skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Population density really doesn't matter that much for a pandemic as infectious as COVID19. The number of people who live in the mountains or on a farm and only come into town every six months is very, very small.

The two big causes of massive early numbers of deaths, including in the northeast US (especially NYC, and NY state, NJ, and Philadelphia to a slightly lesser degree) and places like northern Italy, were

a) sending sick old people into old age homes. Other cities/states by and large did not do this. This drastically raised the average age of those who were infected in NYC, and caused the far higher death rates. 42% (!) of US deaths occurred in old age homes. Old age homes are pretty similar everywhere in terms of layout and design, regardless of local population density.

b) Assuming that ventilators should be used on every serious case, causing both damage from overoxygenation to healthy lung sacs and overdependence on mechanical respiration that doctors are having a tough time figuring out how to wean patients from. Those that warned three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) against ventilator overuse were completely vindicated in retrospect. This happened nationwide but most proportionately in NYC (in part because it was hit hard early so doctors were pioneers).

The big Western European countries hit hardest by the pandemic have 40-60 deaths per 10,000; the US is in the 30s, while states like Texas are in the single digits. NYC's death rate is 161 (!!); it singlehandedly prevented the US's death toll from being almost as low as Germany's. NYC's super-high death rate isn't replicated in the same way in other densely populated states that did not make the mistake of accidentally encouraging spreading of the disease among the elderly. Chicago, DC, and Boston were not hit anywhere as hard as NYC was.

Look, for example, at the NY Times dataset (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...). NYC's daily deaths peaked at about 10% of the cases, so we'll say 10% case fatality rate. Chicago's CFR is about 4%. Philadelphia's CFR is close to NYC, but Boston's is 6% and DC's is also about 4%. Basically, the NYC-Philly corridor handled this worse than anywhere else in the country.

Again, old age homes contributed 42% of COVID19 deaths, and largely due to big mistakes made in a portion of the northeast US. Those mistakes are no longer being made anywhere, nor is the "putting everyone on ventilators" mistake. This (plus the massive expansion in testing causing the average age of those testing positive to plummet) is why, although southern and western states' cases are rising (or in Los Angeles's case, never stopped rising from the start), deaths are not, and why national daily deaths continue to fall straight down from the mid-April peak.
Let's peel this apart a bit. Some of what you've listed has come to pass. In particular, statues are being taken down, and streets and buildings are being renamed. Let's look first at the former. Statues are historical only in that they are an effort to erect and protect. Otherwise, they are not historical records in and of themselves; they do not tell us history. They are artifacts. Right now, some statues are being torn down, but in every case that I've examined, somebody asked for the statues to be removed first. This is a community-driven statue removal effort, not a party-driven effort.

The streets and buildings are curious. We know why buildings are renamed: Buildings are named after people, but it turns out that people are horrible to each other, and so we regret the nomenclature. Building owners get to do this. I don't like that I have to learn a new name for the local arena every few years, but that is how our society works, and it's mostly driven by money and people regretting each other. Similarly, streets are renamed because people are either embarrassed about somebody from the past, or extremely proud of somebody in the present (who will be certainly a future embarrassment!)

But that's about where it stops. Which records are being destroyed or falsified, and who is doing that work? Who is rewriting which books, and which words have been changed? Who is altering photos and pictures, and what are they changing?

Concretely, who is using a permanent marker to draw on official government materials and tearing up official documents? Who is attempting to stop the publication of books? Who is trying to suppress the sharing of photos taken during the past few decades at high-class social mixers?

Finally, who is this Party that is always right? Who is it that has about 10% of the population within themselves, commands the highest positions of government without concern for other parties, and focuses on appeasing the proles with meaningless slogans and handouts while avoiding meaningful social improvements?
Good point.
And what if, from an evolutionary point of view, this new way of acquiring information is actually better in the long term?
Personally, I’ve never experienced the resource management issues you describe here, even when running similar workloads. I have a 2015 MBP with 16 GB.
ZGC – Using -XX:SoftMaxHeapSize
Thinking of I, Claudius' King Log[1], has anyone thought to put 'Victory'[2] in charge of middle-eastern peace?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EA1SK5vXkAQAEAS?format=jpg&name=...

[1] as opposed to King Stork (Perry 44).

