skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already convince the masses to install a contact tracing app. Its perfectly benign in most countries, maybe a bit buggy. Next corona season they will improve it. Eventually peer pressure will make it very distasteful to go outside and not bring your contact tracing device. When most people have contact tracing, and since most people have location history on their devices, putting both data together will happen at some point. If the data exists, it will be used. Always. Either directly or through "leaks" and exploits.

In berlin we're also becoming used to seeing police everywhete all the time because of corona. Small things that together can erode our freedom. Death by thousand cuts and all.
Year-over-year Q2 revenue grows 85% to $241.0 million and total visits increase 203% to 2.8 million

GAAP Gross margin which includes depreciation and amortization was 61.7 percent for the second quarter 2020 and 67.2% for the second quarter 2019.

EBITDA was a positive $2.7 million for the second quarter 2020 compared to a loss of $(12.2) million for the second quarter 2019.

For the full-year 2021, the company anticipates year-over-year revenue growth to be in the range of 30% to 40%.
What struck me more about the last answer wasn't that GPT-3 didn't get the riddle, but that it couldn't interpret "no legs" as "zero legs" or similar, even in attempting to solve the riddle.
An Elongated Cloud Has Reappeared on Mars
The comparison doesn't seem proportional at all. American tech companies were not forced to sell their technology to European investors in order to avoid their apps being banned in Europe. They were just fined.
What's funny is that the AI tends to be fairly terrible most of the time building the story in the way moon wants it to go, but then if he mentions anything remotely sexual it becomes an erotic fanfic literary genius.
Ruby is only 25, but Haskell is 30.
But it's not Javascript anymore.

Seems reasonable for someone to want types but not have to raise their own entire TypeRuby language + ecosystem + re-tooling.
> Every time I deploy to heroku, if heroku updated crystal, the bot breaks

Have you tried adding a `.crystal-version` file as described in the buildpack's README? https://github.com/crystal-lang/heroku-buildpack-crystal#cry...
Are you implying these are local people making these adjustments at the fab?
That's correct. Sorbet currently uses RBI but after meeting with core they standardized on RBS and are migrating to present a more unified front and enable easier development of type checking libraries on top of it.

Very little of this will need to be written by hand. The underlying tech is pretty decent at guessing types, the idea is that if it's not quite specific enough you adjust it, but it should otherwise be transparent.
Yeah, sure. The fit and finish on the Livewire is great. But who can afford a $30k+ ebike? Especially one that gets barely 100 miles to the tank?

Not young americans, that's for sure. Personally, I can't wait until H-D bites the dust. Hopefully once and for all. They're incredibly overpriced, underpowered, overweight, technologically obsolete bikes (aside from their 1 electric model that sold terribly) with dealerships that suck at customer service (and also charge way too much per hour)
I think this misses the point... do you need your own auth at all?

Security is only as strong as the weakest link. If you have a "forgot password" that emails you a login or a "lost/changed phone" that removes the sms, don't bother even having the password or sms.

Falling back to email means you've just pushed your auth behind the email's auth. Just use it directly by using oauth with google, o365, facebook or whatever makes sense for your target audience and be done with it. If you are b2b, use saml.
I think this is where the "beyond budgeting" movement comes in.

See: https://bbrt.org/what-is-beyond-budgeting/
> bringing dxgkrnl to Linux would have been a much more involved process instead of just providing a redirect

Of course, that's how collaboration works. Instead of going the harder but "improving the entire ecosystem" way, Microsoft chose the easiest + the one where they can extend stuff in a non-compatible way.
Just to clarify, most of the query engine is built around LLVM-based JIT compilation, and CUDA is not really used per say except for GPU-specific operators like atomic aggregates and thread synchronization, and of course we use the driver API to manage the GPUs, allocate memory, etc. Supporting AMD GPUs or the upcoming Intel Xe GPUs (or frankly anything that has an LLVM-backend) would not be particularly hard, it would just require adding similar supporting infra.
Do you allow for on-premise inference?
Pure political news. Get this off HN.
Ask HN: If China develops a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, what will the US give up?
In the event that China develops an effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine significantly before any US-led efforts succeed, what are the likeliest concessions the US will make in exchange for access?
Yeah, I was wondering why this was being announced on Square's website. Seems it's because Square happens to employ Soutaro Matsumoto, who wrote the post and is also the creator of Steep[0] (an implementation of a typechecker for RBS files).

It's not clear to me whether Soutaro is a member of the Ruby core team, so it feels a bit odd that the post is written like an announcement from the Ruby maintainers.

[0] https://github.com/soutaro/steep
> I think positioning 100,000 American troops would deter the CCP. Given the New Territories is connected to the mainland, I would position them all on Hong Kong Island to defend against any potential naval invasion.

