skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a better question is:

Why would you want a function that gets students to be called anything other than `getStudent`? Fundamentally, the simpler, easier to parse your function name is, the more readable and editable your code is.

I definitely think overloading functions is more interesting/ important than named parameters. But named parameters are useful both for overloaded functions and for optional parameters where you might not know what the 3rd/ 4th parameter might be.

One pattern I see frequently in languages which lack named parameters is instead of using optional parameters, people pass objects with optional properties. This is used a ton in Javascript/ Typescript. If the language supported proper named & optional parameters, it wouldn't be an issue.
While there's no single slam-dunk study yet proving this with SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19), there's so much mutually-reinforcing suggestive evidence that the authoritative tone of this UCSF professor/researcher/doctor seems justified, to me. In particular, there's a lot of evidence from other similar respiratory viruses.

Now also, there are patterns observed in masked-vs-unmasked Covid-19-hotspots for which the idea "masks cut initial infectious dose enough to make infections milder or totally asymptomatic" fits really well.

You can watch Dr. Gandhi presenting on this topic with slides & multiple paper/incident references, during a UCSF 'Grand Rounds' a few weeks ago - here's a direct link to where her talk starts:

https://youtu.be/Cio3rh6ta3w?t=1740
Better overly granular than overly coarse.
Url changed from https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in-less-co..., which points to this.
It's not about the benefit for you. The whole point of wearing a non-N95 mask is to prevent your breathing from infecting others if you happen to be asymptomatic but positive.
placebo effect? just like putting stripes on your car makes it go faster. Putting on a mask, boosts the immune system, because there's an inner ninja inside all of us. Ready to kick ass.
We changed the URL from https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in-less-co... to the original source it points to. From the site guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
No I wouldn't.

But I'd be pretty fucked if google decided to ban me back when my gmail address was the email address I used for everything.

As for self host, you know that person said they pay for email right? We log in to fastmail the same way you log in to gmail. It's no hassle just a low cost instead of free. Iirc getting it to use my personal domain was a copy and paste job that took like 15 seconds.
The definition of fascist is not person you don't like.
#2 is just wrong. lots of powerful apps do most of their work on the back end, and lots more could just as easily be built with web apis.
would be great if someone can find them, but pretty sure there was a study done during the SARS 1 outbreak in the Canadian hospital that attempted to demonstrate that physical proximity to severe cases (and highly symptomatic individuals?) was correlated to viral load and further correlated to severity of illness. At least I saw people early on in Novel Coronavirus days of Jan/Feb speculating about the meaning of said study.
Yeah, I'm really not sure about this - stories of the strange history of the Eisenhower freeway system are extremely common and there's just a surprising amount of myth around them, like the airplane landing thing that we've seen elsewhere in the thread. It's probably unnecessarily conspiratorial to think that the motivations were anything other than what was officially said (e.g. economic advantages), but I give a certain weight to evacuation as a motive because the vast majority of the efforts made towards survivability were remarkably secretive and it was common, at the time, for the government to use cover stories as justification for survivability efforts. Consider, for example, how FEMA used the FBI as a "front" for the crisis relocation program in order to deny their involvement. It's the kind of secret-keeping that seems really pointless and strange now (how much does it even matter to anyone if it's the FBI or FEMA inventorying relocation sites?), but is an artifact of the ultra-paranoid and minimally accountable atmosphere of the time. Most of these things remain pretty secretive today, not necessarily because there's some ongoing push to keep it a secret, but through the more boring mechanism of once secret, now obscure documents being hard to get declassified.

So I sort of suspect that evacuation was a bigger factor than the government admits, but that's purely speculative. Just like suburbanization there are definitely a lot of reasons the interstates happened.
Would be nice to also show any the associated open graph image as well.
> It only works if everyone 95% of people are wearing one, especially indoors.

If this is the only RCT for cloth masks what kind of evidence is behind your claim? Do you have a source?
> you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm.

You can't, but can a UAV? I'm curious how much more tolerant of bad weather a plane can be if there are no people inside. Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?
How was the American Revolution leftist? What even was this cohesive American Revolution. If anything it was the constitutionalists and it sure does not seem like the modern left is too excited about that racist document written by slaveowners.
buying good and well raised meat.
From your first link: "However, exactly what these findings mean for patients' heart health in the long term is unclear, the authors said. The heart abnormalities seen in the study occasionally occur with other respiratory diseases such as influenza and may be temporary"

News has a motivation to sensationalize, i.e. only time will tell if this was a lot of panic over nothing or if 20% of the people who caught COVID will drop dead over the next 10 years.
Some software engineers are in it for the pay. If you offer them a relatively easy (even if repetitive) job for the same pay, they will jump on it. You can't judge these types of thing based on your personal preferences, you have to take a step back and look back at all the people you knew in college, I think you'll remember some who would be perfectly fine with this line of work.
Except for "dramatically" we knew this in January.