[2] An old trick for maintaining the peace in a herd is to put out more piles of hay than there are horses, so the dominant horses can politic to their hearts' content but everyone still gets fed.
The dude is in solitary confinement begging strangers for a picture just so he has something to look at. Who cares if his request is offensive?
Spaceballs – State of the Art – Amiga Demo (HD 50fps, 1992)
Maybe genetics aren't a very important part of mortality risk.
USA is a third world country, with a layer of the first world on top. This layer seems to show cracks too.
Perhaps, but this is just a nightmare intersection scenario: Desktop Linux and hardware acceleration and proprietary drivers.

If you had supported this early, it would've given users nothing but trouble, because of all the bugs. Then again, if nobody supports it, nobody will use it, bugs will not be found and fixed.
> Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection.

Whilst using Castor, www urls would auto-open in Firefox, and the other way around.
Show me what data you've collected and would like to share, including metadata, and if you ask nicely then most of the time I'd be more than happy to share it.

Things like emoji usage, page navigations, feature uses, etc. Ideally anonymous; no IP, user agent, etc, just a small byte or two packed properly can go a long way.
More convenient digital samplers exist, avoiding those is the entire point
Notion is great. It gives you so much flexibility to really mold the software into what you need, I would highly recommend it. As freelancer I use it as a Jira replacement but I also have personal to-do lists, etc. in Notion and it’s nice having them all in one place.
It would be awesome if this means Google Stadia is coming to FF on Linux. I trialed the service and was very impressed with it, but ultimately decided against a subscription since Chrome for Linux does not support Stadia due to lack of HW acceleration (it runs but is unusably slow).
Those old devices are going to choke on rendering the Youtube HTML of 2020 instead.
If you've spent time in a developing country you'd realize this isn't quite right.

But the US has built some massively harmful institutions and a way for folks to hide themselves from much guilt.
It is hard to defend position "never rewrite" (because sometimes rewrite is an optimal strategy), but I see where it comes from:
1. Most programmers when they encounter legacy code have a strong desire to rewrite it from scratch. Especially when it uses language/framework they don't know well.
2. They significantly underestimate the cost of a rewrite and either it takes much more time than estimated or a new system implements a small fraction of old features and/or re-introduces problems fixed in an old system long time ago.

It a cognitive bias and we can try to compensate it. Though like with any biases - usually you can see it in others, but cannot correct own behavior.
Anna Merlan's "Republic of Lies" Explores Fixation with Conspiracy Theories
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend (2019)
Yeah, designers would hack around the limitations until the hacks become official (against the original protocol inventors' intent, if necessary), because every company wants to control the experience of their content to an unreasonable degree. I recently turned off the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" setting in Firefox, and it's refreshing to read text in O(1) rather than O(N) fonts. Now if only similar tweaks were as easy to apply to web forms, menus etc.
That was an "ignorance is bliss" time, when everyone was enchanted by the sleek design of the MiniDisc and its players. But once MP3 took off, everyone started talking about lossy compression, and people suddenly realized that the ATRAC codec used in the 1990s MiniDisc players was flawed, and often said to be comparatively poor.
No, there are very few great radio stations, covering a small slice of the world's population. That there's a great station transmitting 3000 miles away doesn't help me.

The internet was a boon exactly because I was sick and tired of all the FM stations that I had available, with their narrow and small playlists, and it allowed me to discover whole new genres and authors (including by listening to online radio). In the mean time, FM just become even worse. The first half is essentially all I have available, do you care to choose a great one? https://radioonline.com.pt/

You shouldn't assume everyone has the same access to good things you did and must be lazy and narrow-minded.
It feels like the main feature of this project is incompatibility with HTTP. The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies.

We already have a transport protocol that "everybody" agrees on: HTTP. We can define a specification for a subset of it, and a subset of HTML/browser features we want, create tools around them, and form a small community.

The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants. They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.
Not familliar with WebAssembly. Does this mean Deno is talking to code written in other languages that are compiled to WebAssemlby?
it doesn't appear to include rendering costs at all...that time is purely in upsampling

That part wouldn't be an issue if the plan is to render low resolution images in the cloud and stream them to a device that can upsample them locally. There wouldn't be any local rendering costs.
Here in the Netherlands there are a lot of different small community's. Some are organized by the universities and others can be found on https://www.meetup.com
Tabbed browsing... doesn't this invalidate some patents on ideas of how to use multiple tabs? :P
It doesn't work for me as well! Not sure whats the reason behind this blocking! For now using bing as DDG uses it in the background!
I mostly see it referred to as "the current situation (around the world)".
Would it be too simple to say that you're looking for HTML without CSS ? Because HTML already has semantic tags describing "this is the title" "this is a list" etc...
Privacy can't exist until we own software. We need property rights.
And more related, also from Vi Hart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQ10POrZh8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmN0YyaTD60
I found I could read this in EMACS with a package called Elpher, but there's a smiley or something I couldn't see.
Unfortunately this won't be supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It requires them supporting DMA-BUF, which they can't due to those symbols being marked as GPL. Even then, they don't support VA-API.

