skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with contact tracing apps is that their effectiveness has a quadratic relation with the adoption rate. They would be mostly useful to trace "random" contacts (since you tend to know which of your friends and family you saw within the last 2 weeks), but to be able to trace a possible infection both the infected and the "recipient" have to have the app and active. In Germany they said their 12M installs is "good" but that's just 15% of the population, so if you'd take a random pair the chance to detect a link is 0.15*0.15 = 2.25% ... so it's obvious that this isn't going to move the needle much. So in order for this to be effective, you need to have very high adoption rates, and it can only help in addition to other measures (wearing masks, hygene, avoiding indoor gatherings, ...)
Some months ago I saw a larger one that took half a minute of cycling through different states to fully display the final image. So 15s seems reasonable.
masks also give people who suspect they are sick, but are not sure, a license to go out in public, potentially spreading infection. instead, let's have assurance of basic care and necessities (pandemic welfare) for anyone even suspected of being sick or with elevated risk, and those folks would happily stay home.

masks are a good backup to appropriate distancing, but not a good primary or always-on mitigation, because of their many failure modes, not the least of which is the enormous variety of human behavior.
If the immunity lasts for 4 months, we are talking about yearly vaccinating 200% of the population.

It's not impossible for countries with a small population, but AFAIK the flu is the largest scale vaccination in the world, and we are talking about something 4 times larger (than those countries that vaccinate the most - how are China and India numbers?).

But then, this seems to be the worst case with a reasonable likelihood. Things will probably be better.
Tips to finish your Side Project
But what exactly is long enough? Compared to repeated lockdowns, even monthly vaccine reinjections would be a relief because ramping production is easier than locking down. We don't really need perfect immunity, we just need to force average spread per infected to a value significantly lower than one and even a vaccine that turns out ineffective for a fraction of the population could be a major contributor to that. The most important concern is side effects, particularly antibody-dependent enhancement. Once production is the bottleneck things can only get better.
After a long struggle, I have managed to find a process that allows me to regularly finish my side projects instead of giving them up after a while. I have learned some lessons that I wanted to share and I hope that they will be helpful for others.
Yes, my bad, it'd be 4 frames per minute.
I said a few 1000 and I actually browsed the code on Github when it came out.

There were just six weeks to develop it.

And the concepts where developed before by public research institutes for a tiny fraction of that price (not included).

(If you insist, here is a small calculation. Let‘s say we charge a whopping 500 Euros per hour per engineer. In other words an engineer that costs 1 million per year. And we have 6 weeks time which was all they had. And let’s take 20 people for that. And let‘s add 500.000 for some overhead. Then that‘s still just about 3 million. And I‘ve used insane numbers for a product that trivial.)
South Korea has nationwide contact tracing that's been quite successful.

Here's a study with some data on it: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article

New Yorker article that's older but adds some color: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/seouls-radical-expe...
I use zfs in the home on one machine that runs nfsd and samba.

I started doing that because I saw corruptions on magnetic disks at home. Some files were silently corrupted. I had no redundancy. I didn't know which files were "good" either.

So now I have one multi disk machine running FreeBSD with zfs. Works well. Hardware isn't especially fancy. In the time since I have seen it catch hardware failures. I have seen it call out specific files as corrupt. This is a huge improvement over how I saw bad disks surface in the past.
CDA 230 Reform Grows Up: PACT Act Has Problems, but Talks About the Right Things
One of the chief benefits I find to providing links when in a discussion is - I get to realise I'm wrong before I've posted. I'll have some half-remembered quote or statistic in my head and I want to provide a link to evidence it. But after finding a decent source I find that I've misremembered something - usually it's a minor detail but sometimes not and sometimes it undermines the point I was going to make.

That kind of self-fact checking is enormously useful since i) I look less of a fool and much more importantly ii) Less bullshit is propagated overall.

I'm not sure how you can know that "nobody is really reading [your links]" - on most forums the number of people reading a thread will heavily outnumber the people participating. Who knows how many people are reading your links, perhaps months later?

Even when not in a discussion/debate I think providing a link is just good manners. Searching for something might only take 2-3 minutes but why should every single one of your readers have to do that? Isn't it more efficient that I do it once and provide the link? This is especially true when there are multiple versions/editions of (for example) videos with very similar titles but different quality or subtly different content. A URL helps to say "This is the specific thing I was talking about".
>But then I thought of possible applications

Indeed, some pretty impressive demos have been sprouting up on Twitter. Things like generating properly running code from english descriptions of the desired functionality are potentially game changing.
Isn't that a safety-hazard. The laser is probably strong enough to make you blind if it hits you wrongly in the eye.
I can respond to the rest of it. I wanted to know where the idea that it's common to view the cognomen as a surname came from. It's bizarre.

