is nuts. Large portions of the response were absolutely in the hands of the Federal government, which failed catastrophically. These range from the elimination of our pandemic response team [0] to the early testing debacle, which resulted from bad tests distributed by CDC (and early failures to scale up private testing using Federal powers and expedited FDA approval) [1], to the lack of coordination between states —- typically an essential function of the Federal government —- to reticent distribution of stimulus funds that were needed to bolster an effective lockdown and support state budgets [2]. Let’s not even start with the weird Federal PPE hijackings that nobody has ever properly gotten to the bottom of. My own state governor (a Republican) had to send state police to protect imports of testing kits, so they wouldn’t be stolen by the Federal government [3].

This isn’t even close to complete, and it’s just the official response. I won’t even get into the totally catastrophic and shifting moral leadership we received from the White House, the weird stuff about opening for Easter. And ugh, the fact that close allies of WH cabinet members were deliberately funding astroturf “anti-lockdown” movements that argued for opening up even against the administration’s own recommendations [4].

Honestly, from your response I can only assume that you haven’t been reading the news since January.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/t...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4...
[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/30/poli...
[4] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opin...
Popular movies are popular because they have been optimized for popularity. It's easier to optimize for popularity if one isn't constrained by the burden of being accurate.

Interestingly, this suggests that accurate portrayals of marginalized group X probably do exist, for most values of X. But their accuracy prevents them from becoming popular, so most people in the complement of X are either unaware these portrayals exist, or aren't interested in them. Popularity partly involves pandering to confirmation bias, so portrayals of X that land too far outside X[complement]'s biases are in danger of being dead on arrival in terms of popularity.

There also seems to be some evidence we can overcome this in the long run through a kind of successive approximation. Portrayals of (for example) homosexuality are more accurate today than they were two generations ago, partly because each successive popular portrayal built on the increasing accuracy of the previous one.

In time, we may see the same thing happen here, though that may come as small comfort to the folks who are living through the transition.
I was skeptical of covid-19 from the start (check my comment history) even though the data appeared to be against me initially. My "gut" told me we were overreacting though, and a lot of things didn't make sense (like the aircraft carrier full of asymptomatic sailors). I was browbeaten and I conformed, assuming the data would eventually prove me wrong. I dutifully wore a mask and social distanced and didn't let my kids go to the park to be a "team player" but now I'm kind of angry that I'm slowly being vindicated. Not because I was "correct" in my predictions, but because of how sure the zealots were of their position while browbeating me into conformance.

I'll never get an apology, of course. It'll just be the same old "not my fault, I formed my view based on the expert guidance of the time, what else could I have done?" Strong opinions, loosely held, indeed.
From https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-where-did-the-virus-come-fro...:

> New re­search has deep­ened, rather than dis­pelled, the mys­tery sur­round­ing the ori­gin of the coro­n­avirus re­spon­si­ble for Covid-19. Bats, wildlife mar­kets, pos­si­bly pan­golins and per­haps lab­o­ra­to­ries may all have played some role, but the sim­ple story of an an­i­mal in a mar­ket in­fected by a bat that then in­fected sev­eral hu­man be­ings no longer looks cred­i­ble.

> A study pub­lished in early May by sci­en­tists at the Broad In­sti­tute in Cam­bridge, Mass., and at the Uni­ver­sity of British Co­lumbia has un­cov­ered an un­usual fea­ture of the virus’s re­cent de­vel­op­ment: It has evolved too slowly. The genomes of viruses sam­pled from cases dur­ing the SARS epi­demic of 2002-2003 showed rapid evo­lu­tion­ary change dur­ing the early months of the epi­demic, as the virus adapted to its new host, fol­lowed by much slower change later. By con­trast, sam­ples taken from re­cent cases of the new coro­n­avirus, SARS-CoV-2, have com­par­a-tively few ge­netic sub­sti­tu­tions com­pared with an early case from De­cem­ber.

> The au­thors, Shing Hei Zhan, Ben­jamin De­v­er­man and Yu­jia Alina Chan, write: “We were sur­prised to find that SARS-CoV-2 ex­hibits low ge­netic di­ver­sity in con­trast to SARS-CoV, which har­bored con­sid­er­able ge­netic di­ver­sity in its early-to-mid epi­demic phase.” This im­plies, they ar­gue, that “by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first de­tected in late 2019, it was al­ready pre-adapted to hu­man trans­mis­sion to an ex­tent sim­i­lar to late epi­demic SARS-CoV.” This is po­ten­tially very good news: Be­cause the virus is rel­a­tively sta­ble ge­net­i­cally, a vac­cine that works against it, if we’re able to de­velop one, will be more likely to work against all strains.

