skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a life to a forum... for badly run forums it's measured in years, for the best of the best a couple of decades.

There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth.

Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all.

The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so.

I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent.

What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.
I've had the same experience with old stock Dr Martens bought from a bunch of cockneys at a shop near Brick Lane, the longest a pair of shoes of mine ever lasted until then. Years later I ordered some from Amazon which I suspect may have been fake since it got damaged very quickly and after a long walk I ended up with a foot injury. I've since discovered Rieker shoes by accident and it's looking like it's lasting at least as long.
No doubt violin and viola can cause hearing damage too, it doesn't take much. And it will be mostly in one ear.
Tell HN: DNS censorship has started in Hong Kong
Internet censorship has historically been rare in Hong Kong [0], as opposed to its ubiquity in mainland China.

However, after some friends there mentioned difficulty accessing some websites, I decided to check whether recent events have led to an increase in Internet censorship. I surveyed the top 10,000 websites based on Alexa data.

The following 13 names (in Alexa rank order) reliably fail to resolve (return SERVFAIL) using any Hong Kong ISP's DNS server, and using major external DNS providers via Hong Kong ISP connections [1], but reliably successfully resolve outside of Hong Kong (or within Hong Kong when using a VPN or other technology to securely tunnel the DNS traffic):

dol.gov
osha.gov
army.mil
rapidshare.com
yell.com
uscg.mil
news.abs-cbn.com
arl.army.mil
mundialreguas.com.br
economictimes.com
temizliknasilyapilir.com
starmusic.abs-cbn.com
publicbankinginstitute.org

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Hong_Kong

[1] This suggests that ISPs are intercepting port 53 traffic to external DNS (such as CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 or Google's 8.8.8.8) and spoofing a SERVFAIL reply, or that all tested external DNS providers have been compelled to also implement the censorship.
I heard that version about Apple and the Objective-C frontend case from Stallman during a talk at Gothenburg if I remember right. He consulted eben moglen and based on that change his opinion. It is possible that Eben consider the decision to still be Richards, which technically it was.

When it come to apple I strongly suspect there are a few things companies like them will try avoid putting lawyers and money on. What is the definition for derivative work and what is the definition of fair use. If you do want to stake money on that you likely want aspects of the case being stacked in your favor, and basing the majority of a product on a GPL code base is not that. A single function call to libreadline would likely be more favorable, but a company like apple would just rewrite such trivial amount of code.
Collecting rubber isn’t about adding weight. The teams want to mask the exact tyre wear amount/patterns, which they do by covering the surface with scraps.

<edit>
Actually this seems less clear cut than I thought. I'd heard from David Coulthard's commentary that the reason for picking up was to cover the wear from other teams' eyes. A quick search suggests many people believe it's to do with weight. The weight explanation seems odd, since if the officials think the tyres are masking the true weight of the car, they can demand a different set are used for the weigh-in, but I can't find an authorative source either way.

So it may be to do with weight, or it may be to do with hiding tyre wear.
</edit>
Either HN has some incredibly smart sorting algorithm, or the level of discussion here is amazing for the number of users.

On sites like Reddit the first 2 or 3 top level comments are puns, sarcastic one liners or a variation on the current meme.

Or it might be a matter of etiquette: the same user on HN upvotes the smart comment and then goes on Reddit and upvotes the dismissive and overused quip.
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn is an excellent exploration of what happens to insides when architects care only about outsides.

Seen on imgur: "if art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time."

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcRW3FMuttY
Doesn't seem right to me. Euromomo does show a bump for Sweden, though it is still smaller than some other countries that did lockdowns:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Also, several countries show no excess mortality.
I don't think this is the case at all! To me Excel, for example, peaked at 2003 version, which I still use, and after that it followed the same pattern the topic started described - worse and worse and worse.

Same with Google Chrome (I am using v43 whenever possible) and pretty much all the software.
The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures.

Note also these numbers are for the UK, one of the top worst countries hit in terms of deaths per million in the world.

Also, Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has, which peaks in cold winter months. It may therefore not be altogether accurate to merely compare Jan-Aug. We may need the whole year's data to better compare.
Just look at the daily and monthly numbers. April was absolutely horrific, with daily deaths spiking at 15x and April at more than 10x. Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes. The overall death rate is going down because the age demographic of infection has changed as well. Basically, it's hitting more younger people and older people are taking more precautions.

