skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Per the CDC, the 200k number is an underestimate of premature deaths due to COVID:

> Total predicted number of excess deaths since 2/1/2020 across the United States: 201,917 - 262,877

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Statistically, COVID has caused roughly a quarter million more people to die than we expected to die of other causes.

That said, your point about the age of the deceased is a good one. There was something particularly tragic about the death of a young, drafted soldier. That doesn't take away from the vast numbers of parents and grandparents who have died in the United States from this pandemic, though.
> seemed pretty reasonable; they wanted a quiet neighborhood where their kids could play

This is certainly a valuable thing, I can see why people want it and I support it being available to them. But why are these the only people who seem reasonable? This land use is just as disruptive to the enjoyment of others as "a vibrant city with street life and parties." Why is this preference so privileged over all the others?
My point of reference is always the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, the largest five EU countries comprising 70% of the EU population. Germany is outperforming everyone, but otherwise we are right in the middle of the pack. (Ahead of the UK and Spain, about tied with Italy, a bit behind France.)
How to never use lambdas in Python
This is the primary reason I don’t use new Google labs tools any more. If there was an explicit “we guarantee this will be fully supported for X length of time and migration will be easy if we kill it” I would be far more likely to adopt new tools.

Also, is Area 120 the new Google Labs? I thought they killed off the whole Labs thing a couple of years ago? (The irony is not lost on me here.)
Four bits per cell, though. I worry about that.
I live in a foreign country for 10 years, in the same place. I never voted in the local elections (I cannot), never fought with local municipality, but I see it as my home.
And try not to think too hard about why 9/11 brought about a massive restructuring of our government along with a mass infringement of our civil liberties but a pandemic doesn't.
My wife helped ;)
Gonna open Photoshop in no time!
According to the CDC, 15,171 people under the age of 55 have died due to COVID.[1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Now do Spain, Belgium and Sweden.
Wow, that's amazing. How is that possible?
I am the last one to suggest voting. I would suggest protesting against the government, and against the system. If more people recognized that that is the problem, we could finally stop voting and get fixing.

Sadly, this kind of activism suggests that private sector is the problem, and thus more government is needed.
I think it's too early to assess New Zealand vs. Louisiana. New Zealand likely has very little immunity to this virus. And it will have paid a heavy price in second-order effects from lockdowns.
> If you want to work in an environment where caste matters and the caste hierarchy is observed, do not work for a western company.

And if you want to practice caste discrimination at an Indian company — beware, caste based discrimination is India has been illegal since 1948, you will go to jail, and they’re definitely not the nice Scandinavian kind of jails.

PS. About education and affirmative action for Dalits... there are lots of such programmes. But clearly not enough to wipe this blot away.
Tired: RSS

Wired: ActivityPub
i saw a youtube video the other day entitled "why learn asm in 2020", i guess for doing something like this.

this project looks really cool. i don't hear a whole lot of people using dos nowadays but for a tinkering around that would be awesome.

hats off to the author. it's amazing one dude could code this.
12 year old me saw the box art at babbages and begged my mother to buy me the game. I didn't have a machine it could run on well. All I had at the time was a 486DX 66mhz IBM PC and I didn't care, lag and all, it was one of the most complex and satisfying gaming experiences. It's up there for me with Doom 1 (Ultimate Doom by the time I could afford to buy it). Quake. Ultima Online. Descent. SW: Tie Fighter. X-COM.
A better limitation I saw was that the owner doing the BnB listings had to actually live in the property the majority of the year.
That's now how China works. It's a very different mentality - they _only_ care about China, specifically the boundaries of China defined by the "9-dash line."

The rest of the world will serve to feed 9-dash mainland China with raw materials (Africa) and loan repayments (Belt and Road). There is none of the "social justice" of Western imperialism, no interest in exporting Chinese values or ideology - there is only China.
Now that we are on month six of this disaster, I would have taken a full lockdown of my city[1], if it meant that that the virus would have been brought under control in two months, and lockdown were lifted after three... And 200,000[2] lives had been saved.

