skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember when Twitter was having a field day thinking that this instruction was the reason why the newest iPhones benchmarked well. There is no "magic instruction" that gets you a 40% increase in benchmarks. None. It would literally need to be multiple times faster and executed like half the time to get that increase, which is clearly not the case for a JavaScript floating point conversion. It took someone from the JavaScriptCore team replying with "we don't even emit that yet" for people to see sense.
We could be entirely self-sufficient in wheat etc, if we chose to be. Our current reliance on imports is just the free market at work - more money in dairy, and we're right next to a country that grows wheat far more efficiently.

I've watched quite a few wheat fields I grew up near become dairy pasture.
Another one short Vim cheat sheet
Why should I care? How should the accuracy of qualitative comparisons of this with past pandemics affect our decision making? If this isn’t as bad as the Spanish flu, how should that change our response to the current pandemic?
New Zealand has 5 million inhabitants. That would mean these other countries would need to have billions of people (2.5-5B people). I suspect you just missed a decimal when looking up the number.

Being an island and having a government that doesn't openly reject science certainly helps but they still needed to actually get it done. Which they did. Now they are in the comfortable situation that they can quarantine visitors and sit tight until there is a long term solution. Meanwhile their economy can function pretty normally.
A CLI tool to interact with Elgato Lights
Funny, I have a small JavaScript app I have abandoned because I find developing JS so awful. Now that I have ramped up in Rust I am very tempted to rewrite it as Rust has first-class WASM support. Unfortunately I'd still need JavaScript for the UI bits.

IMO: Rust isn't the easiest language to learn, but the investment pays off handsomely and the ecosystem is just wonderful.

EDIT: I meant "to learn" which completely changes the statement :)
This is a great effort, but in my opinion, uphill battle.

If you have Linux, you are likely a casual gamer, and your best option is to stick to a gaming service like Stadia.

And if you are pro, Linux is not an option for you anyways.
Well, back in the day if one kid got chicken pox other parents would bring their own children around so they could get the infection done and dusted. The younger the child the better.
Can I get clarification on your second sentence? Are you saying that approaches like New Zealand's are destroying civilization?
We carry on as normal, like we are. We have to quarantine for 2 weeks when coming into the country, that is the price. Are you under the impression that something more onerous is happening?
>> It unwisely rejected the parsimonious case and chose tremendous complexity.

> Swift's keyword syntax isn't complex at all.

Yes it is, particularly compared to the parsimonious options. Either parens or Smalltalk-style keywords can do the job, so you absolutely, positively do not need both.

Particularly, if you are going to have keywords, you just don't need parens. So it's already more complex than it needs to be (not parsimonious). Just explaining the various omitted or extra keywords takes 4 pages in the Swift book, the entire Smalltalk syntax fits on a Postcard.

What is complex or not obviously depends on what your baseline is. If it's C++, Swift might seem simple (though many disagree).

> (e.g. Python) so it's a tested idea.

The question was not whether it was tested, but whether it was a parsimonious design, which it is not. It was also not a good design, because it led to a number of follow-on problems that they had to incrementally fix while adding even more complexity.

Python is not a good comparison because they didn't really have a choice: they already had the paren syntax, which they could hardly deprecate.

However, choosing that design without a backwards compatibility restriction is unconscionable, IMHO, particularly if you already have a different keyword design all over your code-base. That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Anyway, even the baseline keywords-in-parens is complex and more complex than it needs to be (because it isn't parsimonious), but then you get follow-on problems: blocks inside parens are really ugly, so you add trailing closure syntax. Yet another special case, which is very different from arguments inside the parens. But then you discover that sometimes you need more than one trailing closure, and then you need yet another special case, the open-keyword-trailing-block syntax, which is different yet again.

Of course, instead of having 3-4 different syntactic mechanisms, you could have chosen just the one and not needed any of the others.

> You don't have two keywords, you have an optional variable name. It's intuitive at the first time you see it

No, it's absolutely positively not the least bit intuitive. And it makes no sense, because internal variable names have no business leaking to the interface. If you want to rename the names of your variables inside your method, it changes the signature! Not even C does this.

