skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I live in Contra Costa County (east bay, SF area), with a lot of retired people. 1.1 million residents. We’ve had 224 deaths with COVID so far.

> Does that sound like a pandemic?

It sounds like a region that has handled the pandemic well.

> In the US, death rates are pretty flat (not fluctuating much with cases)

Daily deaths are tracking case rates (given, one is best off looking at a combo of case rates, positivity and total testing). Of course, deaths lag a fair bit.

> of the 198k deaths in the US, only 16K were younger than 54 years of age.

And, we're only around 10% total incidence rate in the US, based on more recent widespread antibody studies. 16K for under 54 is still a fairly large number given that we're only at ~10%. Add in 55-64 and we're at 42K deaths. Let's ramp up to an incidence rate of 50% - super basic napkin math and we'd be at over 200K deaths for the under 65 crowd - as in, entirely people of below retirement age. That's huge.

> Is it reasonable to shutter most of our economies for those numbers?

We haven't though. Not to downplay the economic impact, but most of the economy is still running.

> People are suffering economically and emotionally because of stress and isolation.

Yeah, this aspect sucks. A few comments:

* Let's imagine we lifted all restrictions. How much do you think that would improve the economy? There's at least some evidence that economies that have failed in mitigation, such that the virus runs pretty close to free, have had the sharpest GDP declines - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy - granted, it is hard to separate out factors, as countries that have seen huge spread often also will, at least temporarily, lock down more. But, my general comment here is that the virus itself is a significant portion of the economic impact.

* The federal government should have done more to keep people afloat during this period. This sort of crisis is exactly when we should have committed to sustained support, e.g. UBI until the pandemic was over.

* Beyond that, re isolation, most places in the country allow for gatherings, for you to visit family and friends, for you to go out and about. Sure, big events and bars are still restricted in most places, but if one wants to socialize, they still can.
Law enforcement can't even prevent a mass shooting when the shooter is repeatedly reported to federal law enforcement (Pulse nightclub shooter). How do you think this level of access will allow them to solve crimes?
New 'frozen dragon' pterosaur found hiding in plain sight
Had the same issue, instead of no-op did "momentary layer toggle" - the key still switches the layer, but only while you holding it. That gives time to re-adjust.
Forgot to add: I don’t trust the consumer devices including a fully patched brand new iPhone. I am far more concerned about the various private interests abusing data access, data brokers, hackers potentially getting into my endpoint directly or to any of my consumer cloud assets, than I am about lawful access to recoverable encryption
I use a Newer NW700 as my microphone attached to my standing desk with my wireless headphones. macOS makes managing this easy through either independent controls through the Sound control panel or as an aggregate device. For the road I found a pass through mic that plugs into my headphone’s line in and use it as wired headphones. The mic comes out on an arm and it does a much better job than an in line mic built into a cable.
Exactly my problem with it, it doesn’t just work with CSS, which is a part of the bigger problem seen above: equating Frontend with JS.
I've been tracking this as a sideproject this year at https://topstonks.com

Right now Gamestop and AMD are the stocks dujour:

https://topstonks.com/stocks/gme

https://topstonks.com/stocks/amd

Interestingly, the guys at wallstreetbets were recommending the VIX a few weeks ago right before the correction. It's been a fun thing to watch.
Fire phone had a Snapdragon 800, Robin had an 808, and PH-1 had an 835. Those were all flagship chips, and they were all cheap when I bought them. I'm hoping someone else comes by with a new flagship to firesale, but maybe investors figured it out. :/
Nilang.jl – A Reversible Julia DSL
Wish they would leave a town of people probably completely unaware of this out of it.
Lol the end. “Stick with English lit.” No need to be so elitist. But oh well, I learned something about pumps today.
Bananas and bowling balls.

Based on your description, the situation you described is a shame and a failure of law enforcement to keep us safe. Not an encryption issue.
In Amazon’s defence, the item sold should have been packaged better by the original seller. A number of my recent Amazon purchases have arrived in original boxes/packaging.