And neither Korea nor Taiwan had latent immunity. What those countries had is a CDC equivalent that actually did it's job, because of its experience with SARS.

[1] My city did actually get a full lockdown, when the civil unrest started a few months ago. Apparently, people protesting deserves a curtailment of basic freedoms, but stopping a deadly pandemic does not. Puzzle me that...

[2] That number will keep growing, not to mention unprecedented economic damage.
Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ?

Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
I’ve been a Firefox user on Linux for the past 2 years. I recently had to open Chromium to accommodate a site that refused to work with Firefox, and I was quite shocked at how much snappier Chromium’s UI felt. Going back to Firefox the sluggishness is palpable.

My machine is in the upper-mid range with a TR 1950X + Vega 56, so I can’t imagine it’s a spec issue.

I’ve read the entire Arch Wiki article on Firefox performance [1], ensured that hardware acceleration and other performance settings/flags are enabled, and tested different configurations of theses settings. Nothing made a discernible difference.

Chromium, even with hardware acceleration disabled, is dramatically more responsive than Firefox.

I have been very tempted to go back to Chromium. Ideologically and privacy wise, I really want to support Firefox, but I can’t help craving a lightning fast UI.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks
It doesn't need to have been successful or useful or practical. Assange stepped over the line of receiving leaked data into providing assistance for the person leaking that data break into more things.

Please note that I'm not saying Assange deserves to be prosecuted for any of this by the US government. Saying he stepped over the line (or may have stepped, since he's not proven guilty) is only step 1.

The next step to ask is "is that a crime?" Yes, in the US it is.

But then comes the next question: "Was Assange subject to US law when he did this?" That is much less clear. I don't know where he was physically located when he was involved with this, or international law to know where jurisdictional issues land on this. Personally, I don't think he should be subject to US when he's not a US citizen and wasn't located in the US when he did this. I don't like the idea that countries could prosecute someone for doing something illegal when what they did was legal in their location. To take a simple example, within, within the US that would be like saying that Utah could charge & extradite someone who smoked weed in Colorado, where it's legal, to Utah, where it is not legal.

And more questions after this too, like "Did crossing the line actually provide significant material aid?" In this, I don't think it did.
A courtesy warning that this is hidden in about:config because it's still unstable.
> distance learning greatly reduces the instructor's workload

Disagree based on my experience tutoring online. I had to prep and then spend my time with them on webcam.

The story is different for asynchronous online learning, for example with students watching prerecorded videos and completing assignments. However, not everyone learns well that way. We'll probably need a blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning going forward.
Folks you can downvote him all you want but he's right.

Almost one third of Covid deaths in July and August 'primarily caused by other conditions'

https://www.yahoo.com/news/almost-one-third-covid-deaths-155...

Source: Oxford University
I assume this uses it purely to make fun of Windows.

Windows has the concept of subsystems - technically the Win32 API is also just a subsystem around the NT kernel that provides the "Windows API". Windows NT also had one providing an OS/2 API, and one providing POSIX API - the latter later evolved into/was replaced by "Windows Services for UNIX" - assume there and with WSL the intent is to read it as "for Linux/UNIX applications".

But why specifically this confusion phrasing is unclear, maybe they wanted to keep the "Windows" brand attached to the thing - i.e. treat "Windows Subsystem" and "Windows Services" as one term?
Canada had more cases of SARS than SK(who had 3). Taiwan had a grand total of 346.
They're both phrased unnaturally, IMO.

The suffix "for Linux" strongly implies it's software for use on Linux. It's like the "4j" and "4win" suffixes, implying software built for the Java and Windows environments, respectively.

What's more, Windows or DOS as an adjective of subsystem bind more tightly than "for Linux". So if you were to start dropping parts of the name, you'd drop "for Linux" first. Except you can't, because then it's just the Windows Subsystem.