That's not positioning, that's an outright invasion and occupation of China. Now that they've become such a global power they'd never back down from that fight.
Linux distros fix new Boothole bug
Equinix Earnings Release Q2 2020
TBH Wong's never going to get a chance to run, I doubt he's even allowed to leave the country after the security laws. The dude testified on the US congress to advocate against Chinese interests - aka treason - he's going to be the first on the chopping block when opportunity arises.
Ctop: Top-like interface for container metrics
There's also Apple's continued refusal to allow devleopers to have separate pricing for updates vs new purchases. It's either a free update to the existing app, or it's an entirely new app listing with the same price for new users and people who owned the previous one.

I've seen this circumvented by creating a package deal of the old and new versions, which then gets discounted via the "you already own part of this set" mechanism, but it's a messy experience and not something that many developers have done.
In fact, Windows 8 was such a disaster that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 altogether to distance Windows 10 from its predecessor.

I am not defending Windows 10 and would never use it for personal use in its current state. That said, my understanding is that they skipped 9 because of all the existing code that looks at windows versions and could potentially match 9.x as "95, 98, 98se" as a matter of reducing risk. I do not have a current reference for this.

I would use Windows 10 if the default install was a stripped down version of LTSC and had zero telemetry. Give me a kernel, a window manager, sound drivers, video drivers, storage drivers, network drivers. That's it. Install size should be less than 500 MB and idle memory usage should be less than 512 MB of RAM, in my opinion. When I "view processes for all users" it should be less than 20. Aside from Windows Update and layer 2 discovery, there should be zero network packets initiated by the OS unless I specifically requested it. Call this one LTSZ for Zero Cruft.
I was thinking less of people with specific memories, and more of the people those people raised and or interacted with. This can actually have even more of an impact than actually being in the period, as what's related may be selective, and based on what people want to remember.

There's a reason why the 50's in America were portrayed so often as a golden age and a time where things were simpler, and part of that is just people that wanted to remember a time before the 60's and 70's where there was lots of upheaval and unrest. Were the 50's as simple and wholesome as depicted? Surely not, there was plenty of intolerance for those that didn't fit into the mold ("beatniks"), and that's before we even broach the rampant racism, segregation, etc. Yet, if you're of a certain age in America, you were raised on the idea that the 50's were wonderful, everyone lived the nuclear family dream, and everyone's mom was like June Cleaver.

How much this applies to current Afghanistan? I have no idea. But I don't think it's impossible there's quite a bit of rose tinted longing for that age among certain segments of the population, even if they aren't old enough to remember it.
I doubt the dust from a large impact would stay in the atmosphere long enough to trigger a snowball earth. It didn't happen with the Chicxulub impact/non-avian dinosaur extinction.
I know plenty of non-ethical vegans. Vegan can also simply be a diet, as it is quite healthy, without bringing along the whole of the animal rights baggage (right or wrong).
> app is effectively spyware

What is your source for saying that? And what is your definition of spyware?

I don't use TikTok, Facebook, nor Instagram. But I don't get how TikTok is different than the other two? I don't call Facebook a spyware but I don't use it for the very similar reasons that I don't use TikTok and Instagram.
The extend stage was always some sort of small convenience that would be only in microsoft's version of a standard so that when people used a standard language or tool on windows, switching platforms would eventually get bogged down with changes and problems, keeping people locked in.
even in the midst of a pandemic most people are far from being a "hard-core germaphobe". most people who follow Covid avoidance advice do completely sensible things like wear a mask in public spaces, social distance when indoors with other people, and wash / hand sanitize their hands more.

if those actions continue for the foreseeable future, I don't think society is really worse off in anyway - at least not that I can see
3E
The closest thing is calling their app-store practices anti-competitive but it is essentially an industry standard for better or worse regardless of how they choose to curate.

The real answer to why is that it is a grandstanding joker jury and all of their reasons are stupid and dishonest.
> Crystal is pretty unstable at the moment (in that it changes often)

This had never been my experience, I have a server written fully in crystal running in production serving millions upon millions of requests on heroku and crystal doesn't break a sweat.

Quite happy with it so far.
Ruby and Python are both strongly typed. They are not statically typed.
> I think this is kind of missing the "if it's inadequate" clause of the heuristic.

I feel like you're running into an issue a lot of rules of thumb have, where there are words that provide plenty enough wiggle room that the heuristic is accurate... but if you know enough to know how they should be wiggled then you don't need the heuristic.
What I also find interesting is that ByteDance is the only Chinese company to become "popular" in the West for a long time (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent are all years old now), and I wonder how this moves affects them at home.

Stateside, I'm discouraged to see it's VC firms making bids (according to the article), as then it may become a play on how to flip this to Facebook as they are the only ones actually monetizing social media.
Genuinely interested to know some names thrown in the public too.
Still one of my favourite urls of all time.
Why is day care so expensive?