And Amazon in Canada does not stock or sell food items at competitive prices if at all. They barely sell a small number of Whole Foods items online. I generally buy local for most food items, except maybe bulk supplements or household items. Some things, especially now under lockdown, you can only find easily on Amazon...
Do you respect monkeys?

What about mice?

The best meat can hope for, is not living in territory needed by silicon.
FBI sent a team to 'exploit' Portland protesters' phones
Despite MathML being too verbose, if it were well supported across all major web browsers, we could write mathematical content in LaTeX or another syntax and then convert it to MathML. It would have been very similar to how a lot of content is written in Markdown these days and then converted to HTML.
Only app that didn't work so far was some Ikea supplemental app because no AR hardware support.

Looking at App Store update logs, following updates were installed recently: Gmaps, Vinted, Spotify, Things, Barbora, Mattermost, Trello, Revolut, Strava, Slack, Dropbox, Duo, Geocaching...
A higher quality sensor will mean less noise in the captured image (especially with poor lighting), so the compressed stream will spend more bits on encoding you and fewer bits on encoding artifacts. A better lens will reduce distortion and aberration. A larger sensor combined with a large aperture lens will enable a shallow depth of field, so your face can be in focus while the backdrop of your messy home office is out of focus—again helping spend your precious upload bandwidth on the details you want to be transmitting.

4Mbps is nowhere near low enough to level out all the differences between a crap camera and a great camera. With modern codecs, 4Mbps is actually quite a lot of room to work with; Zoom specifies a requirement of just 3Mbps for group video calls at 1080p, and even Twitch only supports up to 6Mbps.
Because it's quite extreme view.

Apps should protect users and police should seek to end crime. Only when these two needs cross we get something fair. If one side gives in we all lose.
This some mind blowing work!
For about $20 you can get an HDMI capture device: https://www.theverge.com/21346571/cheap-cam-link-capture-car...
This is a great point.

No, you cannot actually create anything that negates the premise of free will. Even if the Universe is 100% deterministic, it would take a computer the size of the universe to predict anything. Therefore, determinism may or may not be true, but from within the confines of this universe, we will never be able to observe it fully (e.g. there does not exist the possibility for an Oracle who could predict every action).

To prove this consider the opposite: If such an Oracle was able to exist, you could simply ask it whether you would select Red or Blue next, then do the opposite of whatever it predicted.
This. I'm also more concerned of private parties gettingy info than the gov. Gov is going to get whatever they want one way or another, but private parties getting my info is far worse.
You appear to be conflating Intel's 1990s antitrust woes and the success of the Core microarchitecture which launched in 2006.

Despite Intel's well-documented anti-competitive practices, AMD had decisively gained the upper hand in performance by the time of K8 (2003). Intel's microarchitecture at the time, NetBurst, was uncompetitive and relied almost entirely on inertia, and yes, anti-competitive behaviour to retain market share.

Core leap-frogged that and Intel remained ahead for the better part of a decade afterwards. To say that Intel sat on its laurels between the time of the first round of antitrust litigation in the early 90s is quite inaccurate.
Well a large part of that is because the low light performance on all these webcams is stuck in the early 2000's. So, if you feed them some extra light the image quality gets a lot better.

OTOH, take a 10 year old DSLR, flip it to video mode and compare the results when you don't have the lights amped up to max.

Webcams are one of those areas where 7-8 years ago I was wondering why all the webcams were still USB2. For something like video you _REALLY_ want the extra bandwidth. Sure lots of peoples home connections aren't going to be able to feed the 250Mbit or so that is possible with a USB2 webcam, but in many cases your GPU/etc is probably much more capable of doing a good job with a random codec than whatever $.50c codec happens to be integrated on the webcam itself. So run a reasonable bandwidth to the PC and let it cleanup/compress the image. Rather than having the camera compress it to mpeg2, drop 1/2 the clarity, then have your PC decompress it and re-compress it with a more modern codec.
I’m happy to report that this may be fixed going forward. Tesla and I think most EV’s will not let you in drive while plugged in.
In an interesting demonstration of how all ergonomics is personal, my use of a Mac laptop and the repeated wrist rotation from the trackpad to they keyboard and back led to RSI.

