skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My family got Covid in March. I had very mild symptoms, easily confused with springtime allergies. My wife ended up with pneumonia and was almost hospitalized. One child got bronchitis. Another had mild symptoms.

I didn't notice it much at the time, but my sense of smell had changed. It's now October as I write this and I haven't recovered. In fact I would say it has gotten worse.

I'm trying to think of how to describe it, because it's not as simple as saying I can't smell things. There are things that I used to be able to smell with a lot of nuance in flavor, like ripe fruits, wines, cheese varieties, and so on. Now, the nuance is gone. The hint of the smell is there, and for things that I used to eat often, I still have the memory of the smell and taste. Because I'm unable to smell other things, it makes me wonder if I am actually smelling things, or if my mind is telling me that the thing I am eating has a familiar taste, like a phantom smell sensation.

Because of this, I now have a strong preference for very spicy foods and other strong flavors, because it's the only time I ever really taste something.

I am also in the camp of people who have lost the ability to smell certain things, even toxic things. I can't smell cleaning products that contain chlorine-based bleach, for example. I don't notice certain other funky smells that I would normally find repulsive. When the city was blanketed in smoke here in Seattle for a week, I barely noticed the smell. It was there, but only faintly.

The strange part to me is that some smells have fundamentally changed. When I am outside and working in our garden, the smell of soil is now profound. Wet, woody material has a very strong scent. It got me wondering if there was some evolutionary advantage the virus was selecting for, like it was giving me the smelling abilities of some woodland creature. I know that's stupid. That's just where my Covid brain has gone.

The observer in me wants to run experiments to try to document the experience. The pragmatist would prefer to drink a stout beer and eat a BBQ burger with Gorgonzola cheese and pickled jalapeños.
Most people like BLM and Marxism, they mostly disagree only if you refer to them by their names.
> sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames

How long until that turns into "sold illegal devices that hacked popular smartphones so they could be used to run unauthorized, or pirated, copies of apps"?

How long for PCs?
One thing (among many) I really enjoy and admire about this blog is the way he goes “under the hood” of historical scholarship while still condensing complex topics into a blog post. We hear about primary sources, things we simply don’t or can’t know but can guess at, some of the state of the debate, etc. His writing gives you a sense of what a historian does in a way that many history books don’t.

Besides just being interesting in and of itself, I think it raises an important caution for laypeople. It’s easy to read a secondary source and take it as authoritative, while having no idea where that source falls in the wider conversation. Consider how high school students are taught very different things about the civil war depending on what state they happen to grow up in (not trying to raise a shitstorm, it’s an example). It’s hard to evaluate anything you read when you don’t know what you don’t know.
Samsung TVs have been reported to connect to any available open WiFi network.
Also, China makes very accurate maps illegal, and beyond a certain level of precision, there is an asymmetry between Coords->Place and Place->Coords, due to a munging operation they require for maps.
This is actually taking longer than I thought it would.

5 years ago I wrote a blog post essentially saying everyone will wear a smart watch for health and safety reasons:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyo...

It’s disappointing that Google hasn’t done a better job of competing. The industry needs 2 strong competitors.
i guess this shows for all their genius, the Collisons are either feckless/weak or brainwashed
After 5 years, I still have to peck at buttons on my watch to pause/unpause workouts or switch songs when I bet you some slap gestures could do the trick
Dolphyn Receipt Manager for iOS
> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile

In my mind the problem lies with the college, they should be teaching their students how to contribute meaningfully. Spamming behaviors will only hurt the reputations of everyone from that college.
> religious values that don't honor ethics

Of course, false religion and immorality go hand in hand, say true religions. Here, false religion is 'Hinduism'; immorality of 'Hindus' makes them not honor ethics. Are we hearing anything new here?
>So companies are effectively driving their employees towards creating future competition,

Or future complimentary product/service. A company that runs call centers doesn't wanna make call center software but if they can buy call center SaaS (or whatever) that makes them more efficient they're happy and the guy they're buying from is happy.
In February of 2019 I flew to SF for a business trip, and a few days after my return my wife became sick with an unknown illness -- she was complaining of shortness of breath, had a cough, lightheaded feeling and migraines.

Her breathing continued to get worse over a period of days to the point where she was waking up with blue lips and would become totally winded when walking a few feet.

