skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Euromomo lets one easily compare the mortality for various European countries: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps . I think this is much easier to grasp than the tables in the linked paper.

The very first graph shows that it's not "just another flu". Abnormally many deaths, even with the strict measures. Mainly for those aged 45 and older (but also not just "old people" dying, lots in the group 45-64).

Further down "Z-scores by country" also shows a pretty normal curve for Norway and Denmark but many excessive deaths for Sweden, meaning the notion of "sweden just reports covid deaths differently" that was common a few months back isn't an explanation.
> As I understand it, the main draw of WASM is running non-JS code in a web browser.

Simplified deployment + automatic sandboxing?

AFAIK with x86 you can't just write a client app and have it automatically run on any computer that visits your website.
There is no such thing as an "average" person: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Sometimes I wonder if this is propaganda by cloud/serverless providers to get everyone to jump on it and get locked in. The serverless black box kind of sucks, apart from “auto scaling” stuff. Crap performance too.
advice to your older self - your job is now relatively secure, try to do side projects.

or another advice - you need to diversify your skills, choose the skills you believe will be in demand in the future to learn, also try to choose ones that it will be ok you are older.
The point of the micro:bit is education, which requires it to be simple. The Raspberry Pi was made for education, but is completely overwhelming for young kids.

The micro:bit is extremely simple, just a few buttons, pins that can be used easily with crocodile clips, and a small grid of LEDs that makes it easy to draw primitive graphics.

We gave our daughter a micro:bit when she was nearly five (she is six now) and she loves it. The drag and drop programming that MakeCode offers is something that someone of that age can use to make very simple programs (push this button -> show an emoji or write your name). Seeing their program on real hardware then gives them a lot of satisfaction.

tl;dr: this is not competing with your average Linux-running ARM board or even other microcontrollers. Their goals is offering something that is fit and safe for education.
The 'holy grail' of Avro Arrow artifacts uncovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario
I'm grateful that some companies still offer technical tests and whiteboarding.

Had a mini heart attack everytime I see companies requiring significant open-source contribution.

The horror to imagine in the future when I decide to switch company, I won't be able to because of zero non-scribble repository in my github account.
The Modern Lives of Ancient Symbols
World Smallest Office Suite
> Most arguments I've seen claiming the incompetence of senior engineers are circular.

Exactly!

If someone has been implementing and delivering products for years/decades and they "fail" a whiteboard puzzle, which is more likely?

A: The whiteboard puzzle doesn't actually measure anything correlated to delivering products.

B: They can't actually develop anything, despite having repeatedly done so.

I want to hire the people who can develop and deliver products, not the whiteboard puzzle specialists because I've never been at a company where solving whiteboard puzzles is something we do as part of the business.
Audi e-tron GT – The Sound
https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers
I'd argue more specifically social media; countless snarky and sensational memes being promoted by AI to maximize views while propagating half-truths and lies. The Fox Newses and Huffington Posts provide the seeds, but it's social media that twists and amplifies the baseline propaganda.

Also, we have a POTUS that has normalized disinformation and lies as long as the ends justify the means. The extremes of both parties have been happy to take this up since those are the playground rules now. A fish rots from the head.
Not my area. My understanding: colours sync exactly on measurement (when you look at them).

> Knowing the color of one marble is enough to know the color of the other marble

I guess so.

> without information travelling between the marbles?

The marble colours are in sync on measurement. Somehow that info has travelled instantaneously. You just can't use it to send information, at all..

above is just my understanding. I have no background in this. Just a programmer.
> constantly bombarded by an endless stream of highly-targeted bullshit

Isn't this content from friends, family, and any other groups you greenlist? How addictive can they be if you've greenlisted them?
It's a common issue google are refusing to solve for some reason - https://support.google.com/drive/thread/6434357
Glad you like the Universal Hex format! And thanks for the headsup on the SVG - we noticed it earlier and there's a fix on the way through the site build(though whether you get 'Male code' or just bad kerning seems weirdly system dependent). Fix via https://github.com/microbit-foundation/dev-docs/pull/168 :D
Kamchatka marine life death caused by algae
I'd say the two biggest factors are:
1. Change of resources / hardware / performance
2. Change of business requirements

The first one should be clear. E.g. why does Java has arrays and primitives? Because they were needed for better performance. As hardware gets better and better, we can use slower techniques that give us other benefits, for instance development speed.

The second one is trickier. For example scalability. It just wasn't an issue for most people some time ago, but now it has reached many more businesses. This means new problems occur, such as concurrency issues or failures that where negligible before. These need to be considered now and many newer languages offer techniques that deal with these problems better than languages before.
Automatically sending Webmentions from a static website
Flutter WebView – A plugin that provides a WebView widget
The car I drive twice a week, I'm using it way less than 5% of the time, so I'm very definitely paying for the 95% of the time it sits unused on my driveway.