LSW would have been a much more natural name. In a conversation about Windows subsystems, you could refer to it as the Linux Subsystem. If other operating systems picked up on the idea, they would have their own Linux subsystems, e.g. Linux Subsystem for macOS. If you wanted to check if your OS had anything like it, you could search "is there a Linux subsystem for FreeBSD?" Which might turn up results about the Linux ABI in FreeBSD. Speaking of which, imagine if it had been named the FreeBSD ABI for Linux. What an awful pattern! You can't even repeat the pattern unless both modifiers are proper nouns! Could you have called the VFS Subsystem the "FreeBSD Subsystem for VFS"?
> If it's more complicated than apt/yum install mailcow, followed by a nice friendly browser based configuration page, it's too complicated for widespread usage.

It's a bit more complicated than that but the simplest solution I know.

> This includes, having out of the box configuration, that makes the email acceptable by Microsoft/Gmail etc.

This is unfortunately impossible. You can have a perfectly valid configuration including reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, yet Microsoft's email servers will still let your mails vanish.
Why not compare it with Wine instead?

Besides, latest WSL is not like that anymore, it's a hypervisor running a VM now.
awesome post! thanks for the info.
More than 200,000 additional people in the US have died in 2020 compared to this point in 2019. There is no other reasonable explanation for those additional deaths. That makes it abundantly clear that they are COVID-19 related. Hand-wave all you want, you can’t get around this obvious indicator.
That's just human nature my dude. Same reason why Pearl Harbor brought a reluctant nation into WWII.
These numbers do not contain difference between async and sync writes at 4kb or 8kb. I tested the Samsung 970 pro a few years back and got around 1000iops for 4kb sync writes or 4MB/s. Optane did 75 000 iops for 4kb sync writes or 300MB/s.

Good read https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd...
Another good read about Samsung 970 pro: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/my-nvmes-suck.45158/
I mean, the answer is trivially zero, there exists a PDF-like structure somewhere in Pi, and the offset of that doesn't have to be zero, it can start or end anywhere. So the range [0, N] is a valid PDF.
Tools for maintaining code in web applications?
What are some tools ya'll use to automate code maintenance?
France, with one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world, isn’t much better at 15th out of 191. So I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to improve your product?
Until recently, I had only been using Google Analytics for tracking usage and seeing where I need to focus my attention for improving my site.

I recently started using Sentry.io for tracking errors and Hotjar for getting better, in-depth user interaction data. Now I'm questioning why I waited so long to sign up for these kinds of products.

What tools or products do you use to help you improve your product?
The Masked Women of Etsy – How Small Sellers Handled the Boom in Mask Sales
The part with the mass infringement of civil liberties might still happen, I wouldn't discount it yet
> Newly hired by a federal employer who considered morse code an asset, I practiced in my hotel room. Bored, I decided to go live with a small tune-able antenna inside my hotel room, ground to a sink pipe. Yes, I was an idiot, and still am, but older and wiser.

Being ignorant in this area, I am rather curious now: What exactly was your error, and how did it interfere with the TVs? Did the sink pipe become part of your antenna because of it's size, thus turning what you thought was a tiny antenna into a massive antenna with orders of magnitude more gain than you thought? Did you connecting your antenna to the piping end up dumping a bunch of noise into the electrical grounds of the hotel's wiring, enough to mess up the demodulation circuits in the hotels? Something else?
That is what I am accustomed to. However, Mr. Carlson of Mr. Carlson's lab pronounces it "soll-der". https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU9SoQxJewrWb_3GxeteQPA

I was wondering if that is a common Canadian pronounciation.
Sorry - that definitely wasn't my intention! Although to be clear, I don't mean this to be anything negative about Mozilla, just an interesting collection of their past projects. There are definitely some changes I can make to the copy though, especially since this list is meant to include everything from commercial products to experiments and internal tools.