There is a library that maps VA-API to VDPAU (their other video acceleration library), but that doesn't support DMA-BUF either.

I wouldn't hold your breath that this would ever be supported. It'll probably be easier to modify Firefox to use NVDEC directly, given that FFMpeg already supports that. But I don't think that'll be easy given their reliance on DMA-BUF for composition.
Squishy things should pack more efficiently since they can deform to better fill the voids left. Not sure if this makes a significant difference here though. It's only the weight of the grains above that would cause the deformation to happen and cooked quinoa is only stacked up a few inches max I presume.
Essentially, yes. WebAssembly code runs at near-native speed yet is unable to crash the host process / clobber its memory etc, so this is a viable alternative to FFI for most use cases.
I had a recent discussion with friends on how difficult prison must be. We had a lockdown in Ireland but you were allowed to go up to 5KM from your home for exercise once a day(not really enforced) and you could watch TV, cook, sleep, do hobbies at your leisure and people found it really tough. Hopefully people might be more sympathetic to the incarcerated and we can focus on rehabilitation and not punishment.
In most 8-bit BASIC interpreters, the LIST command is, actually, a pretty printer: it reads and parses the tokenized source from memory and outputs it to the "terminal". On the Apple II, for instance, we see upper-case versions with added spaces for clarity (and some annoyance for editing the on-screen code on very long lines).

It just occurred to me we missed an opportunity there, with computers that could display some form of screen attributes (Atari, VIC-20, C-64 and countless text terminals), to make use of color and typography to enhance screen presentation with a negligible cost in ROM.

It'd have been really cool to have color syntax highlighting on 8-bit computers in the late 70's...
Yes, but not acknowledging the problem and that AMP is a solution, even if it's the wrong solution, defeats any meaningful discussions. We need something like AMP but outside of Google's control.

My point is that it's so easy to just see the drawbacks and none of the benefits when you're sitting on a good connection. All threads on HN becomes completely one-sided where everyone is just backslapping each other's complaints.
> I'm fairly certain Cell networks are not encrypted at all, by default. Or at least it's disabled completely by the towers in Afghanistan. :whistling:

This is patently false, while some networks did allow no encryption (A0 on GSM for example), pretty much everything on UMTS/LTE is encrypted at least to the tower.
Lost Horizon – Sansar Events
Aha nice one!

I’m still not sold on it (you’re allowed to do websites without js/css!), but the effort and skill involved is commendable
Discussion from 2 days ago (350 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711735

How did this submission get to 9 votes this quickly with a straight out broken link?
To the contrary, I'm having trouble thinking of startups that launch with multiple products.
Willard be damned!
I've also been experimenting[1] in the natural language <-> code world and the two publications based on Tellina have been really helpful. I know how hard it is to get sensible results when mixing natural language and code, and even though Tellina is a bit rough around the edges it is an awesome effort!

[1] https://codesnippetsearch.net
> By undermining the business model of many ad-supported websites, blunt approaches to cookies encourage the use of opaque techniques such as fingerprinting (an invasive workaround to replace cookies), which can actually reduce user privacy and control.

https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

I'm going to copy paste my older comment on this:

I find their "removing 3rd party cookies will incentivise businesses to rely on fingerprinting" discourse dangerous.

It implies that other browser vendors (Mozilla, Safari/WebKit, new Edge) are in fact making the Web a more dangerous place.

I believe it's dangerous because it creates a harmful, unproductive PR narrative—people might just assume this is a true statement, without learning about both sides of the problem. I'm not trying to strip anyone of agency, I just don't think most of my friends would have time to research this topic and might decide to follow the main opinion instead.

The answer I'd like to hear: Yes, it does push some actors towards fingerprinting, but preventing fingerprinting should be dealt with regardless. Changes should happen both on legislative and browser-vendor level.
What are you talking about? NO, I do not assume everything on the TV has the same intent. I never said anything even remotely close to that. I do however assume that if I am watching the news that I get the news.

