skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In one group there have been a strong set of policies to fight the virus, and it includes face masks, and in this group the virus has been beaten back

But, as the article says, when we study this we find a bunch of other things happening that are probably more important. These include symptomatic people self isolating; people more willing to comply with social distancing; better hand washing; earlier close-down; etc.
Rather than dark-mode - my real Top 3 are:
1) Save metrics. I want to know what happened at 3am last night when I was asleep
2) Nobody runs only a single server, need a single UI for the whole fleet.
3) Extensibility. Allow me to add my own metrics.
I don't have a sub to FT.

I do however doubt there are many economists who would be against the idea of digitizing cash flows, losses, and profits. It just makes for more efficient decision making. The two - ideally - aren't materially different.
As former teacher: teaching is hard, and teaching remotely is harder.

Maintaining classroom order is a big part of the job. How are you going to do that remotely?

When I say maintaining order, I’m not even talking about discipline. Think Roberts Rules of Order. Just coordinating discussions in a meeting of 30 people.

Teachers are taught to engage students, and get them to engage with each other.

Just look how fast a HN comment thread can go off the rails.
Natural language + bash is truly a cursed combination.
I think this is right, but would add that it is also key that the vast majority of here have a lot of trust in YC + moderators and nearly universally view them as good faith actors. This wouldn’t work on CNN.com.
Sounds like your writing style fits with how TiddlyWiki[0] works. I just started using it, but like it so far. Has a plug-in for editing in Markdown as well.

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/
If Fortnite was really the entity holding the spectator sport aces here, broadcasters would already be paying them handsomely for broadcast rights to their competitions rather than Fortnite streaming being the preserve of Twitch amateurs collectively reaching as many people per quarter as an off-peak hour of the Olympics[1]. It's not like Epic aren't commercially savvy, after all.

The reality is that there's little about a computer game that's less than an Olympiad old to appeal to the IOC and plenty of major issues with them granting Epic their patronage, and both entities will do fine without each other.

[1]obviously many of the minor Olympic sports also aren't great as standalone TV and wouldn't get the viewers without the big umbrella event, but that's kind of the point
Isn't that important when talking economics? Liberalism as a political philosophy has a lot to say on economics (very pro capitalist and pro markets) and "leftism" informs the reader that Mason isn't a capitalist.

It shows that he's learned from people with very different theories/opinions on economics.
I’ve benefited immensely from online education, but it’s not a substitute for an in person liberal arts education.
It should be smashed, because what you think its obviously correct yes?
Of course there are some great stations to stream; there is infinite musical content online that I use to great advantage. But we're specifically talking about FM/AM broadcast and the chaff heartily outweighs the wheat in most locations.
The only data people use to back this up is "how many black economists are there?". It's as if people's knowledge of statistics completely goes out the window when it comes to this issue. Show me a black person without a degree, with an equal or greater knowledge of economics than Nathan, and with a website and newsletter following, who was denied entry to conferences because of their skin color.

You can't just pluck out one variable and compare them head to head. There are so many other variables that account for success: family support, educational background, financial position, work experience, etc. Boiling everything down to race is unhelpful and doesn't solve any problem.
Depending so heavily on the automobile was the key decision. Even now it might hamper many such efforts, because most malls seem to be surrounded by a huge Pelennor Field of hot asphalt and hemmed in by freeways or wide boulevards that might have pedestrian facilities as sort of an afterthought. So they really had better strive to be self-contained and offer everything someone might need.
It used to work this way, but got changed to a less-than check for performance reasons. The Bitcoin whitepaper [0] even has the original approach:

> The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
For those who wanted more social contact though, it definitely filled a need that wasn't being met otherwise. Many suburbs are almost completely without any sort of public gathering places other than church & school, i.e. places that don't dictate what to do and how to act. Granted the mall has its limits too, that's why there's the Mickey D's parking lot!

Even Chuck D found its charms irresistible: https://imagescdn.juno.co.uk/full/CS537052-01B-BIG.jpg
> Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science.

Although it's a bit of a side-track and you're quoting, what are your thoughts on applying this logic to "computer _science_" or "material science"?

I think it's more about the age of the field:

1. pretty old fields like physics (which just comes from the Greek word for nature), chemistry (comes from the art of making alloys) just have names describing what is studied without adding something that says "study of".

2. a lot of newer sciences (e.g. biology, geology, psychology, sociology) we use -logy as a suffix meaning "field of study", again from ancient Greek. Some of these are natural sciences, some others are social sciences.