It takes years to train a populous to wear masks. Asia didn't just turn it on.

So were is the reckoning to the medial experts who fought this all the way, who told us to just wash our hands with soap.

These same people chose our complex cancer treatments, yet after 100 years of disease control, masks are a medical argument in the West still.
This is an event taking place in Texas 2 days ago.

https://m.twitch.tv/videos/725630253 (skip to 4:49:00)

Where are the masks? Why is the crowd so dense?

Clearly nobody cares over there: the venue doesn't care, the attendees do not care, the authorities do not care.

It is a matter of time until those events cause a coronavirus outbreak.
I stopped using Gmail because I decided email was too mission critical for me to trust Google with. I'm now with fastmail and appreciate the fact I can port my email elsewhere easily should I choose to do so. No regrets!
Sure, maybe I'd agree that they are people with masks are more likely to have good health habits, but I'd probably also assume that people with masks have worse health (even if they may have better habits).

I think their health is more relevant than habits in this case. I would guess that people who know they get sicker than most will be more cautious than average, they've been dealing with it their whole life. Maybe not totally independently of how their health habits are taught to them, but I bet a lot of it is just experience.

People know their bodies pretty well, even if they don't try very hard.
The linked article is making an assertion that cloth masks protect the wearer by reducing the viral dose, leading to many more asymptomatic cases. It is saying that mask wearing alone is enough to reduce your risk from coronavirus.

That is actually the headline from the article: "Cloth masks do protect the wearer – breathing in less coronavirus means you get less sick"
There's also McGraw-Hill Connect and Brightspace.
or just make it play "chewing" sound :)
I feel like this is more of an immunology question, and really it depends on the amount of a viral load you would need to elicit an immune response without systemic signs and symptoms. And then you're basically reinventing the wheel of vaccination.
False. If you are using touch bar libraries you MUST have touch bar features and the reviewer can ask you where they are.

This really shows why apple needs to be strict with devs. They will include third party code (ad networks etc) without enough care - the networks then try to device fingerprint etc.

And 98% of the touch bar library use with no touch bar feature is abusive.

They should let devs appeal, but if a dev lies and claims no touchbar library use when there is some, ban their account permanently. The reviewer in these cases may want to see the touchbar feature that justifies library use, the app author saying they don't have any touchbar feature means use of library is improper.

So many devs do NO due diligence on the third party libraries they import.
TypeScript adds support for Template String types
The Abolition Movement
This matches my experience exactly.

About 5 years ago I was coming out of academia with a PhD in chemistry wanting to get into tech. Someone pointed me toward data science and I was immediately pulled in by the potential for deep insights and working with interesting data sets. After getting into an industry research position, I was quickly disillusioned by the talk from our leadership of how we needed to become an "AI company" and discovered that was I really wanted to be doing was classic algorithm development, not data science.

Now, I've see so much poorly implemented, unnecessary machine learning applied to problems that didn't need it that I first assume that any machine learning project is a bad technical decision until proven otherwise. I've happily moved into an engineering role building interesting pipelines.
Art stimulates
the non rational parta of the mind. Your conflict is due to your internal inconsistency, brought to the surface of your consciousness when you you brought your mind to bear on the impossible-looking photograph.
You've undoubtedly thought more about bin design than I ever have, or probably ever will, do you have any suggestion for combating that fanning effect?

My kitchen bin is of the slide-out cupboard type, and also suffers from that, despite being more of a shearing than a wafting action!
That’s actually pretty funny.
Statistically, though, that's what the people in this thread are saying — that the majority of the projects in ML/AI are destined to fail because they're BS with unrealistic goals.

"Personalization" is in a similar place for digital publishing; everyone wants it, products and services carry big price tags, and few organizations want to invest in foundational work or simple, iterative improvements. So they swing for the stars with unrealistic goals like "micro-targeted messaging perfectly tailored to every visitor, no matter where they are in the customer journey" and the results are predictable…

I take the increasingly grim accounts of project failure rates from analyst firms as a good sign — they can be used to sober up executives with unrealistic dreams.
The argument was, the web and its tech is too slow for phones, we need apps.

This is no longer true and apps are a pain in the rear when it comes to all the integrations you have for mobile aware sites.

How can app content be crawled, don't ask it's a major pain. How do you track usage like site clicks, ouch! How about integrations like commenting or site support chat, good luck, there might be one for your app.

Not to mention the 30% vig to Apple and Google, or the lock-in.

Many thought apps would bring money back into what sites were giving away and ok, it did -- for Apple and Google.