COVID is not to be trifled with.
Yes, logo marks the first.
> there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July

Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
If you move to another country I am of the opinion that you should have a certain respect for the conventions of the welcoming country. So you might not agree with their naming conventions, but why should I expect the country to change just because I show up on the scene?

In an English speaking county, having a separate surname aids in sorting and presentation of family unities. The character set is typically A-Z. In Spain e.g. one expects a person the have two surnames. The default — but this can be changed – is that first name is from the father and the second one from the mother. By looking at the order of your name you can get information about family structures. Character set is A-Z + Ñ + umlauts and accent marks.

Going to an English speaking country I could expect them to spell my first name correctly; but since it contains a character outside A-Z I change my name to comply with their modus operandi. Yes, their computer system probably supports UTF8, but most people have never heard of this character and you won't find it on their keyboard. No problem, I change my name to comply with their system.

In Spain official forms often expect two surnames and certain characters. No problem, I use an extra hyphen, change my name, use my middle name as a surname or whatever makes the system happy.

Is it perfect? No. Does it really matter? No. So I just respect their customs and get on with my life as a respectful guest in the country where I am living.
When it comes to electronics: Sure, that has gotten cheaper by a thousandfold or however much it has been.

When it comes to transport: Partially; air travel has become fairly accessible for a lot of people now compared to a hundred years ago. Cars are also pretty common now - although driving is still quite expensive.

But I don't see how we can ever have personal airplanes be as affordable and accessible as cars. Not going to happen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
> Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick"

This attitude to me seems terribly short-sighted. Currently tech workers are privileged and can live with the illusion that they are not replaceable. The nature of capitalism however is to instrumentalize human beings and reduce them to what they can produce/consume. Nobody in particular cares about how special you are. If at some point in the future your job becomes less valuable your individual leverage will evaporate. At that point it would be good to have a union to fall back on.
I can't wait for the first website to tell me they won't do business with me because I have an invalid name. It's just the next step from forcing me to remove "invalid characters".
Because that's how quotas work.
So if the country is 13% black your employees should be 13% black.
Then and only then you have archived true "diversity"

Alternatively you can ofcourse always drop the whole affirmative action bullshit and just hire based on qualification.

But then you no longer receive good boy points for wokeness.
Even worse, it can ruin an entire processing batch because the grease ruins the quality of the resulting cardboard stock.
Carbon offsets aren't the only way to do carbon neutrality; Boom is ensuring compatibility with synthesized fuel (they specifically mention Prometheus Fuels). This is where hydrocarbons are basically used a an energy storage medium for renewably-generated energy, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere for fuel production and emitting it back into atmosphere when the fuel is burned.
You Probably Don't Need Moment.js Anymore
Chips and crisps used to be a delicacy. Can't see how that would be exclusive to the rich though, the components (potatoes and hot fat) are (and were) pretty commonplace.
Stolen Mao Zedong scroll 'worth millions' found cut in half
Are there instances of hospitals corridors turning into morgues in recent years due to Influenza?

If Covid-19 is not worse than the Influenza we should have similar impact due to influenza.

I was not able to confirm that Influenza creates similar strain to healthcare infrastructure as Covid-19 which makes me think that the Covid-19 situation in Sweden is more nuanced than the numbers say.
From TFA:

"The analysis of COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia deaths in this bulletin focuses on deaths where these conditions were the underlying cause of death (deaths “due to”), rather than deaths where the conditions were either the underlying cause or mentioned as a contributing factor (deaths “involving”). Data for deaths where COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia were a contributing factor are available in the accompanying dataset."

They also point to this document for more details: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
And because there are no people in a place, it's completely OK to pollute this place with noise, by burning bunker fuel, dumping unused munitions or mabye even nuclear waste there, ... you see the problem with this mentality?
> It doesn't, that's a myth. What hurts education is lack of funding for education.

The pay being the same between a good teacher and a bad teacher, doesn't hurt education? Or teachers unions pushing to get tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired, and being able to collect a pay slip for doing no work while waiting a year for disciplinary hearing?
It is called keto flu, iirc. As they say, your body undergoes a metabolic transformation (it knows how to do it from evolution/genes) when you miss carbs and sugar for a while. When I found out, it was so cool that our body can just reconfigure itself for a completely different diet. That is, if it is true, of course, because the entire keto-thing seems to be surrounded by some fog and doubt, for some reason.
> That would doom us as a species.