I think this differs from Killed by Google somewhat in that Google has killed off several commercially-viable products with active users, so I can see a possible intention there as a warning about relying on Google services.

Edit: as another comment said below, "abandoned" is probably a better choice of words for a lot of these projects.
That wizard is amazing, thank you!
> In January 2010, Philips announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players.

I used Philips Songbird quite a bit in the early '10s. I really loved it. It was so much better than iTunes, IMO.
You're ignoring that most people spend much more money on commuting, clothes for work, and lunch near work then they would spend doing a one time upgrade of their desk and probably eating lunch at home most of the time in t-shirts.

Ironically, commuting to work pushes a lot more of the costs you complain about onto the employee.
in fish you can type some of the command and arrow-up. It will show only commands containing that substring.
don't speak for all locals, as some locals clearly wish to make money by airbnb-ing

(also, the concept of privilege is overblown imo)
Shell functions can also accomplish the same purpose as tiny little scripts. For example, a 2 line shell script can be wrapped in a function instead:

mymove() {
cp --verbose $1 $2
rm --verbose $1
}

Shell has good abstraction capacities! It even has some that other languages don't have:

Shell Has a Forth-like Quality http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html

Pipelines Support Vectorized, Point-Free, and Imperative Style http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/15.html

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=shell-the-good-pa...
“Better” depends on who and what you work for. But on average write code that is more easily readable and can easily add/subtract features will cover the basics. Those basically get you to point A to point B faster but without burning bridges.
If you want to be a local you have to actually become a local. That means moving there and actually living there for a significant period of time.
The comments in this thread are a microcosm of why there are 200k COVID deaths in the USA. A website with supposedly smart people are posting wild conspiracy theories around COVID and the reasonable responses being down-voted. By most measures the USA has done a terrible job, worse job than countries with much fewer resources. There is nothing to be proud of here.
I tend to look at it from "who are the neighbors" perspective. Being rated somewhere between Italy and the UK is not that bad.

I would be far more worried if the US had the same death rate as Turkmenistan or North Korea.
Firefox on wayland has been a joy to use recently (webrenderer, dmabuf, webgl, vaapi). Everything including video and scrolling is butter smooth and doesn't clog the cpu, even with 200-300+ tabs (i know...) over several windows. Much better than Chrome (on Linux at least). Interestingly, RAM usage also seems to be better in ff (both with plugins), but that might be anecdotal.
If US rejects colonialism, why doesn't Puerto Rico have voting representation in the federal government?
> current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases

You make it sound as if they were a part of aggressive expansion and colonisation, which is a bit misleading. Vast majority of US military bases are in NATO countries that were very enthusiastic about outsourcing protection from the soviet threat.
This is demonstrably false. Basic interventions have proven effective across the globe. Reducing the growth rate can cause the case count to decay to zero. Interventions do not need to be 100% effective to succeed in controlling a problem. This is like saying that it is possible to get pregnant or an STI with a condom so we should just have unprotected sex.

Sadly the lockdowns were never billed as something that would put a stop to Covid and the government has really never made an honest effort at that. But let it never be said we took the easy way out.
> feature parity

Like PDF support?
> DOS Subsystem for Linux

> A WSL alternative for users who prefer an MS-DOS environment.

Very confusing description. Is it made for Linux? So what does it have to do with WSL which is made for Windows? May be it's a Wine analog for running DOS programs on Linux then or it's actually emulating things like DosBox does?
DOS Subsystem for Linux means exactly that, you are using a DOS subsystem in Linux. That is why it is confusing. If it is a WSL for DOS, that is what it should be called.
Distribute masks to everyone’s door, not send mixed signals - being charitable here - about the seriousness of the virus when they had intelligence briefings about it in January, not turned mask-wearing into a political thing, not contradict their own doctors and scientists, not water down the stimulus meant to make staying home and closed affordable for people, and on, and on, ...
.NET 5.0 – New APIs
A transcript of a talk by Charles Petzold that I think is relevant to the conversation in the replies to this comment: "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding"[1].