> The same study seems to rule out the pos­si­bil­ity that in­fected an­i­mals at the Hua­nan Seafood Mar­ket in Wuhan trans­mit­ted the virus to sev­eral hu­man be­ings, as some have sug­gested as a point of ori­gin. The Chi­nese au­thor­i­ties have now con­firmed that no an­i­mal sam­ples from the mar­ket were in­fected. This sug­gests that a sin­gle per­son brought a virus that was al­ready adept at hu­man trans­mis­sion to the mar­ket and in­fected oth­ers.
"Could be improved in the future" is a risk when it comes to a simple utility function that does a simple thing that you don't want to change.

In the same way that someone constantly tweaking your utility functions in your own project would be a risk - and you'd understandably want to code review all that - the more you choose to (or have to) outsource "trivial" stuff, the more brittle your project is.
> Why is the modern software industry in such a constant state of flux?

Not all of it is. C is remarkably stable, for instance. C++ is much quicker to add language features, but has a real emphasis on backward-compatibility. I think Java and C# have done a pretty good job there too. Web front-end frameworks have a higher churn rate, yes, but for now, Angular and React are king, and have been for a while. Maybe they'll be toppled by some other near-identical framework in time.

> Is there an end point where we all actually figure out how to develop software properly?

Depends on the domain I suppose. Embedded code, operating systems, and drivers, have been written mostly in C for decades now. Perhaps languages like Rust will make some inroads, but the 'normal way' has been pretty stable. I imagine other non-software fields have seen more radical changes than that over the same interval.

> Every time Slack redesigns its interface, users need to relearn where all the buttons are. Nothing can possibly justify rolling out ten million redesigns

I once read a rather cynical take on this same question: these companies hire a UI team, and that team isn't about to admit that they have no meaningful work to do.
Everyone has their own theory about why some countries do better than others, but we don’t yet know why: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/immunological-...

Does it help to jump to conclusions about the cause being lockdown variations, or weather, or sunlight, or political leanings?

Anybody can cherry-pick their example countries to support their argument, but so far I can find counter-examples to their points whenever I look. I do agree lockdowns have their place (e.g. New Zealand has eliminated the disease using a lockdown, and the Asian success stories).
>An example is a lower case x, where it was taught as: top left semicircle to bottom left then top right semicircle to bottom right (with the two half circles touching in the middle). If the little x is taught to be formed this way, then one can easily learn to write the script x correctly and legibly.

In the US, I was taught to form the lower-case x as two straight lines in block letters. When we got to cursive, the correct way was to draw a hump where the x should be, and come back at the end of the word to add the crossing stroke, like is done for t’s and i’s.
Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis.

In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha...

The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.
Apparently Richard Feynman made fundamental contributions, being more numerate than your average archaeologist.
We actually had a cold start tolerance of ±30 seconds and so far, very few jobs are out of that range. This was one of our main sticking points, and the Google guys gave us some great tips on how to reduce cold starts.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
Stereotypes are generally not responsive to logical arguments that they're stereotyping. I dislike this particular stereotype as much as you seem to, but it regardless appears to fit the circumstances and criteria necessary for memetic propagation in US culture.
Totally agreed. I've been at 3 startups. One was a 12 year old "startup" that was just a privately held business with big dreams and no follow through. The second was a later stage (series C or D, I believe) company where I did learn some things, but, not enough to make up for the below market comp and worthless options. The third was a series B startup that was much the same.

For an employee, whether they're looking to learn or earn, I think "go work at a startup" as a blanket piece of advice is a bad idea, unless they know how to spot the red flags a bad startup throws up. The earlier stage the company is, the more potential it has for both learning and earning. But, earlier stage bad companies haven't been weeded out as thoroughly as later stage companies. This is just survivorship bias, although, in this case, it works for you rather than against you.
Building startups with no design boringtech:

Server-side rendering

ORM (Ruby/Django)

Bootstrap (jQuery one)

FontAwesome

Google Fonts

Template from a store $50 - takes you from 0 to 1

Hetzner $40/mo single real
hardware server
You're right to identify it as odd.

This looks basically like a paid for article you'd see in NY Times Bits section. What's odd about it is that it's on IEEE's site. I don't look at that often, but I suppose I'd hope it wouldn't be sort of shilling startups.
Do corporations use their Netjets/Flexjet subscriptions for sensitive flights?
The article does have a lot of buzzwords and makes pretty big claims, but I guess that is to be expected in certain academic circles.

But it does have some pretty interesting insight and I think the author is onto something important.

I was also shocked by this particular statement:

"According to Mother Jones, the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer – named after Der Stürmer, the unofficial propaganda organ of the Nazi party – gets the bulk of its donations from Silicon Valley, and Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, are the site’s largest traffic source."