Doubtful; it would slow down / reverse the economy and probably cause population decline (which would be horrible because it would be through famine and the like), but I don't see how we'd end up gone.
Thanks, I was already browsing the data set to look at the same thing. When, as a statistician, you already observe that "In 2020 deaths due to influenza and pneumonia were consistently lower than the five-year average in all months from January to August" you need to include the total figure for deaths of Influenza+Pneumonia+Covid19 to arrive at a meaningful comparison against previous years.
There's a cool Numberphile video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GCf29FPM4k
I've been living in rural Portugal for a little while now, and these are some excellent comments. Especially the first point.

I'd also add that there is still a Heroin problem, albeit diminished. It is not unusual to see someone walking though the local village, out-of-their head drunk at 9am on a Wednesday. It isn't alcohol though, it's Heroin. But it is also an economically poor area. The weather is amazing and the place is gorgeous, but for someone raised here who doesn't manage to escape it can also be a trap. Many of the older people work in the fields in the morning, the in the late afternoon they meet in the cafes and chat about village life. Coffee is $0.15, a beer is $0.7. There a very few younger people. Those that can leave have left for a city. The ones who remain are that ones who were not able to leave. I spoke with the local President last week and he himself said that the area has become a skills desert.

So yes, I think the route to Heroin addition looks something like this. Get financially stuck in the local area. Get a bad reputation for being lazy. Try to become YouTube/Insta famous. Give up. Turn on those that tried to help. Drink & smoke weed as an escape. When those stop working try Heroin. I know a couple of people in my village that are on this path right now.

There is some crime here. It seems to fall into two categories. First is petty crime where something goes missing that's worth about $100. That's enough to quickly sell for immediate cash (likely for some form of drug). This has happened to me twice, and I don't really mind.

There is more 'organised' crime where a place gets methodically burgled when someone is away. I know people this has happened to.

There is a rapidly growing contingent of foreigners here now, and we're mostly accepted. Economically, I get the impression that most businesses prefer to deal with the foreigners. Even the guy that sells firewood says that 95% of his customers are now foreigners, and that he prefers it that way. There are lots more foreigners arriving too (leaving cities due to covid, basically), very few Portuguese people being added. Most people in my village are over 60. It'll be interesting to see how the demographics play out over the coming years.

Anyway, maybe that is of some interest. The region of Portugal I am in is Castelo Branco. I'm starting an ISP here too: https://gardunha.net
Note that despite what you might think, Swedes do socially distance. So if they have what looks like a bad flu season despite all the changes to everyday life you can assume that it's at the very least worse than influenza for which no such restrictions are done.
>The main one is that the browser loses its state at each page reload, and that the state on the server, if any, needs to be reconciled every time with that on the browser.

Yes, I also noticed this flaw. There is no good way of dealing with this other than saving state into localStorage which is less than ideal.
> The most immediate and obvious cost is not being able to drive those cars that do not respect the limits

Wishful thinking. You can still drive the most extreme of polluting vehicles as long as they're old enough, or as long as their manufacturer cheated at emission tests (many recalls are still pending for years).
Weird / false analogy; CO2 is a molecule and has no (moral) value.

It's more like taking water from the ground, drinking it, and sweating / pissing it out again.

But I too don't see how they can make fuel out of CO2, they're probably doing something with carbon neutrality, planting trees or something (or more likely: giving some money to one of many shady companies that claim to plant trees. You know, a bit like plastic recycling)
keep in mind that this is in gallons per capita, not in grams coffee beans or in a caffeine equivalent. So the stats may be misleading: People in 1960 would drink filter coffee. Today, they may take an espresso. Roughly same amount of ground coffee per cup, but less liquid. Then again, the stats for coffee beans per capita may trend in the same direction. We have other sources of caffeine today: You may drink a coke instead of a coffee when you're feeling sleepy.
Well the UK chart also shows that:

- Influenza and Pneumonia are counted as one, because the majority of Pneumonia deaths are due to Influenza

- Influenza and Pneumonia deaths have been SUBSTANTIALLY lower ever single month in 2020 than the five year average

- Of the deaths where both influenza and pneumonia, and COVID-19 were mentioned on the death certificate, the underlying cause of death was counted as COVID-19 in 95.8%

So basically this alone already highlights the gross overestimation of COVID-19 deaths. I feels plain wrong to attribute almost all deaths to COVID-19 when the person also had Influenza when it is evident that we've seen so many less Influenza deaths this year. Clearly we're not giving Influenza enough credit in being the cause of death which is wrong IMHO.

Also further below when you look at the age distribution, the vast majority of deaths happened in 80+ year olds, even more in 84+ year olds, which makes one really think. COVID-19 is not nearly as much of a threat to the vast majority of the population as we are made to believe. It seems the people who are dying from COVID-19 are those who have reached an age which is well beyond the average life expectancy of a first world country.

Not saying that COVID-19 isn't a threat, it is, but it's not like the Spanish flu which was killing predominantly young people or the plague which was wiping people of all age groups.

EDIT: Typos corrected.
Hire someone else to do it and get different types of headaches?
I think unions suppress wages when demand is very high, since they make salary negotiations public making it easier for entire industries to just agree on a single salary that don't get out of hand. Pretty simile to the no poaching agreement just that it is now legal. I mean, a union is happy if they can negotiate a relatively "high" raise each year of a few percent, and if they demand more they get scolded by other unions.
>Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes.

Comparing places with and without lockdowns there's actually little evidence that lockdowns led to a reduction in mortality: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-imp.... What was associated with a reduction in mortality was social distancing.
Which skills as politicians do you see them honing over the tenure of their careers?
I am still using MSVC6.0 and loving it... There was a clear drop in quality when MS switched to the "modern" VS.

It seems most people here look at a short period of history: they take some crappy software, like modern VS or Office and point that it improved from the initial very crappy version to a less crappy one. Hurray, progress!

What they don't take into account is how much crappier the whole "modern" range of product versions is compared to the original.
It really makes you wonder whether puzzles like this are a valid measure for real life performance at Google. Probably not.
Compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors like Norway, Finland, and Denmark and the cost of Sweden's failed response becomes pretty obvious.
OpenGL managed to back itself into multiple, mutually incompatible and backwaters on mobile and desktop at the same time. It also is still mired in an ancient architecture based on technical decisions made 25 years ago that just don't apply now, doesn't take advantage of modern GPU pipeline improvements and has issues with poor multithreading and asynchronous processing. This is why Metal managed to get 10x rendering performance.

The other aspect is that openGL has nothing to offer when it comes to accelerated compute services to compete with CUDA. Apple needed a single solution across desktop and mobile, that could also provide a compelling alternative to CUDA and that didn't leave them dependent on anyone else.
I'm interested in deep learning. I'm worried that my lack of higher level math skills will limit my progress

How much math is needed for studying deep learning?

Any suggestions for good resources on math for deep learning much appreciated
I think it is important to keep in mind that Covid-19 is still contained to some extent due to various measures. The influenza numbers are for the most part without any behaviour changes or rules (the influenza season ended roughly when Covid started to spread). The Covid-19 deaths would be higher if it were able to spread unhindered through the entire population.

And even in this somewhat unfair comparison Covid caused three times as many deaths.
> Closest one is like 0,5 mile away, that makes no sense.

Really, you can't walk 1 mile once a week to park your car at a charger?
Hi, you can send me an email at cristian@marketio.ai
Thank you.
Shouldn't the comparisons be based from percentages? Also - even with that I'd assume that the more the people, the more dynamic world we live in then the rate of transmission will increase (then the more deaths)
I agree that video conferencing as it is is not as nice as being at a party or meetup or just at the office in terms of your proximity to others and the ways it affords talking to those close around you BUT! ........

I can only imagine that the charismatic or attractive person so going to get bothered/hit on/harassed 10x more in a virtual space where there's effectively unlimited space to be "near" to them and zero effort to do so.
I don't think you can lump everything together

Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.
Most of water is used for technical purposes, not for drinking. Like washing hands, body or dishes. If it's safe for that, that would be huge achievement is this process is cheaper than conventional methods.
I said CCC is fringe.

Then I went to write the outline best I could.

The two are not connected. I left out everything that contradicts modern physics because that was not my goal.
GraphQL tools and libraries – Part 3