If you had an adult who watched just 6 kids they'd make 180k a year which seems like an insane amount of money to make sure a kid doesn't stick his/her finger in a socket.

If instead they made closer to the median salary then childcare would be closer to $500/month per kid which seems much more reasonable.
In fact none of them are "untyped". They are strongly typed.

BCPL could conceivably be described as untyped.
There's a documentary People's Republic of Desire that I recommend to anyone who thinks China is pretty behind on tech and basically just a manufacturing giant. They're not. Social Streaming on Twitch for cheers & donations? Yeah, they've been doing it for years on their own platform.

I'm not surprised at all that they find international success. Any very large domestic market will create viral products and give their makers enough money and reach to go global.
I guess it's been a long time since I've been personally responsible for the financial side of Stripe accounts. I think it was 5 years ago when I used to run a lot of test transactions and refund for net $0, but times change. Sorry to lead anyone astray.
Not sure what you're saying. What are places where Node isn't caught up to Ruby and can never catch up to Ruby?

Ruby on Rails seems like a kneejerk response, but then again it doesn't exist because nobody really wants it, not for technical reasons.

For example, Python has all the ML/math stuff. Nothing comes to mind for Ruby.
Nope, that happened 5 years later.
What's right and wrong is a purely human construct and changes over time. The point was that, currently, in the eyes of the law, corporations hold many of the same rights as individuals. This could change, but would require special circumstances not considered previously or a change to the law by congress.
Jenkins isn’t really worth the hassle today in my opinion - there are a bunch of new build tools that solve the problem better without all the garbage that comes with it.

And they also look better.

For god’s sake, you could even use GitLab today. What does Jenkins give you? What is there to defend?
Work honored by Nobel prizes clusters heavily in a few scientific fields
Digg wasn't a bookmarking site at all. They put that on for a bit because Delicious had raised money.

Delicious was about 10x-15x the size of Digg.
Ah you are about to face one of my favorite problems. A high-performing building is air-tight, and well-insulated, but old masonry/brick buildings rely on leaky envelopes with no insulation to maintain a dry enclosure.

Basically, the lack of insulation in these old buildings means that the heat emitted through your walls is likely drying your walls during the winter. Once you add insulation on the inside, any vapour from the outside (rain-driven, or drawn through material pores through capillary action) is going to hit the cold/exterior side of the insulation and condense inside your wall (which then causes mold, conducts heat). You can calculate this by assuming steady-state heat flow across your wall during cold/moist conditions and see if the temperature drop across the wall hits the dewpoint (point where air vapour saturates into liquid).

That's why it's better to have the insulation on the outside, with a vapour barrier underneath it to protect your structure. With these kind of old building retrofits, that's not possible. However, you can solve it, basically by calculating the moisture and heat flow through your wall, and identifying the maximum insulation that doesn't cause condensation long enough to grow mold (this is called hygrothermal analysis). There's also various coats you can add to the exterior that have some success in control moisture drive, but if they backfire, you are basically sealing up the moisture inside, so that's always a back-up solution.

Source: I've worked on retrofitting the envelopes of a lot of old masonry/brick buildings.
>A 10 hour audiobook (which is about 90k words) requires

I don't think that word means what you think it means. It's completely possible for an author to record their own audiobook in professional quality audio with a fairly minimal investment. If they don't have a good narration voice then that's going to hurt them, but it can all be done by the author themselves at no extra cost apart from their time, a decent microphone, a computer, and a quiet place to record.
Zelda is definitely not an ARPG
> "Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere..."

It is hard to know what is meant here. Methane is ~25x more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2 or water vapor. But there are lots worse.

A far, far more effective greenhouse gas is HFC. (I know, HFC is a family of formulations. Still.) The number I have seen is 2500x. The amount of HFCs in currently deployed refrigeration systems, if vented, would trap as much heat as all the CO2 already in the atmosphere. Once vented there is no prospect of recovering it, and it lasts much longer in the atmosphere than CO2 because nothing consumes it.

We used to think HFCs saved the world from ultimate disaster by displacing from refrigeration systems the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. Now we know it's a ticking bomb. How hard will it be to gather in, drain, and replace all the existing A/C and refrigerator equipment currently using HFCs?

At least HFCs don't acidify oceans. If we can get the CO2 down, preventing conversion of visible to IR (e.g. roof mirrors) might be enough to save us. Just the latter can't if CO2 remains high, because a collapsed ocean ecosystem is its own mega-disaster.
How is Crystal a "half baked language"?
It depends on what you're after.

Most of the time, I'm here for the text. I really appreciate straight answers in legible fonts. They're a rarity in the age of SEO-optimised, engagement-obsessed websites.