3. in newer fields of study, rather than deriving new Latin/Greek names we just use "X science", which is not that different from what's being done in (2) A major exception to this is the medical fields (like oncology) where we still use -logy because Latin/Greek roots are still in common use in medicine.
It was a resounding success in the same way that the federal flood insurance program is a resounding success.

It mitigates a crisis, but sets up horrible long-term incentives.
One totally genius design feature of the Walkman was the fact that it had two headphone jacks. Together with music ripping and mix tapes, this was the beginning of music sharing, and eventually the downfall of the monolithic music industries. Truly a disruptive innovation.
Exactly. Or in this case exfiltrate my entire loan application, which would be a gold mine for identity theft.
Why are we working on treatments and vaccines? This fat lazy coward in Washington said it's "going to go away."
I think with hn, it's more than just the downvote, it's the subtle greying out of the comment each vote below zero until finally being killed at -4.

This is a bit different than say reddit where downvotes can just keep going on and on and a comment with -120 votes is just as visible as a comment with -1 and only a quick click away from being as visible as positively voted comments.

Hn's comment greying reminds me more of just silently being shut out or ignored and gives you immediate visual feedback as to the relevance, or lack thereof, of what you said.
He shouldn't be so humble, he's not that great.

The headline and the article were incredibly patronizing. I'd argue his response was undignified, as the implication is that due to his privilege, he might have otherwise earned his success if only he had in fact finished his degree. It was a smug gesture that betrays the legitimacy of every other person who has also succeeded without one. The phrase "unctuous git," sprung to mind.

Good on him for succeeding, and one hopes he isn't just being elevated because he can be relied upon to toe the party line, but as someone with a similar background, Tankus is not representative.
It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.
Here is a simple bitcoin implementation in ruby including the networking for interested, that I did some time ago:

https://github.com/oguzbilgic/zincir
Abandon money for virtue signaling?

This is a capitalistic world, money will go where it can multiply itself.

US can leave China as they want, will EU follow? How about Japan? My bet will be that they will be happy to take up the vacuum US left and make a huge fortune out of it.

Corporate America, if they can act coordinately, they can fix so many things domestically in this country. Yet, they didn't and probably won't. It make zero sense that they can achieve that in China.
Do recipes also say 200g of eggs, or just four eggs?
I'm not the poster you're asking, but I've been using Syncthing [0] for anything I need to share with my phone (or any other device for that matter). Very simple and fast to get using.

[0] https://syncthing.net/
Your lancet article has one mention of the word "mask", and says this:

> We are also unable to explicitly decompose physical distancing measures into constituent components, such as staying 2 m apart, increased hand washing, and face mask wearing, as the relative effectiveness of these components has not yet been estimated.

Did you post the right link?
This is also a great of example of how really smart people with deep knowledge in one domain can totally fail real-world skills.

Anyone who cooks a lot has a gut feel for how different foods increase in volume when baked (breads, like popovers), fried (crispy rice noodles), fluffed (rice) or sifted (macrons!), even if they don't understand packing volumes or programming...

Experience actually does matter.
It's unfortunate to see other HN commentators here seeing someone be humble and recognize that their success is the result of a number of different criteria as being an example of 'PC culture gone mad' or that he's just lying to avoid the mob or as a personal attack on them.

There was an example a while ago of the issues black CEOs face in SV [1] and it's just something you'll never see as a cis white man. I've certainly never encountered any issues relating to my race or my gender or how I present myself, but if you're a black man you're already used to dressing a different way to prevent being perceived as a threat [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540162

[2] https://mashable.com/2015/08/08/black-men-dressing-up-police...
I used to think stuff like this was crazy and destined to fail but I've really become aware of how far my preferences are from the norm over the last 5 years.

I think people on average are very open to integrating many subscription services into their lives.
> Walking around Tokyo this week I'm still seeing mask rates of >95%. Lockdown ended about 2 weeks ago.

I currently live in Asia and have been for many years, I am from a western country. I think in Asia, face masks are just a fact of life, including pre-covid. There is/was an expectation that if you are sick, then you should probably wear a mask. Given that a lot of cities are crowded, many wear masks also not to get sick.

As a westerner, I understand the negative connotations of wearing a mask, it is not a part of "normal life" in many countries. But life has changed, people should get used to it. Americans should just look at the stats to know that there is a problem. This isn't an attack on their freedoms, it is an attempt not to save their life, but the life of a fellow American, by preventing the spread.