Can we please stop making "apps" now?
> I don't know why people are so against it.

There's an extremely high cost to introduce and maintain another language in a stack such as the Linux kernel. Everyone involved would be permanently impacted regardless of their opinion on the matter. It's not just a flag you can toggle.

Otherwise Rust community would have already forked the Linux kernel instead of bugging their maintainers to RIIR.

On top of that Rust compilation is very costly. It would render some devices that currently can compile the kernel unable to do so.

Last I checked Rust fails to compile itself with 4GB of memory. Here's another user commenting about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059869
Sure if you define anyone who wants to change things as leftist all revolutions are tautalogically leftist.

Neo Nazis want to change things too. Does that make them progressive leftists?
That someone is now you, innit?
So glad that Rust at 1.38 ditched the Ada model of compiling all dependent modules firstly.
I haven't seen evidence of reduced getters & setters in my day to day yet - they still seem pretty prevalent when OOP comes into the picture. I'd even say they got a bit worse because now it's excessive getters and setters with gigantic JavaDoc style comments all around them. If I see "@returns id integer The ID" one more time I'll be tempted to throw my monitor out the window.
At this point, the field of programming is broad enough that we really should have a moral equivalent of Comparative Literature and we don't.
OECDs countries use the same stats everywhere

No they don't. They collect the same stats, but they aren't necessarily comparable.
> It doesn't matter if the signature is on paper…

I’m not saying that having them on paper makes them more secure or anything, just that signing hard copies is the best way to make sure the signer actually understands what they’re doing and the gravity of it. For you I realize this is not such a great feature but for a system that has to work for absolutely everyone pen and paper works really well. But yeah I’m sorry you had such a painful experience with it. It’s supposed to be one request, you fill out the sheet with the doctor’s info and it shows up at their office.

My bad, of course you can’t email documents to your doctors. The issue is that Gmail isn’t set up to process your medical data. Doctors can email other doctors though with that system. I agree that faxing isn’t exactly the panacea of information-theoretic security but it’s pretty good in terms of policy-security. You’re not going to accidentally have your faxes processed for marketing data and anyone who tries risks big-time jail. Plus faxing these days is all digital and encrypted beyond the last mile. Not super dissimilar to the evolution of email having to bolt on security features after years and years. Unless you’re using a literal physical fax machine it’s very likely that your fax was encrypted the whole way.

I’m surprised your office doesn’t have a patient portal of some sort with an document uploader.
Yeah, IANAE also, but I half wonder if this is how a new variant of regular flu gets started. Kids immune systems handle it like any kind of flu virus. The older you are, the weirder this thing looks to your immune system, and less likely able to handle it. If you're introduced to it slowly, the more able your immune system is able to figure it out.

So I'm wondering if this thing never goes away, the vaccine never works 100%, but in a year or so it's not much different from any flu in all age groups.
How Python dependency management can be improved at this point? Should we hold our breath for Python 4 to solve it?
I think it's unfair to ask a technology startup to answer a public policy question. Economic forces will drive automation of these sorts of tasks one way or another, which will shift income away from labour and towards capital.

It's up to governments to ensure the winners compensate the losers. In the long term, this may be an UBI, but for now it should take the form of retraining and economic adjustment packages (similar to what might occur when tariffs are repealed). This should be funded by a super-profits tax on heavily automated industries.
This is why my interview question focuses around applying linear regression to a complex domain. It weeds out an enormous number of candidates.

There are 5 ML models that we maintain where I work, and none of then are more complicated than linear regression or random forests. Convincing me to use something more complex would take an enormous amount of evidence. Domain knowledge is king.
I have a background in infectious disease research. From what I know, with this particular virus, it would be more surprising if the dose-severity dependence hypothesis was true than if it was not. There has been a lot of discussion of this hypothesis lately, but I am aware of exactly one experimental study that came anywhere close to proving it. That study dosed mice with a nasal titer ladder of flu and observed severity variations. Even that study failed to establish the dynamic range necessary to demonstrate dose dependence (the mice went from all survived to all dead in a single step of the titer IIRC).

There are certainly plausible mechanisms for the dose severity dependence hypothesis to be true, but with fast-replicating viruses I think the parsimonious assumption is transmission chains are dominated by a single event.
Yeah agreed. If everyone was a developer and a security expert, Bitcoin is great, but instead its a massive hobby that has serious risk like what happened to this poor guy.
To be fair, software engineers are in the kind of luxurious position where we can actually say something like:

I don’t enjoy doing this job so I won’t do it.

I don’t think that’s true for the majority of people, who just happen to do a specific job because they’ve been trained for it and it pays the bills.
r/im14andthisisdeep
The original paper was asking the question: Do surgical masks provide adequate protection against disease transmission for dentists and patients in a clinical context? And their conclusion was: no.