I also don't want to be everything online to be "hard news", but when I go to a newspaper site I expect it to be news if it isn't otherwise noted. No the cryptic "A-Head" does not count. I am not a news insider and I think it is completely inappropriate to demand from the consumer to learn such cryptic jargon.

You said this:

> one still needs to try and understand the context of the publication and how the article is presented.

The context of the publication is that it is an article on the Wall Street Journal which is a business focused Newspaper and the Presentation of the article is exactly the same as the rest.

How is it my error then that I think an article like this is just garbage. (Hint: If your customers think your product is garbage then you need to do something about it and not just say "You are holding it wrong".)
It is a bit like this guide on how to become a game programmer https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer
It is a really good guide, and everything is thought out nicely but many people argue on both guides that it is too much stuff to learn. https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer/issues/54 the answer that miloyip gave to the question that it may be to much sums it up for me. These guides contain to much if you want to be a simple programmer and get a job. But if you want to be one of the best in the industry you are going to need read and study all the parts.
I don't think there is any non open source software involved here, it's Intel only though.

Edit: not so, see below
Not so lucky here. hated minidiscs from the moment I bought a recorder. I got an imported MZ-R90, fairly late into the cycle expecting maturity, which would persistently overheat when recording for some reason. Playback was reliable however but the limited ability to record meant that I only listened to about 5 discs worth of music for about 5-6 years. Prerecorded minidiscs were prohibitively expensive and very limited in availability in the UK as well.

Eventually, as I was stubborn as hell, it got replaced by an iPod shuffle when they first came out. Bar a stupid couple of weeks with an awful Sony Ericsson phone it’s been Apple all the way since.

Freedom from having to maintain and record media is the biggest win though over time, not the hardware. Apple Music saves me hours a week managing music for 5 people in my family.
Would this help usability over a slow link (let's say a 9600bps radio modem), or is Gopher better for that purpose?
Strenuous daily exercise may shorten, not prolong, longevity
Some codecs also offer an "Adaptive" bitrate mode. In that mode the codec can vary the bitrate but never in response to audio input.

So e.g. maybe you're doing 48kbps, the codec would still consume 48000 bits per second for silence. However if a radio link layer indicates it's struggling to move 48000 bits per second that "adaptive mode" audio codec could shift down to 36kbps instead. This is likely to be a much better user experience than throwing away 25% of your compressed audio due to packet loss and then trying to reconstruct it.

For something like Opus you can gracefully degrade this way from 48kbps (transparent for voice) to 8kbps (non-transparent but easily understandable) without an eavesdropper learning anything about the content, they only get insight into whether you've got link trouble.
SHU = torture
The separate protocol for everything is essentially what things were like prior to about 1994.

There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out.

The web was seen as just another fish in the pond.

After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while

However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network.

Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.

It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore.

Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again.

The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
Those tiny Aiwas that eventually miniaturized to hardly bigger than a cassette case were a very successful challenger brand in my circles, to the point that Sony brand walkmen practically ceased to exist. It was either an Aiwa or a cheap noname during those last years before everything switched to digital.

But the brand went through that surprisingly unscathed, they might have dropped the ball on late generation cassette innovation, but after the switch to organise CD the Sony brand discman was again perceived as solidly recommendable.
"how is this allowed to happen"

Passive voice is the self-answer.
I have 5 years worth of experience working on back-end development. Looking for opportunities in Clojure Web-Devlopment. Let's connect!

Location:Pune India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possible in future

Technologies: Clojure, Java, Docker, kubernetes, Jenkins, Kafka, Keycloak, AWS
Linux, Restful APIs, Graphql, Microservices, Postgres, Datomic

Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/38oMMpq
It's not that they cannot use the GPL, they choose to not use GPL for their driver. That's a business decision.
VA-API works fine on my AMD card using the mainline amdgpu driver. Buy your hardware with software support in mind and there won't be any problems.
DLSS is possibly baked into the graphics cards. It is what the RT cores are for. Facebook is just releasing a POC. I doubt the code is handwritten CUDA optimized for performance.
Regarding the quote at the end of the blog post:

"When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library.
Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall."
- chris_f (Hacker News comments)

There are still books in a shopping mall. You have to know where to look and not get distracted at every corner, though.
There will be football in 2020