While China may have been the epicenter of the virus, the spread is the responsibility of the citizens of the secondary country.
Historians wanted to push the narrative that primitive people were less violent, that seeing the pots dug up during different eras was due to cultural transmission not people being wiped out and replaced, "Pots, not people"

Genetics has revealed that no, it was people not pots:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6

You'd have had a more accurate picture of prehistory watching Conan the Barbarian than sitting in anthropology lectures.
It's a great point you raise, and something that we all should think about.

> There's some rather vehement responses in this thread. I wonder how many people are threatened by the idea that their accomplishments are partially due to them "looking the part" and not just their work and skill.

Additionally I think a lot of people understand the concept of probability and likelihoods, but when it comes to this topic people get very uncomfortable thinking that where they are today is partially due to luck but as well due to structural factors that benefited them unrelated to any active actions they took.

And usually the emotional response is either doubling down on the parts they did control (completely ignoring the fact that plenty of other people put in more effort or did better at those same parts and didn't get as far as they did), or claiming that yes the problem does exist but "not in my area, because no-one actively does anything bad like that", or the other "my intuition says it's a minor issue or an already resolved issue therefore that's true" - which goes against the research that says - no it is a problem.
I believe you're referring to lectures rather than a university degree. The arguments you're making are no different than the ones made by people saying traditional colleges would be gone in five years once MOOCs arrived. It's possible that things will change in a major way, but simply being able to watch a lecture from your home is neither new nor a substitute for a traditional four year college. (And note that the in-person lecturing part is actually really cheap - much cheaper than the same lectures online, and only a tiny percentage of the cost of running a university.)
It's an internet newsletter. Did you assume his race? Did you assume he's white because you're racist? Why are you bringing his skin color into this?
Power in Germany costs 3-6x more than I pay in St. Louis, depending on time of year. Russian natural gas is expensive.
-20 years in the future.

It's entirely feasible but what's the point. By the time you have designed an efficient network for distributing all kinds of audio from 1 (idealized server) to N earpods you've basically just reinvented the internet anyway. There are too many people without any internet connections (or food, let's be honest) to fuck around with a system like that ethically or with any financial responsibility.
> It gets worse—Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn't receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her behavior

But this works both way. Actually, it works all ways. That is, the person who marginalizes Alice is also marginalized by someone else. And so on and so on. Eventually, everything is binary. There's little if any grey area.

No doubt a small minority actually deserve to be marginalized. Those existed long before the internet. The internet is different. You don't need to work to understand or even engage. Instead, many seek to minimize friction and maximize positive feedback. The validity of the source is irrelevant. Digital love is good regardless of the source.
In defense of the explanation, sometimes it's asking for an unnecessary mental leap of the reader to think of a bit array as a number, especially if the reader is not accustomed to thinking in base-2 or base-16 number systems.
Yes, but the point is not that being a crank is a guarantee of truth. The point is that it's not a guarantee of being wrong either. You have to look at the evidence either way.

Ed: if you care, I mean. I'm the last person to deny the right to just not take a position on a non-actionable topic.
Interesting find. This should apply to any online password manager, though. Shouldn't this apply even to sites like LastPass? Or anything where your master password is entered via a "3rd party" software (browser in this case). I am excluding 1password or anything with a standalone desktop software. But the browser-plugin for your password manager could be just as bad attack vector.
"Masks" covers various types of respirator (such as N95 or FFP3), and fluid-resistant surgical mask, and surgical masks that are not fluid resistant.

We have lots of evidence for all of these, and most of that evidence doesn't show any benefit for surgical masks that are not fluid resistant.
Also much more often every tenured professor starts as a conformist PhD student. Then some becomes cranks.
Well, there are also people who actually learn something at a university and benefit from the fact that there are good teachers and supervised exercises.
I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned An Infinitely Large Napkin by Evan Chen [1]. It's a fantastic, very dense primer and overview of a large variety of university-level topics in mathematics. It was originally targeted at high school students with an interest in higher mathematics, and while the later chapters have strayed somewhat from that goal, one of the best things about Napkin is that it does its best to justify why we introduce certain ideas and abstractions. Generally, it tries to give a high-level overview without sacrificing technical rigor. I highly recommend it.

Plus, it's a free PDF on the internet! Doesn't get better than that.

[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/napkin.html
I think I've read that N95 masks are in fact inferior to other kinds for "civilians" and I don't altogether believe this is propaganda to conserve them. It makes sense, doesn't it, that N95 masks filter air coming in, not out? My impression is the valve in masks that have them is a sign that it's not protecting others from you - the point is to let air out easily.

There is an asymmetry between healthcare workers and the public - in a hospital, you have one non-infected person surrounded by a lot of infected people, while elsewhere, it's the opposite.

