skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DoD spent a large chunk of their COVID money on weapon system components, not on pandemic response stuffs (stockpiling materials like masks or investing into vaccine research). So they could do it, and they should have done it (or obligated the money to it), they chose to ignore their directive.
356 Elephants Dropped Dead. Did Bacteria Poison Them?
Announcements of new companies like this are also the reason why I'm not as negative as some other people about the Bethesda acquisition. In the short term it might cause some more consolidation, but the whole gaming market is still growing and new independent studios are opening up, which counteracts the consolidation to some degree.
HackerNews is listed as one of the directories. When I submitted my project (soon to be startup) I got a ton of support and advice, it was invaluable. That being said, I don't think it would have worked if I hadn't made a very personalized message and responded to all the comments.
Apparently they do live in the upper atmosphere. [1].

> Although many of the organisms borne aloft are likely occasional visitors to the upper troposphere, 17 types of bacteria turned up in every sample. Researchers like environmental microbiologist and co-author Kostas Konstantinidis suspect that these microbes may have evolved to survive for weeks in the sky, perhaps as a way to travel from place to place and spread their genes across the globe. "Not everybody makes it up there," he says. "It's only a few that have something unique about their cells" that allows them survive the trip.

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/01/microbes-survive-and...
The ISS is orders of magnitude cheaper, safer, and closer to home. The experiments done there could be done by robots/craft or by launching humans in individual tin cans but at greater expense and higher failure rates.

I’d love to see humans afloat on Venus, but I tried really hard to argue with the grandparent and I can’t really see what humans bring to the equation that a decked out sensor array wouldn’t do for significantly cheaper other than simply humans being at Venus and learning how to keep humans alive at Venus.
Really cool - I was just reading this and worrying about cross scripting attacks: https://adamj.eu/tech/2020/02/18/safely-including-data-for-j...

Could see your site being really useful as a linting/ci tool. Is that where you're planning on taking it?
> I can't wait for the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" refrains to be trotted out yet again.

We should make stickers that say that, and paste them on the cameras and drones we use to videotape the police.
Good life is the absense of bad life.
> Do you like this analogy?

Not especially - 99.9% of people have doors that are adequate to keep burglars out, but the cops can kick them down or break a window if they need to, in an emergency.

Which is exactly what encryption backdoor advocates want.
I just hope they don't hire a bunch of lawyers and go after Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis: http://dreamhavenbooks.com
I had problems as well. 9/23/2020 @ 10:54 AM (EST)
I was also surprised at their reliability. I had a Model 1 B+ running in a dusty closet with an uptime of almost three years before I finally shut it down.
What's the value in your service as opposed to just giving that list to someone on Fiverr?
A few people commenting is not widespread support. I was at Mozilla at the time and I didn't get the impression that the views you linked were broadly representative.
Introducing WhyLogs: Embrace Data Logging Across Your ML Systems
I wonder what kind of a person would use Edge on Linux.
I was coming to find this comment. Back then, most people looked to Google PageRank[1] as the source of truth for the value of the your website. That "value" translated into a lot of interest in advertising dollars, particularly if you ran a blog with PageRank > 7.

The interesting part was that PageRank was only "recalculated" on a somewhat infrequent basis, so you ended up with tons of domains that that weren't really human readable, just gobs of regurgitated text meant to throw off any "unique" filters, and hundreds of links to outbound sites. In early iterations of the algorithm, sites like this scored highly, and those "services" that would help you build backlinks, etc. basically just plugged your domain on these trashy sites with the hope the algorithm would see this "highly rated" site linking to your site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
Not bad! They remind me a bit of vector versions of the awesome bitmap artwork Susan Kare designed for the original Macintosh in 1984.

These are not really my own style, but they are undoubtedly tasteful. A project could do worse than to take advantage of them.
That's true - and we should be thankful for small mercies.
I love the thought. I also love the line of thinking here. I feel bad for having very different, mundane thoughts around getting rich with my next side project!
To be fair, the NYC version of that is “how ya doin’?”. You don’t wait for an answer though.
Amortization on these facilities is not 6 months. It's years, likely a decade or more. There's only two companies in the whole world with the expertise to make these machines. And the machines have a high failure rate. Every nation on the planet is demanding more capacity. Do you believe that the very tiny number of people who are capable of expanding production capacity are just sitting on their laurels? This is categorically different than building something like a tank where most of the parts can be built in any machine shop.