> There are modern people today with a surname of Caesar. Somehow, the name of the late celebrity Sid Caesar pops up for me. Wikipedia has more

Not really relevant when the claim was that (1) Little Caesars is named after someone's surname; and/or (2) Caesar was Julius Caesar's surname. Both of those claims are obviously false.

> yes clearly, McDonald's and Hardee's are named for surnames.

But I've been saying this whole time that "Taco Smith" is not similar to "Taco John's", because "Taco John's" is named after a notional owner, Taco John, whereas you couldn't call someone "Taco Smith". (And of course, even if you did, you wouldn't expect the restaurant to have the same name as the owner.)

McDonald's and Hardee's are not evidence that anyone ever referred to anyone as "McDonald" or "Hardee". They're names, not nicknames.

> But yes, it is common to address people by their last name as a nickname. I seem to recall it was especially common back in school, something guys did kind of informally. Plenty of reasons explained here: https://www.google.com/

This isn't common at all. What country are you thinking of?
Original title was too long. It was:

CDA 230 Reform Grows Up: The PACT Act Has Problems, But It’s Talking About the Right Things
I had mis-assumed this was about the potential use of "dirty-bombs". Surprised and saddened to read it is about actual use of depleted uranium and the poisoning it is causing in impoverished, war-torn places.
Here, in Norway, the Nespresso and similar pods are aluminium so you just drop them in the metal recycling bin along with other cans and glass. No plastic involved.
PrintMonkey 30 Campaigns
> Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called “Cloudflare”

The other one is called AWS.
Hacker:

"Silicon Valley’s most successful people marketed themselves as hackers until their parents found out what it was."

and

"You startup is not a startup, it’s just a bad project."
There are serious trade-offs in these things:

• In monochrome panels, you can get 16 shades, and a full refresh in under a second (with partial refresh much faster, as tight as very few milliseconds for small areas, or commonly 30fps full-screen update if you’re willing to compromise a bit on image quality).

• In colour panels, you don’t seem to get shades or rapid refresh: seven colours means you get a seven colour palette, so you’ll have to use dithering to get any in-between colours; and you don’t get partial updates at all: even the fastest coloured panels take a couple of seconds to update the image, and the more colours you add the slower it is.

If I’m wrong about these and there are colour panels with more interesting colour or partial refresh, I’m interested to hear. I just haven’t seen any, and have done some looking.

The long and the short of it is that colour e-ink displays are only useful for display use, not for individual devices like ebook readers or computer displays.
Changing your point of view over time as new data becomes available is the hallmark of integrity.

Anyone who claims a position which doesn’t change at all as we learn more and more about a novel challenge should be viewed with less credibility, not more.
ChAdOx1 would certainly make a good IRC handle.
600x448px resolution makes it very limied for most applications. And it's too expensive to be used as a tag in a store.
Congrats on the raise!

Meta comment: The confusion we see in this thread is what happens when a startup tries to create a new category -- a strategy known as "category creation." Founders imagine everyone will jump onboard with this category and run to them as the de facto leader of that category.

In reality, it just creates another point of confusion. Whereas before you had to explain just one thing, now you have to explain two things: What your product does, and what the category means.

There are many existing subcategories within the "database" category of products. Pick the subcategory where you want to compete, and market your innovation to stand out and win over new or existing customers in that category. Timeseries, in-memory, data lake, RDBS, ... Lots to choose from.

This goes for TileDB and any startup founder reading this who's about to launch something like a "Intra-Terrestrial Data Pipeline Miracle" or "Middle-Out Machine Learning Capacitor" or "The First Cloud Fog Edge Dew Platform" or whatever.
Calm down there mr buzzwords, this is not a job interview.
Metrics and APM can change how you develop and ship software
It'd have no effect at all.

We know this because that's exactly what ClimateGate was. A huge pile of hacked emails leaked, and they included climate scientists saying things like:

- The world had stopped warming and they couldn't explain that

- They were mixing and matching data to ensure graphs showed temperature's going up

- They were working to prevent papers that disagreed with them from being published

- They were deleting emails and other material to avoid having to release them

etc

Guess what - they denied everything, the emails were roundly denounced by a friendly media, and nothing happened to any of the people involved.