That said, I love the Mac trackpad and it has great ergonomic potential, I just personally have to use it with a split keyboard with the halves on either side of the laptop. That way the motion of moving from trackpad to keyboard and back is a bend at the elbow, while the wrist stays straight.
Physicists place fresh limits on gravity’s role in wavefunction collapse
What you heard is probably the xdr test tone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_(audio)
I think society ought to address the fundamental issues that create criminality rather than build some panopticon control-grid that assumes everyone is a criminal by default.

I sympathize with law enforcement, most of them just want better tools with the genuine desire to catch as many of the bad guys as they can. The problem isn't that, it's that those tools once established and ubiquitous represent a lever of control so powerful that the temptation for the bad guys to obtain them will be so great as to be unavoidable.

If someone could guarantee to me that such tools would be used for good with practically impenetrable safe-guards against abuse, okay I could probably live with that. But no one can make that guarantee in good faith.
Offering lawful access to widely deployed encryption is hardly an extreme view. Our IC and their partners, as well as our bureaucrats, are mostly in agreement.

An extreme view might entail banning certain forms of math on the internet entirely, rather than simply regulating the widely deployed frictionless math.
And you just replied to a comment explaining what happens if you don’t do those things, so you haven’t really added anything new to the conversation but a trite “nobody is forcing you” which was already the premise when the parent comment started.
Previous discussion of original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24725340
>to all those recommending better lighting: nobody sits in a dark or unlit room when using a webcam.

You'd be surprised.
Face-to-face talking is also unbreakably encrypted. Is that a threat vector we need to address? Really, we should start sewing mouths closed to close that vector permanently, am I right?
”who's pretty infamous in the epi community for the fundamentally flawed Santa Clara antibody study - significant statistical issues, a highly flawed recruitment strategy, a side story of his wife recruiting people through a a non-approved side channel....Many of these flaws biased the study into showing a high infection incidence rate, and thus a much lower fatality rate, in the same ballpark as the flu.”

You skipped the part about how it was right. Current IFR estimates are on par with the flu:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Moreover, Michael Ryan of the WHO estimates 750M infected globally, which would put the IFR at around 0.1%:

https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nat...
2 - First image in this collection: https://swprs.org/covid-the-big-picture-in-7-charts/

3 - We are asking everyone to adhere to economic and social restrictions when the risks are not equal to everyone. People in certain age groups, and with health risks, are far more at risk than most people.
The capture card is actually optional if you're using a Mac, at least for some cameras.

I run my mirrorless via microUSB using two apps, Camera Live[0] and CamTwist[1], both free.

[0]: https://github.com/v002/v002-Camera-Live

[1]: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24275/camtwist

Camera Live claims to only support Canon, but I can tell you that Sony ASP-Cs work fine. The details of how exactly to get it working vary by camera, but a search for "$your-camera webcam CamTwist" will turn something up.
Note that this flavor of lensleas imaging never went anywhere. Rambus is no longer active in the space, and both David and Patrick Gill left some time ago.

There is very similar grating based imaging coming out of Rice.
The Russian market is still small. And the Russians would be unlikely to cut themselves off from the best tech when people can just use it on Android anyway. It's an extremely hollow threat. As Russians might say "назло бабушке отморожу уши" -- spiting my grandmother by getting frostbitten ears (from not wearing your hat).
I took John's class on theoretical cosmology while a master's student in Cambridge. He was remarkably old fashioned — he scribbled in his undecipherable handwriting on a bunch of transparent slides and used a projector to share things in class. He had a deep mellow voice and clearly had a supreme grasp of all areas of cosmology. It is a real shame he died so early.
That’s a bit myopic, isn’t it? Because Google essentially owns the development of FF even if they lose or are forced to spin off Chrome.
Law enforcement isn’t perfect; this is exactly why we would like privacy.
If you enable showdead, you'll even see it on HN. Thankfully, mods here do better than Reddit can
Oregon doesn't either (except in certain rural areas at night and that just changed a year or two ago.