You have to assume that every country on the planet, not just the US, has the same problem you're ascribing to the US. That they could just order new production capacity into existence, but they are choosing not to.
It's 2 or 3 times what we use for "sterilization", if there's life it really loves the extreme
Are you seriously comparing civil rights to a tax increase? Spend 10 minutes today learning about marriage and the rights it includes. I used to think it wasn't a big deal until I actually learned about it. Marriage includes hundreds of legal rights that have a huge impact on a couple's life (and death).
This is Cali. You can be castigated for saying 那个 too much.
Building a Pseudo-3D Racing Game for the 2020 JS13k Game Jam
Both are appropriate. The state can be criminal or do criminal actions, and often is and does.

Illegalizing encryption this way just makes it easier for the government and protected parties to commit crime, just the same with illegalizing guns.
Depends what one means by "mainstream." RT and Sputnik do a little coverage.

Also not mainstream, TJDS and Chris Hedges cover it.

Furthermore, the growing problems of conspiracy theory cults is partially due to incompetent leadership and lack of journalistic integrity by those at global microphones leading to a dissolution of trust in authorities. The obvious solution to better journalism isn't an alternate reality, but by higher-integrity journalism that is sustainable and independent on the whims of mercurial "family products" executives with undue influence to have anchors fired. And that can had only by outlawing corporate, ad-supported journalism that creates evil, corrupt business model-reinforcing dark patterns and replace them with grant- and subscriber-based journalism.

Also, government-supported news, like BBC, RT, and Sputnik, is a terrible idea because it creates the appearance of a conflict-of-interest in holding government accountable. The Fourth Estate must be separate and independent.
That death and total recovery are the only possible outcomes is also an assumption.
Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.

- Gandalf, TTT, JRR Tolkien.
I mean of course, that would be nice. But the thing is modern editors like vscode will automatically convert class statements to className if you copy paste plain html from elsewhere. Don't know about other attributes though.
Are they the kind of assets you can stuff into a folder and if absent fallback to some dummy assets?
That sounds like an urban legend. Most middle managers know they will never be CEO, there are orders of magnitude in difference in available jobs.
> I do wish papers would reserve “war” for actual wars

There are fewer of those than you likely realise. Countries that we'd think of having a dozen wars in the last century may only have declared one or even none. The Geneva Conventions for example smartly do not hinge on declarations of war, they rely upon the idea of "armed conflict" which is an observable fact.
Let him work from home, that should solve all the problems. It is not really your problem whether he has home or not, your problem is only his work. If he can't work from home then tough like for him...
Okay few pointers, there's a bunch of dialects in the language that vary mostly based on which sub-part we come from. In turn, most sub-parts have one or other caste majority, additionally, people take a guess based on looks, accent and choice of vocabulary too.. So she'd assume something and keep moving on..
Well, its hard to tell not being a haskell advocate, but the people building the systems were haskell experts with years and years of that being their only language and were extremely particular about the implementation, which is part of the reason why they justified the 10 requests per second part, is because it was "done right". My understanding is that haskell is designed is such a way that certain things are impossible to do any way but the "right way", so its also just fundamental by merit of the fact that they were using haskell to solve those particular problems. But it was mostly clout and the fact that the implementation was so thorough and the people building it were like phd level experts in haskell/category theory.
Same. My problem isn't finding the will or the ability to say no, it's figuring out when it's acceptable to say no. I've said no too many times and had absolutely each and every person (including people whose opinions I valued) who's analyzed the interaction come back with, "wow, you were being a real jerk saying no in that instance." I've come very close to losing jobs for saying no to the wrong person at the wrong time - if I didn't have an in-demand skillset that was hard to replace, I would almost definitely have found myself unemployed sporadically over the years. I've finally come around to accept that I'm far enough into the autism spectrum not to be able to figure out when I'm in the right, so I usually say yes because it's the least dangerous option.
Yes, having one or more executive directors is standard operating procedure for public companies in the US. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, et al sit on their respective boards.
> VS Code will load quickly but every single goto def will take ages.

I wouldn't blame that on VS Code but on the relevant extension. Go to Definition is instantaneous for me when I'm working in TypeScript
There’s a new weapon against Covid-19. And it’s dogs
It is when your company's CEO actively fights against it.
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?

This is a somewhat ahistorical. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is what everyone is talking about. Withe respect to WWII, production increased every month of the war until the end, and the ramp up began in a limited fashion a year or two before the US entered the war.

The thing people miss is that a lot of what was produced by converted companies in the first year of the war was junk. The guns jammed, the planes fell out of the sky, and so on. Typewriter companies just don't know how to make rifles, and it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure it out. Literally they had to get back field reports on what broke and then try to reproduce and fix it, then put that fix into production. No amount of the government will it to be could make typewriter machinists immediately good at making rifles, even though those worker probably knew men who would depend on those same rifles.