> that doesn't mean it's 'tremendous complexity'

Although the argument could be made, I wouldn't, not by itself, no. However, this is just one example of countless others, see for example Rob Rix, whom I quoted before:

Swift is a crescendo of special cases stopping just short of the general; the result is complexity in the semantics, complexity in the behaviour (i.e. bugs), and complexity in use (i.e. workarounds).

I also talk more about it here:

https://blog.metaobject.com/2015/05/i-am-jealous-of-swift.ht...

> is a bit too harsh to Swift,

Nope. The comment I replied to made the indefensible claim that Swift was parsimonious. Which it's not. Not even close.
Your 'of its kind' phrasing does all the work, and it's not justified. Plenty of viruses don't create useful immunity, from flu to AIDS to the other seasonal coronaviruses, where immunity length is in the order of a few months...
um, I'd argue respectfully that "unprecedentedly dangerous" is the phrase approaching the delusional.

when this whole thing started, I did what any self respecting analyst would do: try to calculate the numbers and calculate the likely outcomes and risks (primarily to my own family).

And I kept arriving at the conclusion: it's statistically bad in the sense of spread and infectiousness, but as a virus and comparative lethality it's not THAT bad. The main danger was from responses/strongly compressed infection timing, and assuming you didn't overreact and your health system held out, if your family were in their 50s or younger and healthy, existentially it wasn't much worse than the flu (and for the youngest, possibly even less dangerous).

but what I was scared of was the human response.

Because it targets the old and infirm, and because they largely control most wealth and power, and because we largely don't have mature ways of dealing with mortality in common cultural discourse, and because a lot of our countries have become increasingly partisan, I figured the response would probably be bad/chaotic/ and have lots of badly targeted over-reactions, unintended consequences, and probably a lot of name calling, fear mongering and virtue signalling. our media has just gone crazy.

6 months later (and in the lockdown in Melbourne), I stand by most of my initial judgements. One problem locally (and maybe NZ shares this problem, I dunno), it's that the trump/Johnson swing to the right/populism left the opposition (we have Labor in power locally too, so the opposition is conservative) being relatively flirting with anti-science and anti-int
tellectualism as well as general juvenile behaviour and responses, so even though one might not fully support local actions (I don't fully support the lockdown extents in both Melbourne or NZ long term), there isn't really a viable political alternative presented either.
Yeah typically when you fly on a plane the rest of the passengers were forced onto the plane by proud boys.
Probably because one who already knows of proton would understand such a title, but one who does not would understand the HN title better.
We have many vaccines that aren't long-term effective, and we have strategies for those.
> The point has been about whether more powerful figures can use their platform to drown out the free speech of others

The article isn't focusing on that aspect, though. It's suggesting that falsehoods and propaganda can flood the zone with so much shit that people are just tired of trying to sort though it to figure out what's actually true and what isn't. The modern (post-modern?) demagogue doesn't bother with curtailing free speech, they just put out many false narratives like Putin does.
"The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up."
Influenza mortality rates are subject to exactly same problems as covid rates. The same caveats apply. And, influenza deaths are estimated - we assume that some percentage of pneumonia deaths are flu deaths without ever doing test.

You debunked nothing. All the per age IFR comparisons of flu vs covid I had seen has covid killing more people for 30 years old too.
I'm maybe a little older than what you had in mind (25) but still young enough to really grow up with Facebook. I think even in my age group, you saw tech skills primarily being taken up by people my age as "you can make a lot of money with this", or at least that was the mindset of most of my classmates at a mid tier state college.

Most of them seemed to have taken CS classes in high school and enjoyed it reasonably enough or have had CS recommended to them as a major since you could easily get a job in it (like the other reply to your comment suggested).

On the other hand, my interest in CS and programming was a lot more old school. I got on the internet for the first time in the mid 2000s and learned to make basic websites for my hobby and then JS, PHP, MySQL to make them interactive. I'm not sure I would've followed the career path I'm in now if I'd been born 5-10 years later. The epicenter of my hobby moved to FB/Discord/Instagram/Youtube and if I were growing up now I think I would've tried to share my hobby through those platforms and therefore never gotten into what I did now. I'm lucky I was born the time I am and thanks for an interesting question to think about!
QALY (quality-adjusted ...) is a similar term used in many contexts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

DALY and QALY compared:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29431169/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
> COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths.