Really, you don't need deepfakes to create climatology skepticism. Climatologists are very good at creating it all by themselves.
This man knows how to make money consistently.
Agree with the post, but not with the title. Overtime I have come to realize that being lazy/productive are the most meaningless measures there can be. You are either enjoying what you are doing so much so that you don't give an f about the time spent or you are at a position of responsibility. Either way you are doing something worthwhile(at least to you). The unwarranted mechanization of your life through quantifying the superficial aspects of what constitutes productive and what doesn't will only distance you from writing more. In fact, The feeling of being unproductive is more often than not a byproduct of not being in one of these situations --- all it says is neither am I enjoying what I'm doing nor am I in a position of responsibility. A net negative term, says nothing of essence at all, squeezing every bit of life out of you by inducing unwarranted guilt!
Flutter Loader – A widget that shows the loading progress indicator
Is it just me or should this be four color CMYK like a regular printer?
My current favorite feature: you can manually override the maximum thickness :] 160px thick book ftw

The only comment I have is that the width slider tends to make an aggressively flickery mess of my screen anywhere above 250px.
Where are the bones of Hans Holbein? Solving art's grisliest mystery
Is there an actual contact tracing app for the US or any US states yet?
> There is a huge asymmetry between the effort to make an outrageous claim and that to refute one.

Asking "Got evidence for that?" is sufficient refutation for baseless claims.
I've pretty much switched over to youtube-dl for video viewing, as I find it to be superior to the web interface in most ways. I get the highest-quality file every time, instead of what their AI thinks I want. I can easily request audio-only or video-only. Download once, watch over and over without using more bandwidth each view. No suggested videos. No recommendations. No comments.
> One result of the Heinsberg study in Germany was that living together with an infected person only resulted in ~43% chance of infection.

If you're living in an area where the virus is circulating, you are likely to eventually be exposed many times. Getting lucky once is not enough.

> like a seasonal virus that starts big and then fizzles. The high R-Values people talked about in the beginning aren't a real thing.

They're absolutely real. Seasonal viruses come back every year, so if this is like the flu, then we have to worry about another major wave in the fall.

Epidemics can slow down for two reasons:

* Increasing immunity. Herd immunity is a long way off in most places in the world. Even places that had some of the worst outbreaks, like NY city, have only had ~20% infection rates.

* People change their behavior, causing R to decrease. Social distancing, mask-wearing, enforced lockdowns, quarantining of infected people, quarantining of exposed people - these can all lead to slower spread of the virus.

> Michael Levitt in the beginning already calculated the outbreak in China perfectly.

The epidemic was suppressed in China through a massive government and societal response. It would have been far worse if there had been no reaction. Because of the reaction, most of the country was spared the experience that Wuhan had. If all containment measures were to end today, the epidemic would flare up again and millions of people would die over the next several months.

The only way to permanently dampen the outbreak is to achieve a high level of immunity. That can either be through a vaccine, in which case almost nobody will die, or it can be through herd immunity, in which case many millions of people will die worldwide.
uri encompasses/superset of both url and urn (there was also urc that went no where). urls have a "scheme" (http/ftp/gopher/etc) to access the resource, while urn is a persistent non-location based type of name identifier e.g. urn:ietf:rfc:2648
From what I can see at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Crypto/getR... or https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto_crypto_randombytes...

... neither crypto.getRandomBytes() nor Crypto.getRandomValues() are SEEDABLE. There is no argument I could pass in that would produce the same random sequence for the same seed-value.

A reproducible random sequence would be useful in many situations I believe. I understand such a thing is not too difficult to program but it may be difficult to get verifiably good quality randomness out of your own implementation.
oops, skimmed the last part tbh (was a bit too long of a read for my morning Tea). Just saw the roadmap in the end and figured this is where it's heading. Have you thought of applying this to web-stacks?

But thanks for the great article! Will read the second half more thoroughly this evening.
I have a lawyer friend who complains about this in the legal field. A brief may cite a case for a specific proposition. They have to be pretty thorough because there is a nonzero chance that the cited case doesn't actually stand for the proposition, and in some cases says exactly the opposite!
Considering we already do this once per year for the flu, its not even that unreasonable of a measure if its necessary to do monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, etc.
I find it funny how even though it removes the clickbait thumbnails, the "youtube face" is still inexplicably there there.

https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/223/...
It offers you procedurally generated dialogue that can be relevant to any potential player actions. You decide to kill the town chicken and now all the townspeople are talking about it. You've freed up devs from having to hard code all these possible interactions, obviously not perfect but it allows for some interesting possibilities.
> This is absolute nonsense.

Please refrain from breaking the site guidelines...
The other problem is which people are likely to install the app. It basically requires a modern Android or iOS smartphone with internet connectivity, which probably excludes the really at-risk groups that are of most concern: https://www.dw.com/en/loved-or-loathed-how-germanys-coronavi...
Doomed.

It's literally RT all over again.