This is an entirely separate question from: Do masks provide enough protection against disease transmission to be worth wearing/recommending in public places during a global pandemic, despite their imperfections? The answer to that, from many other studies, seems to be clearly yes. I can imagine that anti-mask folks started using this article as ammunition, due to the catchy headline ("see, this article says face masks don't work!"), and the publishers felt it was doing more harm than good and took it down for that reason.
That was 20 years ago.
That cruise ship didn't issue masks until after the outbreak had occurred: "The first recorded fever on board the ship was a febrile passenger on day 8. Isolation protocols were immediately commenced, with all passengers confined to cabins and surgical masks issued to all. Full personal protective equipment was used for any contact with any febrile patients, and N95 masks were worn for any contact with passengers in their cabins. The crew still performed duties, including meal services to the cabin doors three times a day, but rooms were not serviced. Expedition staff helped with crew duties at meal service."

So passengers were already infected when that 81% figure was computed.

https://thorax.bmj.com/content/75/8/693

In a village in Tuscany, over 3000 people were actively tested and 50-75% were asymptomatic: https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1165

And among NYC labor and delivery patients, 88 percent were asymptomatic: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/20/we-tested-...

This number is not at all unusual in the general population, regardless of mask wearing.
I understand that. The point still remain, why wear if it only minimally prevent from infecting others.
> C++ hasn't seemed to have changed that, either.

C++ is not like C. Putting some C++ objects in a C codebase would, indeed, not change it much, but if you write in modern C++, some memory errors will literally disappear, and some become less likely.

Caveat: This is based on language mechanics, standard library facilities and recommended idioms; of course people can write unsafe C++ if they want to.
COVID has really taught me the limitations of data journalism and data science. Both presume trust in the data collectors and data communicators, and many people simply do not.

I think it would be much better to let people "test it" for themselves. Let them be the scientists, ask them basic questions. You can do this with a kid:

1) Where is the virus in our body? (answer: in the lungs)

2) What does it feel like to wear a mask? (answer: hot/stuffy)

3) Why does it feel hot/stuffy? (answer: the mask is keeping your exhalation closer to you)

4) If masks block your breath, and your breath has the virus, does that not then mean that masks block the virus? (answer: yes)

Bonus) Suppose masks don't actually block the virus that well, say by only 10%. Will they still affect the chain of transmission (yes, its "multiplicative": 90-> 81%->72%->...)

This "psuedo-experiment" would not be up to snuff for a journal, but conversations are not publications. Its better to make assumptions and make deductive arguments, because then you don't need to rely on trust in scientific institutions.
Flying by instruments, I wonder how high the risk truly is. One of the bigger concerns might be an instrument failure, like the failure of the airspeed sensors on Air France 447.
Again, strawmen and worse. Theism hardly excludes science or technology. 3 children down you attempt to change the subject again. You have already admitted that you could only argue against deism. I don't expect everyone to come to the light (Strong links between autism & atheism); I do expect a higher level of commentary on HN ...
It compares the Diamond Princess outbreak, which occurred in the hot spot temperature range (40s-50s F, mid-humidity), to a cruise around the Antarctic peninsula, which looks like it was about 20 degrees below the hot spot range and way outside the humidity range.
An example of that model is Mindustry:

https://mindustrygame.github.io/ (Open source)

https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry (Pay-what-you-want, recommends $6.00)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/ ($5.99, with various Steam integrations; it has over 4,900 _reviews_ by people who _purchased it on Steam_, which indicates a lot more purchases. See also this: https://mindustrygame.github.io/wiki/faq/#why-are-you-chargi...)
I agree with you because you said overuse - but I wanted to reinforce that this is statement reads: "It's a bad idea when it's a bad idea" which isn't super helpful and might give the impression that abstraction is usually the bad option. There are very very few times when I've seen the correct answer between abstracting code and leaving it as-is being leaving it as-is when a good abstraction is possible - but I've also seen a lot of incorrect misaligned abstractions that abstract functionality that coincidentally looks the same (i.e. sharing similar business rules as an origin) but is actually quite different. If you're calculating the final price on a transaction and that item could be either a donut with a 5% food tax or a t-shirt with a 5% sales tax it's not appropriate to abstract taxes to be 5% - they're different taxes and just because they happen to be the same number making them reference the same logic block or constant is a Bad Idea(tm).

Abstraction is (generally) an investment in the long term health of your system, whether you, the dev, can justify the costs to higher ups or not is usually a pretty big part of the question. But, if there are legitimately abstractable things you can abstract please do abstract them (and add tests over everything).