Totally did not expect that.
As someone whose gone the opposite way (moving from ECS to Kubernetes), I think the author is understating how good managed Kubernetes solutions are.

At my current job, I use Azure's managed Kubernetes service, which does a great job at providing a consistent environment that's very easily managed, no unexpected updates, great dataviz, and if you choose, simple integrations to their data storage solutions (run stateless K8 clusters if you can) and key vault. We don't do much outside of our kubectl YAML files, which as commented below has a de-facto understanding by a large number of people.

CVEs will always exist, which is why network security is important. I think we can agree that the only ingress into your cloud environments should be through API servers your team builds, and everything else should be locked down to be as strict as possible (e.g. VPNs and SSO). With a system like K8, so many eyes on the code mean so many more CVEs will exist, so I don't find this argument compelling.

My team, and so many other teams worldwide are betting that the K8 community will accelerate much faster than roll-your-own solutions, and K8 gives us the best opportunity to create cloud-agnostic architecture. Additionally, helm charts are easy to install, and afaict more software vendors are providing "official" versions - which means for a team like mine, which is happy to pay for services to manage state, in the same vain a company chooses AWS RDS over managing their own Postgres server, we can get the same benefits as the author with a cloud-agnostic solution.
I don't know exactly what US anti-trust law says, but German anti-trust law also considers what kind of power you have over competitors and suppliers to decide whether you're behaving anti-competitively. We call it (roughly translated) "Law against constraint of competition". Amazon might qualify as abusing their position under our laws. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get a case started if the relevant authority isn't paying attention because of how the justice system is structured here and there's a question of how badly companies are actually being impacted in Germany by Amazon's behavior. Our wholesale/retail market seems to be a bit different and far more diverse than in the US.
I know quite a few startups going the Nomad route. It might not be as mainstream, but I don't think it's going to be phased out any time soon. Rancher was still maintaining their own scheduler for a while (not sure if they still do) because there were a lot of legacy customers still on it. Racher and RancherOS has pretty much moved to a full k8s management shop though.
Requiring new kernels for hardware support is a permanent problem with the way linux is developed. Ubuntu was supposed to "solve" this with it's hardware support layer( basically backporting drivers) but I don't know how well that works.

Fwiw with an older amd gpu that got mainline support years after it's release I found that Fedora was a good balance for getting the new patches without breaking everything.
Certain news and social media sites have expertise in detecting voting rings. Maybe they could help...
The point is that it's not my problem. Those things, together, comprise "React" as far as my application is concerned. React being a huge project which millions of dollars have been poured into, and which billions of dollars probably ride on, is going to be kept working, one way or another. As long as it continues to provide a functioning interface for my code, that's all I care about.
Which part of Swarm are you looking to replace?

Nomad already does the container part, and Consul Connect is the networking overlay / service mesh. Work is being done to get Nomad better integrated with Connect.
Surprised that no one mentioned what a headache arrays are in Haskell. First, there are several different libraries: Data.Array, Data.Vector, Repa, etc. Second, the syntax is very clunky, especially if you are using multidimensional arrays. It's a real shame, since most machine learning/scientific computing programs are very heavy on arrays.
It's This Week in Virology, and a reminder to everyone that acronyms are not as well known as you think they are, please spell them out unless they're very common or have already been defined.
Found it interesting that most of the commits are under 1 contributor (OP). Are you the most active contributor or was this an artifact of open-sourcing it? Just wondering if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, what would we do? :)

Thanks for this, btw!
He explained that a bit here[1]. The project targets a world wherein existing computers have degraded to a point beyond repair and we have to scavenge parts that can be retrofitted. His reasoning is that under such conditions, parts that can be thru-hole soldered such as 8-bit z80 CPUs will be much more robust than surface mounted ARM chips.

1: https://collapseos.org/why.html
I really like that idea.

It could be implemented very easily by using DNS SRV records or HTTPS .well-known URIs.

+1
The “Majority Illusion” in Social Networks (2016)
A Solid State Tesla Coil is basically a power inverter so technically its DC/AC.
Yes, it was bad then, too. Doesn't seem like much of the Node ecosystem learned from that, though.

Rails projects were pretty famously brittle and painful to deal with for doing major upgrades.

I've moved to JVM-land and don't miss that part of working with Rails, though there are still things I miss about Ruby.

But everything my coworkers tell me about Node projects sounds like it's even worse than Rails was.
Sharks are opportunists- for example people who wait for somebody else to do all the hard work, then come in, take over and get all the credit. It's not a really strong analogy but I've heard many people in biotech referring to sharks in that context.
I think the bigger problem that people have in general with moves like this is the _change_. If Walmart previously didn't promote their brands, and now did so aggressively, you'd hear complaints as well.