Eventually she decided she needed to see a dr so we went to an urgent care -- due to the fact we had no car (we were living downtown Denver at the time) we walked and only a few blocks from the house she nearly collapsed -- I had to hold her up while we walked very slowly the rest of the way to the urgent care -- once we arrived she was immediately put on oxygen and given an IV.

later that night she was sent home, but in the morning her condition was worse, so we went to the ER but she was sent home again this time with asthma medication including an emergency inhaler.

Her breathing was labored for months and she continued to use the emergency inhaler during this time.

In August of 2019 she completely lost her sense of taste and smell.

In October 2019 she got exponentially worse so we went back to the ER and this time they checked her in.

They ran loads of tests on her, checked for cancer, HIV etc. -- eventually they gave her a bronchoscopy and found lots of very thick stringy mucus all in her lungs and found that she had a collapsed lung.

During this time they treated her with oxygen and antibiotics.

All of the tests they ran came back negative -- she remained in the hospital for a week and eventually recovered. I was in close contact with her during this time I even laid next to her in the hospital bed but did not contract her illness.

After 7 days the doctors concluded that she must have developed asthma and sent her home with an inhaler which she relied on daily until around February.

She is now able to exercise on a treadmill without ill effects. However if I cook things on the stove and it produces smoke this seems to trigger mild issues, and occasionally she has a stuffy nose that seems like allergies.

I'm not saying she had covid-19 but she had many of the symptoms. She had no fever during this time.
>Philosophy is not a single school of thought. That's why I quoted you the definition. That's literally the central point of my entire argument, which you continuously have ignored or dismissed out of hand in favor of your personal definition of the term.

If philosophy is so varied than how can it be more fundamental than science? You literally said that "philosophy" is more fundamental than science. How can a mixed bag of various schools of thought be more fundamental than science?

That's my argument. That's what I've been arguing about from beginning.
Also, OLED with HDR.
> In my friend group, one dude downloading Into The Spiderverse led to six of us seeing it in theaters.

and this is different than "paid influencers" how? oh, well I guess in the former, it's an interested fan, and in the latter it's a known commodity that likely doesn't even like what they're reading/watching.
The LG OLED TV's have "smart" features but work just fine as HDMI connected display devices-- fast the initial startup any of the "smart" stuff appears to be invisible and inert.
Do you see antitrust action rising with regards to the health data implications that smartwatches like the Apple Watch bring? In the EU already, we're seeing heavy probes on Fitbit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fitbit-m-a-alphabet-eu/he...
It's black-letter law that modchips and other copyright circumvention devices are illegal and trafficking in them is a felony. No precedent is necessary, and the courts are unlikely to overturn it on constitutional grounds.
Apartments are a problem though
Veritasium has an entertaining video on this [1]. Trees get weirder and weirder every time I think about them.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PWMQR59M68
Then write your congressman.
... and there I go again assuming people want the same things as me. I want a good quality, high resolution 32-40 inch tv.
I will get one as soon as an iPhone is not required. I know they now have a "family" option, but it is still quite limited. I would love to be able to use my iPad Pro (with active data sim) for this. There is no technical reason for me not being able to do this. I am never going to switch to an iPhone, so it's on them. If they want to expand their market, this is an easy one for them.
I believe some devices sold by Amazon and Google (not TVs itself but things similar to a chromecast) have tried to connect to open networks because DNS requests (of advertising domains) were being blocked. I don't think a TV manufacturer doing the same thing is improbable if it didn't happen already.
But who likes the design? In my view, Apple tried to cater to the desires of both men and women simultaneously, and ended up with a sex-less watch that looks like it was designed by a committee.
> Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract

This problem is probably less relevant in NZ than most places. However thanks for the comment (and it’s parent), I didn’t know these things.
You can self-host Flatpak repositories with flat-manager, which differentiates Flatpak from the App/Snap/Windows Stores.

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

https://github.com/flatpak/flat-manager
I didn't take parent to be arguing in favor of selection prosecution but rather pointing this out as a suspicious instance of it. If the volume of laws outstrips the resources available to enforce them, how do you propose those resources are allocated?
The opposite is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". It's interesting how both views are opposite and yet both true.
Thanks for the interesting links!
Advertisement for Gem
AppleSoft BASIC: Tweet code to emulator
Competition by Apple and Google in these areas will imo always be a bit asymmetrical as long as Apple makes its money off of selling luxury products and services while Google instead makes its money off of advertisers or data.
NSFW if dumb is a bad word in your office culture.
People have been convicted under the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA before. The law explicitly says it's a crime.
I'll take an interest once they offer the cellular version in my country (Ireland—where their EU hq is based, of all places). Until then, meh.
Why do you need a watch that is designed for a particular sex?
I think tens of millions of buyers don't quite mind the design so I'd day they have a strong market...
The poster is being too harsh. It's just a t-shirt. Clearly they haven't met art majors in America attending tech talks for free pizza.
Garmin seems to be doing just fine. And I don’t have to charge it every day.
Seems it should often be possible to tell if the deadline is real or artificial. Perhaps by asking a question or two, but if it's something like "we're planning to start a major new project soon and we want the new head (i.e. you) to be there at the start", that seems likely to have come up early in the discussion of "what would I be working on".