[1]: https://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.ht...
>2) It's plausible (perhaps even likely) that the US has experienced a more acute course of the virus, and thus has experienced more of its deaths already, while others like New Zealand are still in a much earlier stage.

New Zealand will never get to where the US is because they have an administration that actually takes it seriously. It's also resulted in them being able to have no restrictions aside from travel for quite a long time.
Oh, I think I see what you're doing here. Step 1 is actually an iteration over the entire file (I interpreted it as merely step 1 of a per-1k-block loop), effectively making a backwards (blockwise) copy of the original file but only using up 1kB of extra space at any given time. Step 2 is to truncate the "last" 300M lines, because those correspond to the first 300M lines of the original file. Step 3 is to re-reverse the temp file into the destination.

This is great, although the line-vs-block-orientation issues will be tricky to make sure you get right, as others have pointed out. The truncate will almost certainly need to leave a partial last block.
I think this will be the unpopular opinion, but writing, text, is actually the problem.

Most emails/tweets/texts read like statements of proclamation.

The cues of a "hmmmm" or the rise in pitch in voice, can indicate someone isn't sure of the position. Or that they're pitching it as a possibility, not the actual solution.

All of those cues are lost. Twitter is the worst offender - I've seen many of people that I follow present in person at conferences and they come off as humble and approachable.

But their tweets are written as a bold, definitive statements, and read as a proclamation to be argued and challenged.
Revisiting the Relationship Between Fault Detection,Test Adequacy Criteria, and [pdf]
After nearly a decade as a professional software developer, I recently found Bob Martin's "Clean Code" videos and I cannot recommend them enough. They're sometimes awkward and weird (he's a bit eccentric) but the content is superb.

I try to watch 2-3 videos each week, usually before work.

O'Reiley has most of them available if you're a member ($50/month) and it's worth it just for those videos, imho.
Accessibility Issues Concerning Windows High Contrast Mode – Accessabilly (2019)
If the Ba'ath Party and Taliban had taken back control after those 14 months in each respective country, are you under the impression the US would've gone "welp, we tried!" and left?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification
Being able to do SQL queries to remote servers, upload form contents directly to a server, embedded 3D models and being able to have a fully featured page embedded Tetris game due to support for JS.

Having said that (and worked on a commercial PDF library), despite all the cruft that came with age, it's a well built format that survived the test of time with good reasons.
> Also, there is a lot of complexity lurking in using stuff like JPA (which I tend to avoid), spring data (like wise), spring-batcg and a few other things that IMHO are not so great.

If you are accessing databases, JPA/Spring Data are pretty much the most common options. For typical use cases, the configuration is straightforward and features like Query Creation[0] can get rid of so much boilerplate.

[0]: https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/jpa/docs/current/referenc...
I was quite amazed by IntelliJ's refactoring capabilities just few days back. I had code like below

switch(sort) {
case "asc":
sortedComments = topicComments
.stream().map(Comment::getThreadComments).filter(Objects::nonNull).flatMap(Collection::stream)
.sorted(Comparator.comparingLong(PostResponse::getCommentPostedTimeMilles)).collect(Collectors.toList());
break;
case "desc":
sortedComments = topicComments
.stream().map(Comment::getThreadComments).filter(Objects::nonNull).flatMap(Collection::stream)
.sorted(Comparator.comparingLong(PostResponse::getCommentPostedTimeMilles).reversed()).collect(Collectors.toList());
break;
}

I selected the first case and applied "Extract to method" and IntelliJ automatically suggested and applied the method to the second case also. Not sure if Eclipse will do that.
Windows has had subsystems since the OS/2 era, and WSL1 was actually such a subsystem. Initrix was the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem.
The Lucas Plan
Back to Basics: Hardening Computers and Smartphones