It's super annoying, unless it's raining or really cold out.
Such books are nice and can provide insights, but with the amount of digital data available and the recent advances in NLP, I think it's time for a more data-driven approach to "taxonomizing plot"
s/device/& and application/
Funny story, I broke a plug while undoing it (there was some jank), and it refused to let me go faster than ~5mph. I needed the service station to remove the adapter.
Looks like even here one can’t be safe against JoJo references…
VB2020 localhost is over, but the content is still available to view
It's not just Dell. I have an old iPad Pro I use for video calls (Zoom maxes my CPU on Linux) and when it's sitting in the case, the camera is either to the left or the right of where I am looking...
One of my old coworkers used to totally and completely trust the auto shutoff. To the point that he didn't even stop the pump before pulling it out of the car. He would just yank the still running pump out and it would shut off. One day he comes in to work complaining about how the pump he used the day before didn't work and he got covered in gasoline.

We all just looked at him incredulously when he explained what happened.
Replacing old stuff is a challenge. What is the effort to spin up a whole new widget that does the task, and how do we test it sufficiently to prove it has the same results as the old one? Do you need to run it on sky? If so, can you switch it on/off quickly so we can run the old stuff for science and run the new stuff on an engineering night to prove equivalency? It's difficult to replace but not impossible.

The best outcome you can hope for is some new instrument with better capabilities comes online before the old one dies horribly. For computing systems, we have projects to replace the old stuff with new machines and new OS's and take the time to work out the kinks and bits of tribal knowledge we realize all too late that we lost when so-and-so retired. This is not atypical in the computing industry.

In summary: yeah, things can be hard to replace. There's inertia associated with old systems you have to balance the thought to "string it along, ebay/graymarket a replacement" versus reinventing it.
Closes the market to external power banks. Perhaps add a bit to detect the type of power supply.
Isn’t it as callous to dismiss the 50 million people who have filed for unemployment for the 200-210K who have died from the pandemic, esp when the majority of those are older?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/07/09/nearly-50-...

From an argument perspective, I’d suggest that if we want to allay encryption restrictions because we don’t buy “think of the children”, the same logic could be applied to the economy and the 50m already at economic risk. People are dying and suffering from poverty, starvation.. around the globe. Children aren’t have their childhoods.

And per https://swprs.org/facts-about-covid-19/ perhaps we’ve flattened the death curve and we need more targeted policies for those who are truly at risk.
The Making of “My Octopus Teacher“
Every single social network is backdoored by multiple governments.
Sure but thought experiments are not actual experiments. In fact thought experiments are... exactly the same as simulations.
If by "less sophisticated criminals," you mean "anyone too stupid to google 'encrypted chat app'," then I doubt they were ever much of a threat, especially for any kind of serious criminal conspiracy beyond selling a few baggies of drugs.
Download YouTube Video
You can repeat "hysterical nonsense" all you like. Adopt it as your mantra. But it does not change the body count, or who acted recklessly to produce it.

Negligent homicide is literally in the lawbook, and no amount of frantically wishful chanting will erase it. All we need is for it to be acted on in good faith by those who are sworn to.
Crime will be the price that a free society pays.

We need a certain tolerance of petty crime if we are going to truest be free.
To me this is all political. With the election coming up, its in Trump's interest to look tough on immigrants. H1Bs are easy targets, they don't have any political rights, and a large number of them will likely never have those rights.