The other complaint seems to be "fairness." If you operate a platform, people expect it to be fair. But what is "fair" probably has more to do with historical cultural norms than actual abstract fairness, again it is the change the causes the issue. If Walmart started putting "see our generic option for cheaper over here" on end-caps that manufacture were paying top billing to place, they'd complain. But Walgreens has already been doing this in their OTC sections for years, just not with paid-to-place products.

As a consumer, I personally like the Amazon brands, because I can at least trust them to be real products with a reasonable quality expectation, not a switchout from some crappy seller or comingled inventory with fakes.
that is not new, unless that article is old
K8s is a lot of things, but a monolith it is not. Quite the opposite - the complexity comes from the large number of relatively simple components interacting in various ways.
> But before you go to war, the leaders listen to a diversity of opinions. Could diplomacy work? Could sanctions? What about an alliance prior to war? Could we use covert methods? The problem here is that we waged war without having that discussion. We went straight to the Generals (in our case, epidemiologists) without getting the opinion of the diplomats, allies, covert ops (economists, labor groups, civil rights groups) etc.

You're leaning a bit too hard on the analogy: you can't negotiate with a virus. The pandemic is more akin to an attack by an irrationally implacable enemy with a couple months advance warning of the threat at the border. In the analogy, the policy options are: resist, Y/N? If Y, then how effectively?

When a country is attacked, does its leadership typically first consult with its economists to determine if resistance is cost effective vs. just letting the enemy take territory or kill citizens with little opposition? Usually the generals evaluate what they can achieve, and if success unachievable, then alternatives are considered. Surrender is always an option, but it's usually towards the bottom of the list.
Thank you for that.

I really appreciate the care you seem to have given to your choice-of-words while trying to convey your own experience.
I'm banking on Java still being needed when I'm 65 (~20 years from now) and close to retirement. When my 401k is worthless, I'll still be able to make a living until I'm dead and buried. Seriously though, Java is the COBOL of tomorrow.
Mars days in Earth minutes >:)
Agreed. And capitalizing the word 'Fall' (in an attempt to clarify) is problematic too - it's not usually a proper noun.
It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or area chair if the conference is big enough, and often even senior PC members (the metareviewers). All they have to do is perform an export and put it on Dropbox or Google Drive.
I've tried yoga and salvia once each, and i much preferred the salvia.

Where i live, weed is usually the narcotic, body-high type that makes you sit there quietly in an anaesthetised stupor - stereotypical indica. I don't enjoy that all. But occasionally, you come across the head-high type that makes you energetic and giggly - the stereotypical sativa. That's really good fun! It's like the best parts of being drunk, without some of the downsides.
Silly Window Syndrome
Deno: Use JavaScript Instead of TypeScript for Internal Deno Code
In the sense that they requested 1,000 volunteers, and 400 signed up? Do you mean it's a selection bias due to only a certain kind of person who signs up for these things getting tested?
I would really LOVE if Amazon required all sellers to disclose the company and country of original origin. Including for Amazon products.

If it's an electronics part, I would also like the FCC submission numbers, UL submission numbers, etc. For every regulatory agency in which a filing was made, I would like to be able to see those filings.

Those filings should also count as the advertised product specification. If they change chips or designs outside of the specified list I should be able to return the product for it being different than the listed item.
In a time when the main purpose of a conference were academic exchange and moving forward a scientific field, there was little incentive to engage in fraud. When, as is standard practice today, your scientific career hinges on how many papers you published at top venues, the story changes drastically.

Accounts of how groups of inter-connected high-profile researchers game the review system for their own advantage are deeply concerning.
Your sarcasm doesn't appear helpful here. I'm not saying it is perfect (it's definitely not), I'm just saying it is "time tested" and "sufficient" ("well enough"). Perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that.

You already pointed out one attempted alternative and its many drawbacks. We don't have a "perfect" solution yet, and that's not a reason to stop trying to build one. I just don't think you should be so quick to criticize the Fediverse for using the well worn trail until someone builds something better instead of blazing a new one on their own.
While this may not be stated in the most diplomatic way, it's important and relevant for this discussion and I don't think it should be downvoted. It's very well established that Coinbase's infrastructure is unable to handle traffic spikes, despite the fact that traffic spikes are a fact of life in their industry and downtime can easily cost their customers millions of dollars.
Being around your partner and daughter is social.
It doesn’t sound you’re suffering from depression though. If you’re healthy stay that way. Some people need help and psychedelics can provide the answer
China's largest cobalt producer responds to child labor concerns
Why doesn't ARM understand that having a free graphics stack provides tons of business value for embedded systems?