The garden, yeah, maybe, but I haven't used it in any capacity since last Friday.
Seriously though - while it is a trite, it doesn't seem like Facebook is actually hurting because of that. Besides the loud Twitter and HN screaming, what else really happened? Who here really believes that a Republican government will regulate FB which is very effective medium to spread their message?
It has. The well-meaning use of the word is trying to convey a sentiment that your views may not work for people who are less well-off or in various dire circumstances. Which is a good point to make, in context.

However, in the common use on the Internet, this word very often just stands for "you're better off than ${some group}, so your opinion is invalid and you should repent" dismissal/personal attack combo. Which makes knee-jerk reactions to its use, if not justified, then at least not unexpected.
But at what point does hard work and perseverance get any credit? You're not doing anyone any favors by lumping them into "privileged" vs "disadvantaged" binary groups, you're promoting victimhood mindset while virtue signaling your politics.
How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux
That's exactly the argument why you should go serverless. If all you do is keep a vanilla Linux distro running in a VM with occasional updates and some initial config-magic (webserver, certs, ip tables, ssh etc.) why even bother? The serverless isn't going to be any different, other than it just runs. No need to make a cron for updates, no iptables, no certs or webserver-stuff ... just put your app on it and let it go. On the other hand, if you actually need to tinker with your OS, roll your own. But what you described is the prime example of serverless target audience.
Australia counts 0.1% of the population as infected while the US counts 2.4% of the population as infected. Where in the study did they control for that when looking at the mortality (which is counted per population and not per infected)?

EDIT: My point is that the epidemic is not over yet and countries with a low immunity could be hit harder later on. It's just too early to compare mortality numbers.
For the Sinclair ZX81 / Commodore PET / Jupiter ACE Tynemouth software do clones (available via The future was 8 bit) which are accurate. I suspect however that doesn't really hit the "Reboot" you're looking for.
There seems to be apathy in Rust community towards using client-side js for syntax highlighting. Rust documentation and The Rust Book uses it for no good reason. Code in examples doesn't change, and the way they are highlighted doesn't change. In my opinion it clashes with the philosophy of the language - that as much as possible should be done before the code is run.

Aside from my pedantry, it causes computers to make more unnecessary computations and our civilization emits more carbon. It also affects me because I currently have an old CPU and it takes a few seconds for syntax highlighting to kick in. Every time I press "Back" in my browser, syntax highlighting needs to be recalculated as well.

Oh well, on the bright side I have an itch to scratch :-).
I have a hunch (based on family and friends in the US) that the US is the only country that the population did its best to not take the measures seriously. Here in the Netherlands masks aren’t required in stores, but people still wear them anyway. Same with Sweden and France when I visited there over the summer. (Though France does require it in stores IIRC).
Yeah but those "very specific circumstances" can come up at inconvenient moments. Certbot didn't run, disk got full, CPU hitting 100% for some reason, Debian needed to be upgraded, These are all things that need to be taken care of. Sometimes, right away and just when your family needs you.

I agree that it almost never happens, and that's why I run Debian as well. However, if you run production then things happen.
It has a 32-bit FPU, with single cycle add and single cycle multiply; it also supports 16 bit float storage format. It lets you run small models, but note that you can't fit big ones in flash anyways.

There are also some DSP instructions, but it's only 2x16 bit mulitply and 4x8 bit saturating addition, so not so much use.
No, it is content from clickbait farms forwarded by friends of friends and casual acquaintances of that crazy uncle who you always try to avoid at family gatherings. The ratio of content and updates from this core circle of people you might actually care about vs content created with the intention of being forwarded and going viral has been in a constant decline for more than a decade.
Micro Bit mini update – Adding microphone, speaker, more RAM and faster CPU
> there are async await semantics

There are coroutines in C++20 now. It has the async/await syntax except it's extensible to any kind of coroutine semantics, not just Futures like in Rust.

> locking is way better

RAII was inspired by C++. For making a mutex own its associated data, that's a simple template class which is a well-known pattern. You're also not forced to use it when it is not a good fit.

> The syntax is cleaner

You got me, I have been trolled.
Infographic: Product Searches on Amazon
Is this implying that somebody doesn't suck at UX?

Just no.
Mine NIMIQ
Facebook's hiring process has a tendency to benefit people who are good at presenting themselves a certain way and who can perform well when under pressure... One group which has particularly benefited from Facebook's hiring process are psychopaths.

I'm sure that there are good people working for Facebook but when I think about all the people I knew who ended up at Facebook, they all had psychopathic tendencies.