In that sense, I'm happy with platforms that standardise the experience. It's just unfortunate when those platforms add their own layer of annoyances in the name of growth.
Show HN: covid.town – See cities with pop. closest to the total US COVID deaths
I highly recommend you (or anyone, really) reading 'Embracing Our Selves', a book by Sidra and Hal Stone. It is an introduction to Voice Dialogue method, where you literally talk to different parts of someones psyche. Its a mind blowing perspective.

You both mention self negative talk and for that reason I come forward with this recommendation, but things you discuss (repressed emotions, powerlessness/vulnerability, self-leadership,...) are all intertwined and addressed in the book in an insightful way.
My problem with SMS-2FA is when it becomes a single factor back into the account.

It should never be the only factor required to reset a password. It should always be an option to disable. (Smaller financial institutions seem particularly to fall into this one, "its for your security.") It should be granular enough to give the customer control of what it can and cannot be used for.

The big thing being missed here is that all organizations should be expected to block any leaked password in the wild from being used. Banlists are rarely used by any entity except the largest. SMS-2FA is a step in continuous improvement, not a destination. It is also being used to either check compliance boxes or as a part of security theater. The hoopla, range, and witch hunt energy should be repurposed to get everybody using password banlists.
I feel the author is writing about the ability of Amazon to use it's size to create a hostile environment for smaller companies. If you take a large enough portion of quality books and offer the author cash to make them exclusive then you'll shut down competition.

There is obviously a grey area here. I don't know how much Amazon is in the business of creating books (i.e. hiring authors to write them).

The main difference is see between this and Netflix exclusives is that Netflix takes an active have in making their own content (it's a Netflix movie, not a X director movie on Netflix), they have competition in the marketplace and the financial dynamics of movies is different from books.
This strongly depends on the issue though. In most dual booting cases I've had to deal with recently, a single efibootmgr command was enough.

Windows and some Linux distros like to replace the fallback EFI command and the two can conflict every now and then. By properly configuring the UEFI to pick the right OS at boot (sudo efibootmgr -o 0001,0000 or something like that) should be enough.

If you're still using MBR or you have a shitty motherboard with bad UEFI support you're right that you're still forced to do a full Grub reinstall.

I've had to do recovery on a non-booting Windows machine that broke after a recent update and it was just impossible to recover. Some file on the FS was corrupted, but SFC couldn't recover it and wouldn't report what file was corrupted. Rebooting into recovery takes forever, boot recovery constantly fails and the only saving grace is the "reinstall Windows" that uses a complete reinstall as a fix for a broken OS.

Yes, fixing Linux is difficult, but at least it's doable. On Windows you're basically stuck with the two or three auto-recovery options or an OS + software reinstall.

I can't speak for macOS but I can't imagine it being much easier (especially because the limited variety of macOS hardware makes it more unlikely for the OS to fail catastrophically because that's easier to test for).

It shouldn't be too hard to create a Linux boot ISO that lists installed operating systems and then automounts them for recovery. It's only a matter of parsing GRUB config files + fstab + crypttab and some predefined mount patterns for distros after all.
I don't know many agile teams that plan and design and estimate the next 3-6 months of work.

It's my understand that would not be considered agile.
PayPal Earnings Result Q2’20
I don't share Mr Wood's point of view:

"But not all people who invest in startups will be that lucky."

He's downplaying the bad news. I'd still be mad if this happened to me, even with full refund.
He does have the disclaimer
A good start is banning interest and other parasitic practices that underly the banking system.
Has anyone confirmed this is true (or is this tweet the only source...)?

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/105454 "Apple has the RIGHT TO withhold"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989256

It seems you can only get a refund by reporting a problem, which means if your app works as described you shouldn't be able to request a refund.
Cargo works around that by treating the first non-zero number as the major version, so 0.x version bumps are also considered breaking (and don't happen automatically).
Why selection bias is the most powerful force in education
"The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Perhaps this will be brought up in the current antitrust hearings. Buying a competitor and shutting them down is often viewed as restraint of trade.
Aaaaaand now we’re back to XML, but with less readable syntax and implementation consistency. Sounds like a win for everyone.
(To make this link work press the "100 mln." button when you arrive. It seems there is an encoding issue on this link that causes it not work correctly when copied to some sites.)
Yeah, if the CCP had evolved into the liberal democracy people were hoping they would (in the lead up to 1997, e.g.), then Hong Kongers would not mind so much.
I didn't find any url to the code and build system changes.
Web sites can all just do WebAuthn. The browser will securely manage the relationship between each site and the USB key ensuring that sites can't lie to the key about who they are (which would enable phishing).

If you are happy to use this only as a second factor, the USB key can handle any number of sites without constraint. If you want "resident credentials" where the USB key can sign you in spontaneously (no need to even enter a username or email address) the key needs storage for each such credential, those on the market today hold only a relatively small number, fine for your bank but not for say Hacker News and other forum sites you might join dozens of.

For other application software it's trickier but possible, you can see that OpenSSH did this for example.