Also, the larger the company, and the less specialized the role, the higher is the likelihood that "if you're above their competency threshold, then there's some team somewhere that needs more people even if they hire someone else for this role".
Well, we went from video games to TV to TCP. That's quite a lot of different things, no wonder we lost people on the way. =)

There is one thing I'd like to insist on though, I'm not sure whether people could actually notice 100 ms of latency after user input. You assume that users do? but I don't think they necessarily do. I think the full delay between when you press a button on a gamepad and when the frame changes on the TV is somewhere around that and gaming consoles are generally considered very usable. (Of course latency in computer networks is a different matter).

My daily job among other things is to optimize software and networking infrastructure covering 4 continents and 50 datacenters. I'd say I have a certain grasp of networking. ;)
Hacking Physics from the Back of a Napkin
I've got a TCL from 2018 with no smart features. The picture and audio are great, but the screen definitely ghosts with quick video games. It was also only ~$300, though.
>I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans.

Read _Industrial Society and Its Future_. It has the path paved out already. Japan is, as seems to be customary, ahead of the curve in some respects.
I don't think the constitutionality of the law has been tested here. Can you point to an example of it being held up in these circumstances?
"It's amazing what you can do if you're willing to sacrifice a few universes to get out of doing some addition" - probably no one ever, but it should've been said before now.
I don’t get it. Monopoly doesn’t mean just a market that one product is clearly superior to the competitors. Monopoly is a market which has either natural or artificial barriers which preclude competition.

What’s the natural or artificial barrier to entry in the fitness wearable market? It seems highly competitive to me.
Pragmatism is a weak point of the left leaning personality (that's why many are in the arts), in the same way that low openness to experience is a weakness of the right leaning personality (that's why many work traditional administrative jobs).

Jonathan Haidt brings up another reason for this. On the left and right certain things become sacred and must be treated with purity. On the left, the environment is one of the examples he talks about, so pragmatic solutions get thrown out because they're impure.

This is of course a generalization but it does capture some truth.
Buy a cheap router, don’t connect the router to the internet, and connect all smart appliances to the router.
(Some) libraries are to books what archive.org is to the internet.

I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library.

This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that.

Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.
I made https://orangesite.sneak.cloud to discover links that get removed from the frontpage, which is how I saw this comment.
I haven’t ever been too keen on smartwatches and never really tried anything beyond a Fitbit. I recently ordered a Series 6 and I’m absolutely loving it.

I can positively say this device on my wrist is the best thing I’ve done for my health. The multitude of sensors are great, sure, but the real magic is how the watch motivates you. Closing rings is like crack. It makes me want to leave the bed and go for a quick run or cycle at 11PM.

Having a cellular connection is fantastic and on occasion even lets me leave my phone behind. Coupled with their usually reliable software, I can 100% see why Apple’s approaching 100M Apple Watch users.
How We Use a Scale-Out HTAP Database for Real-Time Analytics and Complex Queries
As far as I can tell Grindr has had crappy security and a willful negligent response to security concerns for its entire existence. Don't forget that location tracking in real time of people with Grindr.
Don't use Grindr.
I wouldn't call him a villain.
> I am never going to switch to an iPhone

Out of curiosity, why?
Lets keep aside trivial semantic nuances and get to the core point. When I say caste system, I mean the practice of segregation and discrimination of people based on birth, ancestry or profession. Are you denying the existence of such a system in India before the Europeans arrived?

There are countless references both in Hindu scriptures and social practices to prove that a rigid caste system was the basis of Indian society for millennia.
But the cheapest TVs on the market are the super-no-brand models which aren't smart/ Clearly these are unsubsidized.
> Besides, it would be his FDA that would have to pursue it.

That's not necessarily true, given that it is so close to a presidential election.
> The debate is worth having. But in the place of that debate, there have only been pious paeans to diversity.