If the company is full of such people, of course there is no incentive to fix problems.
Knock knock, who's there? The Nobel Prize for economics
Definitely just slotted it in! So I must've been working with a massive 1Mb :-)
who is bob?????
Retro Games Ltd annouces Amiga 500 replica
> The communists were motivated by science and humanity.

No not really, communists are also another form of majoritarian political system.

So far there isn’t an example of any system which really builds on science and humanity. All the structures at present are based on majoritarian views without due protection to minorities or minority views. I have yet to see a system which protects minorities from the tyranny of majority.

Communist or Democracy both can survive only when administration appease majority and follow majoritarian views. Seen it first hand by living in both the systems.
Undo logging vs redo logging (except both are MVCC).
I'm not sure that's true. Mortality is very high in the elderly, so if it went tearing through the rest of the population, you'd expect more deaths, but nowhere close to what you see in the 60+ old age group.
Depending on which types of constraints you need to express your problem space, you could use plain Prolog or (more likely) make use of excellent constraint libraries like CLP(FD) for SWI-Prolog [1]. It's important to note that these are built into and tightly integrated with most Prolog. So people who point out that Prolog's backtracking search is too limited and/or slow are not taking the full picture into account.

I also recommend checking out Picat, a Prolog-derived language with excellent support for constraints programming and many built-in global constraints (a very important tool for larger-scale constraint programming) [2]. As of the recently released version 3 (featured on HN [3]), Picat also supports traditional Prolog syntax. IMO Picat is still rough around the edges when it comes to error messages, modularization etc, but if nothing else it's excellent for learning and for prototyping constraint models.

[1] https://www.swi-prolog.org/man/clpfd.html
[2] http://picat-lang.org/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24608997
> Serverless models don’t require users to maintain their own operating systems, or even to build applications that are compatible with particular OSs. Instead, developers can produce generic code, and then upload it to the serverless framework, and watch it run.

Instead, developers can build applications that are compatible with particular serverless frameworks.
I was just about to comment saying that it was nice that they mentioned Espruino in the article and it would be great to see an Espruino build without the limitations of the old device. Great to hear you're already working on it!

Any idea which Zigbee isn't mentioned in the press release, when it seems to be available in the new SoC - would it be problematic to make use of it in the micro:bit?
While I share the skepticism in the numbers from China and India, I believe that if they were anywhere near a similar per capita rate as the US there would be visible evidence. China attacked the problem hard and by all accounts seems to have succeeded. For the most part India seems to have just gotten lucky; maybe India's numbers will be adjusted over time to reveal some rural devastation, but I will want to wait for some real evidence before I group them with the cluster of fuck-up states like the US, Brazil, and UK.
While this looks cool it is far from useful. I took time to build such cluster with the Pies and shortly after it landed in the box of things I may need in the future. It's just too slow to do anything useful. Watching stuff compile or even boot was like watching paint dry. It is much better to get a bunch of used NUC if you are space conscious or just get VMWare Workstation or similar tool to simulate number of machines on your desktop.
Is shielding affected by an insulating layer, e.g. paper or foam used in thermal insulation or vapor barriers? Those are available with two layers of aluminum, in 4' wide rolls with fiber strands for strength, at much lower cost ($0.20 per sq ft) than overpriced shielding fabrics.

There are barrier variations, some do use aluminum, e.g. https://www.radiantguard.com/products/radiant-barrier-ultima...
I agree with the diagnosis, but I think there might be better solutions: not to do political distancing, but to make sure you interact more with politics from up close than at a distance. When you are talking with others and you are physically there, you have to look at people in the eyes, you have to consider their points of view more thoroughly, their personal circumstances; you can hear them reply too and notice they are humans, and last but not least, you can't say random sh*t because someone might get annoyed and actually punch you in the face. There are a lot of feedback mechanisms that are lost when we are just writing on the internet or social media. It's much easier to do armchair reasoning, find the perfect victim for your biased narratives, ignore others selectively, etc.

And it's not that hard to explain to people. Just like we have been educating the general public on how to eat more healthily with the food pyramid, we should do the same with online interaction. Stating opinions online is ok from time to time, but if all your interaction with the "real world" is not on the "real world", you are probably missing perspective, and you might get sick with conspiracionist thinking, extreme political polarization, biased narrative poisoning. Which we are seeing that, when reaching enough people, start to become contagious even outside the internet.

It's totally possible to interact more responsibly on the internet and social media too, but we kinda need to understand what these environments are lacking compared to the "real world" and work on more healthy practices.
Yikes, 600+ upvotes and no response? There must be thousands of users frothing at the mouth by now.
The cause appears to be due to a toxin produced by a micro algae bloom:

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-kamchatka-marine-life-death-al...
> Dealing with server infrastructure isn't business differentiating

I agree, for most businesses no it isn't.