You can't target family based immigrants because their families might already have been naturalized and have voting powers. The family GC recipients would also eventually get naturalized, and you don't want to upset potential voter base (however, tiny it might be).

> There has been no meaningful legislation changes to H-1B program in over two decades and I don’t think that there is political capital to make those changes .

This makes it even better. You get to throw punches which makes you look tough, but also doesn't really hurt the other side. Sort of win-win. Although I do think the other side in this is the H1B sponsoring employers and not the folks actually on H1B.
> How is this really different to government-mandated microphones and cameras in your house, school, workplace, etc?

The difference is that the infrastructure is in place and can be turned on at will so it feels within the reach of the people who think they deserved to do that.

They think that deserve it because they believe that the job they do is the most important thing in the world and they can suddenly gain access to an amazing tool that will make their job much more easier and potentially more effective. They believe that the risks are overblown, can be contained with proper measures and well worth it.

If you are a pro-nuclear energy, you can draw an analogy with you desperately wanting nuclear power all over the place.

“So what if a really bad accident can cause an irreparable damage? The new designs would not allow this to happen and the positive aspects are huge. Coal kills much more people. Yes we had chernobyl and fukushima but this time is different”

is very similar to “So what if the surveillance can be used to create a dystopian state? The measures we put in place will prevent it from ever happening and the positives are huge. Terrorist and other criminals cause huge damages and not that many are killed by repressive government. Yes we had the stasi and kgb but this is different”

After all, it is true that it would have been great to a have a power that watch us an protect us, right? The concept is the bedrock of many religions anyway. It’s something that a lot of people want.
Ask HN: What Book has you learn a skill through a start to finish project?
What books or tutorials build a project, start to finish, to learn a skill? I've seen a few threads that are a few years old now, and I'm curious if anyone has some new recommendations. Bonus points for skills that can be more readily turned into something that can be monetized.
Legally mandating government wiretaps in every major method of online communication, subjecting every citizen to having their private life potentially scrutinized with no trial, is fairly extreme, yes.
HN you disappoint me. No basic science, no basic reading comprehension. Just downvotes for not playing along with easily discarded misogyny
I have a similar setup (a6600 with the Sony G 16-55mm f/2.8). Have you tried it without the cam link?

Like so:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24743842

I've been satisfied with the results, I'm wondering if you've done both and if you see a difference. I'll probably end up with a capture setup eventually, but I've been kicking it down the road.
> Well, you're wrong. I've had interviewers ask why I host my own blog instead of using Facebook, and said it was very unusual that they couldn't check out my social background.

Well, why would an employer need to check your social background? They should care about your skills more than anything else.
The Vanishing Computer
Slightly higher compression engines, perhaps <2L high RPM, like sub-compacts or maybe motorcycles. I’ve had rentals, don’t recall. Hyundai?
> it would still be trivially easy for criminals to use it

Maybe it's not about the criminals? Governments have a tendency to seek to increase control of citizens, surveillance being part of it. Saying it's about "tools for terrorists and child traffickers" is the traditional rethorical ploy no-one can argue against. You wouldn't want to protect child traffickers would you?
Stop this socialist nonsense.

Capitalism should be fully expanded to include all resources, in order for people to fully value what they pay for and for non-owners to be unable to access and use it without properly compensating the owner.

Environment gets destroyed in part because it's owned by governments who manage it like crap and have no incentive to preserve it, let alone increase its value.

In other cases there is no owner (oceans, for example) which is just as bad (but can also be fixed with privatization; see https://mises.org/files/walter-block-privatizing-water-inclu...).

BBC itself should be privatized to pollute less (it'd shrink quite a bit if if they had to earn what they spend)
> children will look at us baffled when we tell them that there used to be just nothing there when we closed our eyes
It’s not clear if chrome is really the heart of Google’s monopoly power, if it is a monopoly. It seems to me like the combination of being the ad network and the (non ad) content distribution & discovery network is the real issue. If I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome.