skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what that 3% translates to in bandwidth costs alone at Instagram's scale.
I believe in the UK landlords are on the hook for business rates on commercial property when it's empty, so the incentive to lease at more reasonable rates is there.
A fool and his money are soon decentralised
I think there are a couple of shortcomings to this argument. First, it seems to be arguing that there is no infection at all. Reports of people dying of a new form of pneumonia would argue to the contrary, regardless of test results. Second, it argues that the true positive rate must be so low that it's swamped by the false positive rate. This, however, argues for an extremely high false positive rate, given the overall positive rate we've observed. Third, the analogy to the 2006 Dartmouth whooping cough incident is strained at best. Almost everyone at that hospital would have been vaccinated against whooping cough in the last ten years -- that's the P in your TDAP -- substantially lowering the probability of epidemic. We do not, on the other hand, have a vaccine for sars-cov-2, and yet we do have reports of people dying of pneumonia all over the world in ways that follow consistent patterns of infection and spread.
COVID Conversations: Sarah Gilbert on Vaccines [video]
My phone, an non flagship brand was supported by lineage when it was still being sold and used. Now as main android support has gone, so has the users and so has lineage support. I think it's the same for the majority of android phones. Only the phones with the longest vendor support also get the longest lineageos support. Other phones are out of luck from any angle.
Google Pay to launch digital bank accounts in 2021
The moneybags needs to stop meddling in policy. The only reason why they ever meddle is to increase their own heft.
That was the whole point of the check. Inflate the debts away and allow people to live in current circumstances.

Future inflation is for future generations once all the oldies in congress die.
Overworking/burnout culture isn't relevant with working remote. agree/disagee?
if that's a movie, it's impossible to google
The countries of origin of the peers downloading that torrent is pretty cool to see. A fairly broad cross-section of the world.
There are actually very simple tax schemes that go quite bit further. A high Land Value Tax + low tax on improvements (eg buildings) means the portion of rent due to the landlord’s actions/investments generally get kept by that landlord, but the portion of rent not due to his/her actions (eg good schools/restaurants/transit/employers nearby) get recouped as tax.

You should look into LVT, you’re right that would be huge for people.
If both parents have a recessive gene for a recessive genetic disorder, their offspring will inherit that disorder. That's why people have such an issue with it. It doesn't take multiple generations for this to happen. But I agree that it'll get much worse if it keeps happening, as heterozygous couples will eventually produce these recessive offsprings, who, when mated, will produce children with these disorders.
Hey there Kenton! Thanks again for Cap,n Proto!

> Varint is not compression. Proper compression looks for redundancy in data and eliminates it.

I'm not sure why you are choosing to make a semantic argument about an assertion I didn't make, but very well. Compression is any mechanism that allows you to encode information using fewer bits than the original representation. There are compression mechanisms that don't require there to be any redundancy within the data they are compressing (for example, with a fixed dictionary).

> Huffman coding would process the entire buffer in one go and can be a much tighter loop.

That's a very good point, except part of how lz4 pulls off the wonders that it pulls off is by not having an entropy encoding stage... so no Huffman coding going on there. You can optimize Huffman coding all you want, but it still going to be slower than lz4's "not doing it" (hence why lz4 is so fast), which is in turn slower than varint.

You're right, you can't really leverage x86's various SIMD extensions for varints, because varints are usually only less than four bytes long. On the other hand, you can use normal processor instructions for executing an instruction in parallel on a sequence of bytes packed in to a 32-bit or 64-bit register. I agree that protobuf has some surprisingly untuned logic for this (in fairness, the three bits reserved for field identifiers does hamper taking advantage of it, but then those also screw up the use of SIMD instructions in general).

I agree that I found capnp+packing to be very competitive with protobuf for certain applications, as you had promised. However, as you said, there are confounding factors there.

The notion that varint is much faster is intuitive rather than benchmarks. I've looked at the assembly for a varint decoder and compared it to lz4. While the lz4 might be able to win out if you are trying to decode a long sequence of bytes, it's all over but the crying within a a few instructions for simply decoding a small integer.

> My recollection is that the original designers of Protobuf were never very happy with varint encoding. It was a casual decision made early on that became impossible to change later.

That is my recollection as well (although a lot of the pain was around the ugly work around for signed integers). Varint isn't the best thing, but it is a thing, and if used properly, it does yield advantages.
> I think this isn't really the time or place to get into gender issues and the field of Computer Science

It's worth noting that, according to the article, Frances Allen actually spent some time focusing on exactly that.

As important as distinguishing her work in the world of computing and programming, Fran was also committed to her team by embracing their ideas and synergies and, in particular, supporting women. She spent many years as a mentor through IBM’s mentor program.

...and later...

“Professionally, Fran spent a lifetime working to advance the field of computing and pioneer new breakthroughs. Personally, she was equally focused on inspiring and motivating young people – especially women – to do the same,” said Fran’s nephew, Ryan McKee, on the IEEE honor.

So I imagine she would be quite happy to have the topic brought up (at least in a positive manner) in discussion of her life and career.

That said, I brought that up to highlight her achievements and character, not to bring you into that conversation if you don't want to be in it, which is your choice, and I can see avoiding that topic as a useful strategy if you think it can't or won't be handled appropriately by the people involved. As such, don't feel compelled to respond about any of that if you don't want to. :)

Edit: It occurs to me now you might have been referring to something entirely different than I thought, in which case I wasn't trying to bring anything of that into the discussion at all, and my wording was purely an attempt to avoid that type of discussion as well.
Scale released Nucleus: UI for collaborating on data
That SanDisk Ultra Fit is doing pretty well. What I really like about this thumb drive, is that it's so small that it easily can be stuck there permanently.

I've got a Mac Mini to which I've added a comparable stick, the Samsung Fit Plus 256 GB. Great addition but unfortunately I haven't figured out yet how to make a fusion drive with it.
Sherlock Holmes ruined Basil Rathbone’s career
Long before Twitter I'm sure like-minded journalists also spent more time together and had better professional and personal relationships (at least on an intellectual level) than they did with others.

To follow your point: what does it say about journalists that don't use Twitter at all?
Ask HN: Anyone here using VNC server with Android
Long time ago, on my samsung galaxy 1, I used to run VNC server and connect to it remotely. While working I could quickly reply to texts and emails. I haven't found any good free (as in beer) solutions since.

Is anyone here able to successfully compile vnc server on android and run it from command line?
Ask HN: Using Containers for Local Compilation
Are there any team/projects out there that are regularly using docker containers or similar in lieu of natively installed compilers/build stacks?

This questions is specifically not focused at CI/CD pipelines but what developers are using for day to day build tasks when working locally. If so what stacks are they working with?
Whoever is in control of a "layer" will always want to consolidate control - that means they will try to impose their own favored policies on all other "layers" below them, through whatever means they have at their disposal.

There are theoretical and ideological debates to be had about "states rights," but politicians are interested primarily in exercising power, not in having philosophical debates about the precise balance of powers required for good governance. If an elected official speaks of "states rights," it's usually just a bad faith argument to throw people off the scent of their actual agenda.
Germany saves the insects, China empties the oceans.
We can't have large investors losing money on any of their (inherently risky) investments. How will the market work if investors can lose money?
Funny how it's a moral hazard to bail out individuals weighed down by debt, but an economic necessity to bail out millionaires and billionaires who didn't do their risk analysis.
My experience is indeed that lz4 tends to work reasonably well on protobuf encoded data, which generally does not compress terribly well. I hadn't much thought about why, but your reasoning makes sense.
I think that is Eric's facetious term for what Universities are (a play on the military/industrial complex) but the main problem he points to is the inventivisation through market forces to not release non-monitisable research and that the best researchers don't teach because they are more value to the University generating grant money and basically being salespeople.

The not publishing research was interesting in that holding research in-house, making predictions, getting grants to research those predictions and then using the original unpublished discovery as the basis for the whole lot makes a lot more money.
The news doesn't exist to inform us of the truth, it exists to get clicks which generate revenue.
In addition to HOAs, some municipalities have ordinances for keeping yards tidy (e.g. cutting the lawn) but usually much less restrictive. In historical districts and houses deemed landmarks they have ordinances closer to and sometimes stricter than HOAs.
I'm renting a place where the lawn was moderately overrun with dandelions. They kill of the grass, and the ground becomes uneven. You can't run through your yard without the fear of twisting your ankle. Not to mention they continue to spread like wildfire into your neighbors' lawns.

And wild blackberry vines come up straight from hell.
Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering.

The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a problem with their attitude towards science and data.

It's not that hard to imagine a tool that can do exactly what Excel can, but without corrupting your data. It might even exist already. LibreOffice got mentioned a lot; it can do almost(?) everything Excel can, but without corrupting your data. If there are problems with it that make it useless to scientists, there's a good chance the LibreOffice community can fix them.

I think better tools that preserve the integrity of their data are absolutely the solution here.
Very nice app! Been looking for something like this.
That is very interesting. Do you happen to have a link? I'm not doubting you, I think you are right, but a link that goes into this type of detail would be a very interesting one to read.
Show HN: Voicegain Speech-to-Text Python SDK
Are you a natural born citizen? You should know exactly why things work out this way if you are and there's no excuse for your confusion. If you're a green card holder or other non-citizen you can be forgiven for being ignorant, I suppose other nations don't teach people how America works. But if you're on a path to citizenship in any capacity please learn how America works and why. Otherwise you'll be frustrated and unsure of why things work the way they do forever.
Honestly, the only reason that I can think of is that they want to have a decentralized database with a provenance chain of where resources come from/go to, track it on the individual level.

Why wouldn't they be using a centralized DB for this? No clue. They can get the same functionality 99% of the time with their own internal centralized DB.

The only reason that I could recommend using a blockchain solution would be that you need to have each individual location that utilizes the database not be able to trust the connection to the central database, and therefore you need a distributed system that enforces trust, especially between locations, i.e. Bottler #1 doesn't necessarily trust Supplier #1 for the correct transfer of resources, and the crypto nature of the exchange confirmation would make it difficult to defraud the transaction. The problem is that this only works while all resources are tracked on the blockchain -- otherwise, you have digital information with no physical backing.

If you are Coca-Cola, you can build your own centralized system to track supplies yourself -- you are the central source of truth. If you have the weight to throw around, why wouldn't you just require your suppliers/bottlers to utilize a connection to your DB system instead of trying to shoehorn in blockchain? They might actually have a good reason, but I kinda feel like it's a waste.
They're tags and you end up with multiple names for the same gene. They might as well be replaced with an arbitrary string of numbers- those are equally easy to do a quick Google scholar or pubmed search with. You don't lose anything of value by changing the name. In chemistry amd organic chemistry, the proper IUPAC name of the compound also tells you its structure. It tells you what the compound is in a real physical sense. If you go to someone thats never heard of a compound d and you give them the full IUPAC name, they can draw it. You can't change those names without losing meaning.

You go to someone who's never hears of the hedgehog signaling pathway and ask them what SHH is, they're not gonna be able to give you much.
I got your back. I'll be on the lookout for function_seven and take care of it for you!
Will Fast, Cheap, and Plentiful Energy Be a Legacy of Los Alamos?
> firefox works

> it's useless

does not compute
On my iPhone 11 Pro Max, iOS 13.5.1, chrome 84.0.4147.71 the "health index of each country" is crashing my tab.

Otherwise, thanks for sharing. Bookmarked just in case.
At a previous job I built an internal translation system forked from pootle because the commercial options were so bad (mostly wrt UX). This was 8 years ago, so I would have to do a survey to learn what the state of things is today. It's possible the existing solutions are "good enough" and the switching / retraining costs aren't worth it for most organizations. Not to be too Thiely, but I wonder what a 10x improvement looks like in this space as well.
You can select any format you like. Then, if you put in 01/01, excel ignores your format choice, displays Jan-01 and puts 46000 in the actual cell. If you re-select the text format, you get "46000". The 01/01 you actually entered is gone forever.

Now imagine you load a file with 1000s of values in the form AB/CD, many are trashed. If you save the file, you've lost the original data.

All because it might save some data entry drone 5 seconds to expressly make something a date.

There are then also issues about whether "01/02", assuming it actually is a date, should be the second of Jan (US) or the first of Feb (EU, UK, North America ex US, Africa and Pacific regions). In many places, based on some arbitrary and we'll hidden settings, you will get the wrong result.

I honestly think the only reason excel does this is to force you to use excel formats and make it harder to work with non-MS products...
The integer 20200806 is chosen solely for the purpose of human readability. If you actually wanted to store a date as an integer, you'd use the Julian day.
I ran with one in my MacBook Air for a few months, but I noticed that if I used it for more than a few seconds of file IO (e.g. copying one large file to it for a couple minutes, or trying to run some application off it), it would slow down considerably... and in those cases if I unmounted it and pulled it out, it was hot enough to cause discomfort!

In the video, I cover how it's a nice, cheap drive, but it's basically trading off a lot of performance for that tiny size!
Great job, citizen! Here are your celebratory linked steel bracelets. Enjoy your vacation!
And an external video card in an enclosure isn't an option? Even a cheap PC video card will out-perform these laptops discrete ones.

But it matters before purchase because the laptops needs the correct IO to hook up to an external enclosure (Thunderbolt 3).
This sounds bad in theory but in practice I am not sure why developers would purchase an expensive city land to build a coal plant there. But okay, let's have residential/industrial zoning. I am not okay with any restrictions inside the residential zone though. If someone wants to build an apartment tower on their single-family house lot, that should be allowed.
A web app that only works in non-Chromium browsers isn't useless.
Vaccine data from Novavax [Covid-19]
I am confused. Last I heard, RocksDB was an offshoot of MongoDB. What is the real story? Being the basis for a bunch of other DBs seems to make it much more plausible.
The Democratic party recently favored more military interventions into Syria than the Republicans, and has taken positions against withdrawals in Germany and South Korea. There have also been a few studies showing that the Democratic party is more 'peace-focused' when there is a Republican in the White House.
Strange.. I asked for that $200k, and the computer offered me ... a whopping 13k @ 17% /3yrs. I'm guessing it doesn't just look beyond the #s..yet ;-)
Clover lawns use to be common but went out of fashion. I saw an episode of This Old House where they visited a grass farm and we're shown a new clover breed they were developing for lawns.
> But the [Pixel 4] was hampered by bad battery life

What? By far the Pixel 4's battery life has been the best out of every smartphone I've owned. Unless I'm using it unusually heavily, a single charge lasts around 30 hours for me (and that's still the case, after owning it for 8 months or so).

Previous phones lasted much shorter, sometimes barely giving me 12 hours. Even the Pixel 2 only gave me 16 hours or so on one charge, with moderate use. For the first time ever, the Pixel 4 has taken away my late-in-the-day charging anxiety.

Really my only complaint with the P4 has been that I miss the fingerprint scanner.
Do they change the data or only the representation? Several people here argued that LibreOffice preserved the original data, which would be a pretty fundamental difference in this context.
It does mention that left-leaning users are twice as likely to block, unfriend or hide those posting political content they do not like:

> Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.
Again, for small integers, this isn't really much of a disadvantage. You can find the terminating byte very efficiently. The bigger issue with varint tends to be more that when you pack data into bytes you have a lot more unaligned memory access. You can work around this, but it increases the complexity of your decoder.

Flatbuffers, Cap'nproto, and similar formats can pad everything else for alignment, at the cost of easily compressible nulls. For a lot of use cases, that's a good trade off.
It's not like fusion, because nobody has done it.
Can you please elaborate on why it’s an impediment?
Really curious about this. I've been following the stories posted here on Deno and IPFS, but I don't want to spend the time setting everything up. If this is really a next-next-finish type of installation, I'd be very much up for it.
Probably not very much compared to image and videos.
The FAQ about how the VA app works is an interesting read. I do wish it was open source though, so I could really advocate for it even for my friends who are very privacy conscious or wary of tech.
Hmmm indeed
The “eu” in euthanasia means “good”, “thanasia” means death.

So, that statement would say “aren’t all suicides good deaths?”

I don’t and cannot believe that.
We use the term “manhole” for those sorts of things
Dark triad traits are personality traits, not mere political or social beliefs. They involve a lot more than just attitudes towards "the system", and the way they're assessed also reflects this.

> Quite the opposite. I'm just skeptical about many psychological studies like the one in the OP.

There's reason to be skeptical about many things in psychology, but the broad "dark triad" construct is seems to be at least somewhat sensible.
> Compared to an average house in California, the new homes cost as much as 45% less.

> The company is making homes in a variety of sizes, ranging from a 350-square-foot studio (starting at $115,000,

These two statements do not compute. I’m in the process of planning an ADU, and $115k for 350sq ft is smack dab in the middle of the ‘really nice’ prefab ADUs in the Bay Area, and as much as 50% higher than the less expensive options.

If these truly were cheaper, I’d be willing to take a risk on it.
At this point it's just more 2020...
From a public policy perspective, encouraging home ownership was arguably a mistake, but that is a seperate issue.

Rental properties are normally cash-flow positive, including payments on their mortgage. This means that buying a comparable unit that depriciates to $0 over a period of 30 years is still expected to be a net positive.
There is depth information, just not in the form of a mesh.

The model learns to compute a function that takes an XYZ position within a volume as input, and returns color and opacity. You can then render images by tracing rays through this volume. You can pretty easily compute the distance to the first sufficiently-opaque region, or the "average" depth (weighted by each sample's contribution to the final pixel color), at the same time.

Another recent Google project figured out a way to approximate these radiance fields with layered, partially transparent images for efficient rendering: https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/
I think you missed my point, that eventually the pain will trickle down to the rest of us at the bottom. I should have continued the domino metaphor to this conclusion to avoid misunderstanding, I'm sorry.

And to be fair, I and likely many other "regular Joes" benefited initially from the 2008/9 downturn; I was able to buy my first home, humble as it is, at less than half its usual market value. I'm still enjoying that benefit today, with a monthly house payment less than most people's car payment even on a used vehicle.

I think this time around it will be much different; this is approaching a true depression, not just a downturn. We are at 30 million jobs lost due to the pandemic, on top of the existing unemployment not related to it. We are on a dark road.