However, saving on cloud hosting costs to replace them with a handful of dedicated servers in different data centres can make a large difference to costs, depending on what the cloud usage is. For a funded rocketship startup with lots of free AWS credits it makes sense to use AWS; for a steady state or long-term low income business, not so much.

Those costs can make all the difference to a business if the cloud rental is creeping up to look comparable with salaries.

I've used a combination of dedicated and cloud hosting for a long time. In general the dedicated systems are so much cheaper for the same amount of bandwidth and compute, and you can run VMs on them with great performance, so you can run everything interesting inside VMs and a lot of the arguments around upgrade downtime have completely gone away.

With some cloud to assist, you can even use cloud temporarily to cover the downtime for major upgrades such as replacing hosts or reconfiguring the cluster network.

99.9% uptime with excellent bandwidth is easily achievable this way, and you can completely avoid user-facing downtime due to planned upgrades, with a bit of planning around DNS and IP transitions, VM migration, overlay networks, things like that.

Sometimes at much lower opex cost (100x) than the modern cloud-recommended equivalents, although it takes knowledge and time to ensure it.

If you have enough redundancy and occasional infrastructure stress testing, a similar level of "optimise for sleep" is possible as with cloud deployments. If you care about this (not every business does), it does take some work and knowledge to produce and verify hot redundancy, and of course there are costs.

Things will go wrong, but they'll tend to be at the level of things running inside VMs and containers, rather than hosts failing. The same things which go wrong with cloud deployments anyway.

The cloud can be used alongside dedicated to provide some of that redundancy and extra scaling. Cloud is rented in small units of time, so you can use cloud as "free most of the time" cold-backup service, and if there's a burst in traffic beyond what the dedicated systems can provide, or if you want to temporarily improve geographic locality for a service.

It might seem wasteful to rent larger dedicated services rather than cloud-as-needed, but the cost differential has changed in the last 10 years to favour the former more than it used to.
What about reflections inside? I bet foil is very reflective and is good if you only need shielding from outer radiation.
Nobel winners are all over the world, regardless of when you pick, there will always be a chance it's "the middle of the night" for someone. With the current time slot that happens to be for people in the US.

They could pick a slot that's during the day in the US, but then it'd be night for someone else. What justifies the US importance to make such a change? Using the timezone of the committee as they do now seems as reasonable a compromise as any...
Workaround: terminate and disable Google Drive.
Mars is a good training ground as it does provide you something (gravity, abundance of resources), but after we're reading to take off the training wheels, moving enough resources from Earth to Mars to build a civilization is almost the same as moving the resources to ... not Mars - keeping them in space, in (probably rotating) space stations, and moving the whole station around to wherever the resources you need are (sunlight, water, carbon, metals, ...)
What I've meant it was my bias. I thought it were mainly the hardware components who drived the creation of most languages, but, well, Javascript wasn't created using this criteria :)
Another option that my kids have always liked is “Apple Pie Oatmeal”. Just normal old fashioned oats (not quick) cooked with a skinned and cut up apple and a dash of cinnamon. Make sure to use a good baking apple like a Granny Smith so the chunks don’t dissolve to mush. Serve with milk and brown sugar - it tastes just like apple pie.
An interesting article, but given the author, I would have expected some exploration of how Steve Jobs' RDF compares with Musk.
Oh I had forgotten about that, thanks!
As someone who had COVID-19, I've researched this issue a lot.

The single case presented here did have worse symptoms from the reinfection, but we do not know the antibody status after the first infection.

Other possible cases, involving nurses and such, also had much worse outcomes after the reinfection, but I think there is a selection bias in these cases.

There is the case of a Hong Kong man who only knew about his proven reinfection because he got tested in an airport, otherwise he was asymptomatic.

There was one case of a patient remaining infected for a very long time, but his infection immediately cleared after convalescent plasma was administered, so antibodies seem to work as expected.
> I would be curious to know what rate of death you would consider abnormal.

Well, clearly this is an abnormal number of deaths. Pretty much every week is statistically Very Unlikely.

But it is 20% higher than the background rate. Quitting a job as a day labourer and going into roofing is something like a 400% death rate. People voluntarily subject themselves to some pretty outsized risks.

> Wikipedia says that the U.S. had 291,557 combat deaths during WWII...

That is about a decade worth of car accidents. So on the one hand, horrific. On other other hand, the raw number of deaths is not the biggest issue at play. It didn't stop Americans marching over to the other side of the world to fight people.
When talking about the Sweden don't look just at the current year. Take a lookt at the previous and compare it to the neighbours.