One notes that a lot of developers have legally moved to block GeForce Now from virtualising their software in the cloud without a license agreement. Will they do the same for Microsoft with Windows 10x?
31 Books Like Ready Player One
From a decade ago. Seems odd how this tech has so few applications.
Best Buy has a warehouse near me that will allow you to do order pickup directly from them. Vast warehouse outside Spanaway in Washington. "No retail services are available here" but they will bring appliances etc to the loading dock for you (no idea whether you could use it for smaller items but most likely).
With possible timing attacks you usually do a full linear search, without early return. This search has always constant time, twice as slow. When the attacker gets to know the seed somehow even hashmaps can be exploited.
OpenAI's GPT-3 Language Model: A Technical Overview
This is a good point although I would say that citations are still better than no citations as they at least give the basis for a reasonable discussion. Now that "evidence" for X has been cited, person 2 can come back and explain why the URL does not actually support X.
> I did briefly try ZFS on my laptop a year or so ago, and it ate up half of my RAM permanently.

ZFS will use all available RAM for caching, unless you tell it otherwise (zfs_arc_max[1] or similar[2]), but it should release it when the system requires it[3].

[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/817-0404/gjhec/index.ht...

[2]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-advanced.html

[3]: https://superuser.com/a/1137417
Lots of animation is done in vector tools to start with. If this format goes anywhere it would probably be pretty easy to add exporters to Toon Boom, Animate, OpenToonz, and whatever else people are currently using - I left that industry a decade and a half ago so I'm not too up on what everyone's using right now.
The systemic risk argument is absurd. The risk posed by any financial asset is not distributed uniformly across the economy. Its impact on any party is proportional to their direct and indirect exposure to that asset, which is something that they control and have to take responsibility for.

In the absence of the government bodies that socialize the losses of irresponsible actors, those actors who take on imprudent risks would see the share of the financial market that they control steadily shrink at the expense of those who do not.

The suspension of this market feedback mechanism is what increases the risk of financial crisis.

For example, the FDIC has been found to stimulate risk-taking and thereby contribute to more systemic risk and more frequent and severe financial crises. [1]

For another example, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, well-capitalized players like Walmart, which was expanding its banking activity via its Sam's Club lending, were well positioned to replace the incumbent Wall Street firms as major lenders, but that was forestalled by Congress and the Federal Reserve socializing the losses of the major financial institutions with a bailout and prohibiting nonbanking parties from providing banking services. [2]

>>And right now our government is literally feeding the capitalists while watching millions of people go w/o food, housing, health care.

Agreed. The Central Bank is an engine for corruption and centralization of power. I disagree that the solution is more cookie-cutter rules that violate the freedom to contract and centralize power in the hands of powerful regulatory body subject to regulatory capture - which very well could have been the principal factor behind regulators stopping Sam's Club from expanding its lending activity, considering the banks' lobbying activity against it.

The solution is to stop creating moral hazard with a Central Bank that holds the exclusive power to create the national currency and allocate it to the private parties of its own choosing.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/17bank.html
This is certainly the case. I don't have a link, but one study suggested 80% of cases were from "super-spreading" events, with one person infecting many others.
That's pretty much my twitter feed, plus some authors like Cory Doctorow.
The services I've provided are for consumption by the customer so customer.saascompany.com is fine. I haven't made services that need customer branding e.g. product.customer.com.

For this case, I would likely still manage my own Letsencrypt certs (e.g. service.saascompany.com) and have the customer add CNAME product.customer.com -> service.saascompany.com for the vanity domain. At that point the customer is managing their own cert and I would recommend CloudFlare, AWS or other that issues/maintains certs for them.
Great shared. Thanks pal.
Universal Android Debloater – remove bloatware by using ADB
Would like to see a discussion about whether it is a false dichotomy.

I mean, in an ideal population set where people acted rationally, it might be. In the real world, where fear motivates counterproductive behavior, it’s hard to imagine a different scenario where you don’t slow the economy (associated harms) while trying to mitigate the virus.
I usually search videos with Bing using the !bv redirect from DuckDuckGo. Google's video search is shockingly bad, considering they own YouTube.

Not only are Bing's results more on target, it also displays search results much more conveniently. Also Bing supports the "+" operator that Google does not. (Also the "-" operator.) These allow accurate targeting of what you are looking for.

I also usually redirect to Bing image search (!bi in DDG) because their support of the "+" operator allows more accurate search targeting.
large pavilions with picnic tables, lighting, and fans works well and we should be building them all over our communities.

They're cheap to build, keep everyone dry, shaded, and reasonably cool. It's obviously not as good as air conditioning, but I've worked under them when on a camp staff in central Georgia during some extremely hot summers in the '90s (and the 90s/100s F) and it is tolerable for most people.

Brief research tells me the construction cost is generally under $25k which is a blip in most education budgets. As a bonus we have more outdoor community space when we manage to get past this.
Maybe it would make sense to have multiple independent sections of backbone at the BGP level. Instead of having one public AS/backbone, break it down into regions at least so that it is more confederated.
Fun!

Thank you for the reply — it got my gears turning in a very good way.

Best of luck with mid-terms!