Whatever could have made people unwilling to publicly debate these issues?
This reddit user said their Samsung TV connected to a nearby open WiFi AP. see https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Its not a tv at all but a projector... still plenty of these around that have no functions other than displaying what is input. As a bonus it is much easier to deal with when it is eventually obsolete than an extremely large flat panel tv. ALR screens are pretty good these days too so you dont have to use it in a cave.
Marketing.

Also, smaller antennas.
They live in France and Shenzhen. Are circumvention devices illegal there?
I think that many people enjoy learning. But they enjoy learning different things. Developer might enjoy learning new programming language. Artist might enjoy learning new painting techniques or may be new Photoshop features. But if you will ask artist to learn Lisp to write image processing algorithm, probably that won't be interesting for him. And if you will ask developer to learn Photoshop to add shadows to that icon, probably he won't be happy either, unless he happened to like both programming and painting at the same time.

So may be it's important to understand your target audience.

Of course some people just hate their job and the only thing that makes them happy is the end of the day...
Thankfully most let you skip the UI entirely by having direct input selection IR commands. Get yourself a generic universal remote that either has these buttons, or custom ones you can program.

With this I basically never see the UI on my LG and Samsung TVs, and I certainly don't interact with it unless I need to get into settings.
Does Samsung count? https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/wearables/smartwatches/
Smart 'X' in general has become synonymous with 'paid for by your data we scrape 24/7' at least when it comes to most consumer range products and platforms made by big tech companies...

Smart phones

Smart TVs

Smart speakers

Smart doorbell/security cameras

Smart home systems

If there's one thing these all have in common it's:

'Known privacy issues regarding tracking and data collection by large tech companies.'

When a product is marketed as smart...I assume it's smart as in it's watching and learning from me and giving the data to someone.
Boo-fucking-woo.

Whining that you're kindly informed to use more inclusive language, to not be ableist, sexist, etc., is such an unreasonable demand, apparently. If being inclusive, for example not being derogatory/hurtful toward LGBT people, etc., is a "liberal" political take, it really tells you a lot about conservative stances, and the stances of people against this who just say it's "liberal ideology," doesn't it?

> If you want free debate we’ll give you free debate. We demand liberal bias training sessions paid or by the company and run by conservative consultants. We demand proper gender segregated bathrooms. We demand nobody use the term “cis white male” with vitriol.

This guy is such a scumbag. Wow, you're this upset and feel excluded because people are asking you not to use exclusive language, and workplaces are made more accommodating to trans people?

> proper gender segregated bathrooms

Hmm, I wonder what he meant by this, also?

If your political views involve being a piece of shit to humans just trying to get through their work day you're in the wrong and nobody should give a shit about your political opinions.

Also, by the way, I do not consider myself a "liberal."
For many, a watch is a fashion accessory. Thus, a watch that fits their style is important. If their fashion style identifies strongly with a particular sex, then a watch that clashes with that style would be less appealing.
Superman and Jesus as Science Fiction Parables
Actually yes, for my senior high school students and I specificily mentioned the cameras in the class rooms lol
I still have an original Xbox with the Xecuter chip soldered into the front of it, also running Xbox Media Center. And it still runs.

It has an SNES emulator with hundreds of games, a lot of music from the 90's, and about a dozen Xbox games on the internal HDD.

Will never get rid of it, I'm pretty sure there aren't many left in existence.
The problem is the JS decode mean images in practice load slower than competing formats.
That is true although if the product is new (or the assembly line never ups the installed firmware version) day-one patches due to rushed software could be a thing.

But you're right, I was just saying everything with software has a reason for updates, though not a good one sometimes.
FAQs on Protecting Yourself from Covid-19 Aerosol Transmission
Came here to say this.

It could be summarized simply as: decrease options, increase option depth.

Apple does this very well with its products. From the 'unboxing' experience, down to the dashboard UI's and functions. Every complex function is 'unfolded into', while only the things that are immediately necessary are made obvious.

I made a drawing to help to further illustrate this idea: https://twitter.com/PlanFlowDev/status/1311356383221223424/p...
I mean... at what point does something become a luxury product? What does it mean to be a luxury product? I see homeless people with iPhones, people put Apple watches on payment plans.

I agree with your point about Google and ads, but I feel like this meme of Apple being a luxury product is slowly just not making sense to me.
It's not delusional, it's a simple statement of fact. It would also be nice if we would stop shaming these people and instead protect them and encourage them to socialize and study. Maybe they wouldn't be so angry on internet forums.
I'm not a user of Grindr, but isn't the real time location tracking a feature that users actually like?
How is their smartwatch software and SDK?