I see a lot of people wearing surgical masks, and having just googled and read a page on 3M's site, it mentions:

"Surgical/procedure or “medical” facemasks are designed to help keep spit and mucous generated by the wearer from
reaching a patient or medical equipment. Some surgical/procedure masks do contain filter media but as they may not be
designed to form a seal to the face, and have not been certified to meet all of the performance standards of a respirator, they
should not be used to help reduce exposures to airborne particles"

I feel like this is a simple difference that people can't comprehend due to a very primitive equation of protecting oneself and protecting others. There is a difference and it should inform our behavior.

Edit: to clarify, I meant to contrast the N95 masks with a valve, that seem to make more sense for health care workers, with the surgical masks that seem to make more sense for the public.
Your description of history and anthropology is about at the level of accuracy that one would expect of someone who conflates the two.
That's one of the reasons why there are required humanities courses: to try to ensure that graduates are "well rounded".

As for their emphasis in higher education, where else are you forced to face different and conflicting ideas? Certainly not in political debates.
Absolutely.

The initial disinformation campaign by the western governments (and the CDC and the WHO) that masks are useless for their wearer (due to the shortage of masks, and the fear they won't be enough for the health care personnel) has long lasting effects.

That was an abject lie, and people have paid with their life for that.

The governments now don't know exactly how to turn around and communicate that yes, masks are useful, we've been lying to you all this time, sorry for that, now you can go ahead and wear some.

You can't do an 180 like that, can you? So for now it's "masks are good for the others, but they won't help you. but don't you want to be a good team player?".
LIGO Black hole merger may have optical confirmation
> family support, educational background, financial position,

All of which are harder to come by or worse on average for black Americans, because of the US's history of race-based slavery and racial discrimination.
Show HN: Designtarget – Resources to Improve Your Design Workflow
> but got changed to a less-than check for performance reasons.

Performance as in "it takes less time to verify the PoW," or something else? Because the "leading zeros" and "less than target" approaches would both take a negligible amount of time.
Interesting idea. But as of right now, the recently submitted queries shown on the right almost all have wrong answers. For instance:

> Change jdk default version

cd $( which oracle | xargs -I {} dirname {} )

> change the first character of every filename in this directory to "z"

find z -type d -exec chown z {} \;

> count number of lines in a file

wc -l $( wc -l )

> ping google.com every 5 seconds

find . -name "*.com" | xargs -I {} tar -c -v -f google.com {}
The music helps dull the pain of the walking (Brings back fantastic memories of getting injured while walking a 61 mile training route on Dartmoor)
Personally, I don’t think the right has changed one bit since Reagan went to Philadelphia Mississippi. They’re just simply more comfortable saying what they couldn’t say in public before and they finally have a candidate who is their real deal.

But I would not be closing what channels are left for those who might be confused or naive. There are more important things than purity, and 2000 and 2016 prove that.
There are a lot of people who are capable of self educating and removing ignorance from their lives, but don’t have the means to pay for the fancy universities and prove their capabilities, which is what in the end certificates do. They provide a baseline, a level playing field if you will.
The "Humanities" come from the story of Oerestes, who was being chased and tormented by the screeching furies, often portrayed in art as harpies or other shrieking, biting spirits that yell into Oerestes' ears.

At the end of the play Apollo arrives and turns the Furies into Eumanides - Humanities, who comfort Oerestes. The humanities were created to heal us, but in modern academia, they have been turned back into shrieking furies, and the response we are seeing -- the only sane response -- is to flee them like Oerestes did.

There are still humanities out there, and it is important to seek them out, but you wont them in modern humanities departments.
I agree with you on StackOverflow mostly but their penchant for moving 1v1 arguments into extended chat and then providing a link to said chat for anyone to see is something that I wish was adopted by other sites.
Scaling Linux Services: Before accepting connections
I agree on needing to self-isolate if symptomatic.

However, an occasional sneeze or cough is impossible to distinguish from allergies- for me at least. I have to also rely on measuring fever and pay attention to other symptoms. I have to reserve the step of self-isolation for when I definitely know I am sick.

So - I continue to wear a mask. It’s the one tool I can always rely on, to cover my mouth at least.
> it was the exactly the right call to make.

Lying is never a defensible policy. If there was reasonable concern about run on PPE, then perhaps government order restricting or banning their sale to general population (like it was done by some governments) should be considered.
"What do you think politics is?"

How human beings make collective decisions. Why, what do you think it is?
Godel Escher Bach is a good place to start. Or any book about Godel. That's a great place to blow a kids mind.