Now consider that the weaving machines for n95 masks are probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than the lathes used to make rifles or the tools used to make a 1945 aircraft.

You're also forgetting that the first thing we tried to ramp up with a government nudge was ventilators, and numerous companies tried. Most of them failed however, and that experience isn't forgotten by other companies. Then it turned out that no one was paying attention to data from China and Italy that suggested that ventilators may actually be causing WORSE outcomes, but when doctors noticed the demand plummeted. Those manufacturers were now left holding the bag. Who want's to sign on for that?

Then, consider the PPE ramp up. A lot of companies participated, but cash strapped hospitals weren't buying because the moratorium on elective surgeries killed their cash flow, which no one had previously expected at a policy level. Sure the government could have stepped in, but again no one saw that coming before hand so extra funding for PPE for hospitals didn't get included in the Covid relief bill.

Now, after 2 big misfires the political will is spent.
I get where you're coming from and I sort of agree, but the last time the US or the UK actually declared war was in 1942 (with Hungary and Thailand respectively!?). So if we used it properly, it would basically be a defunct word...
Post author here. I realise I wasn't explicit about the metaphors I was trying to draw.

Mars problems have grand scale but we can see them from the beginning. Google building the original web search index was a Mars problem: massive (at the time) but tractable. Robot cars probably similar: it's an engineering and world mapping problem, and it's tough but we can get there.

Venus problems are knotty, hard to decompose, and characterised by discovering new problems as we go along. UBI is a Venus problem. Vaccines/CRISPR/biology are all Venus problems. Physics is a Venus problem -- notably at the time of the ultraviolet catastrophe which upended everything in the early 20C.

My take is that technology has mainly dealt with Mars problems till now, but now we're facing Venus problems.
Show HN: ScreenToVideo – Turn screen recordings into impressive videos
I actually explained why this is often, but not always, a contagion of the mind. I'll spell it out for you "dude":

If there's some property "being trans" which functions like we think "being gay" does, either set biologically or early on in life or some combination of those, then you expect this property to be relatively randomly distributed in the population.

What you see instead is one teenage girl transitions and then her friends are far more likely to also transition. The effect clusters around social relationships. Hence it's a social contagion of the mind.

Again not in all cases, I'm not denying there are real trans people out there who benefit from transitioning.

Dr. Debrah Soh lays the argument out in much greater detail and with supporting citations in her book: https://www.amazon.ca/End-Gender-Debunking-Identity-Society/...
> If the person is so forward with this, isnt that a good filter (of sorts) to avoid a specific person who will judge you by such things rather than your character?

Sure do note, this is a friends' mom so atleast a couple of decades older than me.. I've a good friendship with her son, so i guess it's just a question of being polite with her and limiting spending time with her.
Hey Scope of the Stratos,

I'm unable to wait a minute. My time machine's out of order.
Looking for dollar values, found only “thousands” for Berkeley. This sounds like a low price.
Ash HN: Best practices for key management /w web-based client-side crypto?
I'm building a webapp storing the data in the cloud and some of our users are concerned about their privacy. They don't want their data stored in plaintext in the cloud and we're planning on offering an option to encrypt it before its sent to the server.

The main issue I have is how to manage the keys.

My plan is to not do anything weird or invent my own crypto or key management.

What I'm worried about primarily is when the user uses a new computer or it's destroyed.

How do they get new keys?

What do other services do here and are there any standards / best practices I can follow?
I believe many countries intelligence agencies have the ability to weaken/break anonymity of tor and VPN's.

The question is, is the music industry able to leverage that? Would any government, either for strategic advantage, or because some low level employee was 'overly helpful', hand over that info?
HM has been such a monumental case in neuroscience, that a case like this would mean a huge shift in the way people think about hippocampus and memory. We already know that his amnesia it was more severe due to parahippocampal areas being removed rather than just hippocampi. Still, he was only one case, upon which thousands and thousands of studies have rested on.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.

I'm surprised no one in the comments so far has challenged that these machines actually take 6 months to build.

There would literally be hundreds of suppliers of the components of these machines around the world - and the process of making the masks and fabric is not rocket science:
https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/...
Mars is probably not geologically active and has no protective magnetic field, so my first thought was to change that by hitting it up with a larger asteroid from the belt, preferably a metal rich one with significant mass. I first thought about its moons, but they are too small. I mean to achieve a complete planetary melting.

That would be step one, step two would be waiting a few million years and see how it turns out.
So what is your point? Are you saying that Tesla is outsourcing manufacturing or something? Are you serious? You can literally visit one of their factories and see the cars being made.

My Model 3 gets 310 miles on a charge as they "claimed" it has, while no other manufacturer's EV gets even close. It goes 0-60 in under 4 seconds now while it was closer to 4.4 when I bought it. It charges at 250kW as "claimed". The UX on their display is super-smooth compared to clunky screens and buttons/dials on legacy auto's cars.

What are these technologies that you say they are claiming to have but do not have?
That hasn't been the case, then, because I clearly remember OpenGL being translates to DirectX in XP/Vista days. Whether it was because anything >1.1 called that up or because the driver vendors chose translation over native, I don't know.

Original link seems to be dead but Slashdot references Vista layering OpenGL on top of Direct3D:

https://slashdot.org/story/05/08/06/177251/windows-vista-may...
Awesome! I'll have to dig up the chip-8 js emulator I made years ago and see how well these games work.
I only played the first Amensia game. I felt it was kind of a weird fit. It was a horror game in that you were in a horror environment with entities that were scary. But the lack of consequence for death made it feel kind of gamey. Horror is hard to get right. The amnesia monsters are horrifying, yes, but in the context of a horror game, not especially memorable in my opinion. One thing I think the resident evil series has done well especially in number 7 and the number 2 remake, is realize that players won't be scared for the whole game. In the first half of these games, you tend to be weak and there are genuinely frightening moments. Towards the end you're pretty desensitized to the nature of that game's fucked up shit, and you just want to mow them down or get by the efficiently.

My absolute favorite horror moment is in the original Silent Hill. You enter this giant hospital and you know its going to be a huge daunting task if its full of monsters, but its not. So you go through the elevator to floor one. It's empty. Floor 2 is empty. The final floor, floor three... is empty. So returning the the elevator you're feeling like you missed something and then, ta-dah, the elevator eerily has acquired a bloody fourth floor button letting you know you're about get shat on.
Anime fandom has had a significant overlap with computer nerds and hackers probably for longer than the majority of people reading this post have been alive.

Anyway, as the guidelines point out "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."
Two Danish startups fight false news with AI
I don't agree that the reason that Firefox is losing market share is outside of the control of Mozilla. Most people seem who stop using Firefox seem to do so for concrete reasons within the control of Mozilla: speed (now perhaps a historical issue), compatibility with sites and user experience (the various controversial changes to the url bar over the years for example). These are all within the control of Mozilla.

I'm sure that marketing is an important point and it's true that Google can promote Chrome in many places. However Firefox gained considerable market share against internet explorer under (IMO) more difficult circumstances: it was pre-installed, Microsoft were considered as or more trustworthy by the public than Google now is and of course some sites could never work well with Firefox as they used proprietary features like ActiveX. Word of mouth is one of the primary reasons that browsers (other those that are pre-installed) are adopted and the word-of-mouth on Firefox has been poor relative to Chrome for some time.
It is not only e-commerce. A digital information network like the Internet is without doubts of great usefulness, be it commerce, business, science, or keeping personal relations.

However, a communications network where trustworthiness, integrity, and privacy of communication is not kept is not worth much.

This is why: Human communication uses universally some kind of medium to transmit some kind of symbols. This is pretty much universal whether we use gestures, sound waves, smoke signals, handwritten letters, telegraph lines and Morse code or digital networks. To be able to communicate, we need to have trust that the symbols match the reality which they are supposed to describe - be it a bank transaction, a business plan, or a marriage proposal. If symbols and reality do not match, they do not have any value. This is so important that we judge individuals in how well what they say matches what they do, the property which we call honesty and trustworthiness. It is much of the yarn which binds the social fabric. It is quite the same as with money - anyone can print numbers on pieces of paper but to have people agree these pieces represent some value, it needs trust. Without this trust, business is hardly possible.

In many realms, privacy is also required, or more technically, confidentiality of individual communication. Especially in business, but also in domains where individuals need to be protected from organizations which have more power than them, and not always benevolent intentions (think of gay people in Russia or Iran). Furthermore, integrity and confidentiality of information is intertwined, as digital signatures do not work without private keys, and security certificates need to be kept safe. This becomes even more important as much software is distributed via the cloud. Without confidential keys, there is no integrity of software.

Disabling or crippling encryption is like demanding that no private dwellings can have locks on the doors, so that police can enter at any time and check whether somebody has stolen something. Clearly, theft is not desirable, but preventing theft is not worth it to generally abolish the security of people's private living space.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall. Or a modern take, if a disease has no symptoms is it really a disease.