I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like that. But it's certainly plausible that deaths like that would lead to excess deaths.

In the UK specifically the health authorities were estimating in late July that around 21,000 people had died due to lack of access to health care during lockdown: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/29/lockdown-has-kil...

In the US there are a lot of concerns that dementia patients in particular are dying due to the isolation caused by lockdown measures: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus...
We can come and go.
Data Visceralization: Enabling Deeper Understanding of Data Using VR
He references his own terrible seroprevalence study in this paper.
Tourism is (was?) our second largest export earner. We've just had to choose which economic hit we take.
> it enables the following games to run:
> Red Dead Redemption 2
> ...

It is interesting because RDR2 has yet undefeated DRM.
... which were removed in SPARCv8 (64-bit) because nobody used them.
I think OP meant technological and process maturity, not age.

I worked for a Rackspace competitor in the mid 2000's and can confirm that every business decision in that space is driven by short-term growth and revenue. When I worked there, the pay was terrible (although I didn't know it at the time) and the "servers" were literally rows upon rows of cheap tower PCs shoved into wire shelving. The owner of the company made millions but never invested it back into the company beyond whatever was required for horizontal expansion. (He preferred to spend it on exotic cars and vacation homes.)

There is close to zero long-term thinking in this space and as a result, a decade or two later, cloud providers are eating these guys alive.
Wait.

Do you mean JS inside of browsers themselves ? Or JS running in another manner
There's a classic SMBC which speaks to this. It's not quite realistic, but it give you some thought: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-09-02
Is Technology Making Things Better?
Did we lose occupations to this effect and if yes, which?

Like, work we would still like to pay someone for, but now the minimum wages are too high.
My issue is that your comment reads far too much into the motivations of the author, and you create a strawman stereotype that they are a corporate drone. You have no right to assume how the author prioritises nice vacations with their [partner] and kids. Hacker news guidelines: “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

It is fully possible to love a 9-5 job and still care about your career progression and take self pleasure with your job. The author could be a believer in “work hard, play hard”.

“while your career will fade into a 9-5 job” is easily read as using 9-5 as a cliché for a dead end job. I too have a negative attitude towards 9-5ers, because I prioritise lifestyle and alternative achievements over the corporate ladder, and I think 9-5 has its own severe risks.

I agree that the article comes across as work focused, but the article is still relevant even if you want a cruisy job and to glide through your work life. Any career needs to avoid the risk of complacency, leading to zero development, leading to permanent unemployment or being stuck in a hell job when external circumstances change.

Edit: Let us presume that the author is hyper-career focused. Why choose to use a personal values attack against that? That’s their choice man.
Looks like the link was changed to https://gothamist.com/news/ny-lawmakers-gave-cuomo-unlimited...
Don't trust TDP numbers. In the Anandtech Tiger Lake review the AMD 4700U used actually 30W instead of 15W for a significant time of the benchmark: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review... I'd guess a "15W TDP" AMD CPU would consume 30W continuously if the cooling could cope with it.
Please No. Let the hardware do best what it's good at, being simple and running fast. Let the interpreter/compiler layer do its thing best, flexibility. There have been attempts to move the hardware 'upwards' to meet the software and it's not generally worked well. No special purpose language supporting hardware exists now that I'm aware of - lisp machines, smalltalk machines, Rekursiv, stretch, that 1980s object oriented car crash by intel whose name escapes me...

Edited to be a touch less strident.
Food delivery and direct financial support don’t protect people from getting covid by themselves. They would help people isolate... so you’re still talking about locking people down to protect them.

Free N95 masks would help to the extent it increases the number of people wearing them. But that’s hardly aggressive. Aggressive would be mandating that old/vulnerable people wear masks (which is another form of lockdown).

Free healthcare would help with the financial situation of those that get the virus and survive, which isn’t exactly the goal.

Priority vaccination... well, there is no safe and effective vaccine. Maybe that will be a good path six months from now. But if we had one, the goal would be to vaccinate everyone. Priority would be nice, but would ultimately only shorten the months-long window for infection (vs those without priority) by a matter of weeks. So that would be helpful, but not a game changer.
NZ has done far better economy wise than countries that went for “don’t harm the economy”
Why restrictive immigration may be bad for U.S. entrepreneurship
Excess death in places where hospitals were overwhelmed (Lombardy, NYC, Madrid) was so many standard deviations above normal values that I am not even sure how we can be having this discussion.

Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out. In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what it is.
Fixed width instructions allow trivial parallel instruction decoding.

With variable length instructions one must decode a previous one to figure out where the next one will start.
I guess the question is... for how long?
No, it doesn't. Spotify has a premium model but even for premium users, there was no way to insert any kind of delay or temporary pause in a playlist. These tracks were frequently inserted into playlists to make up for Spotify's lack of a basic feature -- that's why it got so many streams in the first place. There wasn't any kind of fraud from the Artist, Spotify just got salty because they realized a an album like this would mean they have to pay for a feature in their own software.
Buy stuff that needs to be reliable from reliable sources, i.e. not ebay. RS, Mouser, Digikey, whatever is available in your country.
The numbers you cite aren’t 10x higher than median.

Observing that mortality is above median doesn’t prove that the virus is the cause of those excess deaths (e.g. we know that there were a lot of unreported heart attacks during a the same period), and it doesn‘t prove the specific claim that the IFR is 10x higher than the flu.
What scales such that the NZ approach would not work for a larger population?
Only if you managed to build a viable business model around it.

Which seems to be a risky endeavor in comparison to subscription SaaS.
The border controls and quarantine stopped importation to the community, the lockdown on gatherings stopped transmission within the community.

Both measures together likely stopped the flu just as they stopped the coronavirus. Keep in mind that both the flu and Covid are transmitted in the same way, respiratorily, but the flu is much less contagious, so eliminating transmission of the coronavirus is almost certainly also going to eliminate transmission of the flu.

Australia saw a similar effect, the flu season in NSW was one tenth of what it normally is.
Deaths in the U.K. are ballooning, as are hospital patients.
I first encountered this idea and "cost disease" in this SSC article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

There are several interesting follow ups as well; I think this is one of the most interesting and important ideas I've ever read about.
Of a person, yes. Of a language, I think the intention is clear.

Note that this is syntactically ambiguous – a lovely feature of English. Try writing a sentence that isn't.
Same here. I was happy to find a small bug in the code so I could work somewhat more on it.
this is free but is it open source? I could only find an option to download via the package manager but no links to the source or how to build it myself.
Easy exchange of electronic business cards, when you can control who is standing in front of you at a busy conference, but you can’t control the hundreds or thousands of Bluetooth devices that might be around you?
> Buying back shares lowers your denominator and magically increases EPS, which drives the price higher.

It also lowers your P, so the net effect should be 0, no?
It would be nice to see also “out of season” vegetables, so that I don’t have to assume that if it’s not on this graphic that it’s out of season.
Thanks for sharing. Nice articles in your blog.
I think every Subaru shipped comes with Level 2 now? So for $23k or something, you can have a properly made car with lane keeping, traffic jam assist, adaptive cruise control, etc. etc. It won't turn at stop signs for you but feels much safer when considered with today's state of self-driving.
Plus, hunters tend to eat their quarry.

The main exception is probably people who hunt feral pigs in Texas, but those are just an ecological menace to be exterminated.
Same, XPS 15 9570 (2 years old I believe). It's almost as good as new. A little electrical whining when charging and putting the ear against it, but that's since day one. I've kept a cloth in between the screen and keyboard, kept everything clean just by rubbing a cloth a few times.
> Have you worked with Swift at all?

Yes, regretfully.

>> Keywords? Or parens? Both!

> Why should they be mutually exclusive?

Because of parsimony. The comment I was replying to made the claim that the original Swift design war parsimonious. It wasn't.

> Swift's named parameters are great!

Named parameters are great. Swift's implementation of named parameters is deficient, and not parsimonious. Yes, even that design is better than not having named parameters, but once you have named parameters, you don't need the parens.
But if you're Valve, and your windows catalogue of games run on Linux, you can sell cheap consoles to play your catalogue of games
I can imagine that is a problem for some applications. So again, cores/RAM/... basically essential stuff, more important than TPUs or whatever.
You look exactly the target audience of Tailscale.
And how many years was Madoff a successful investor returning great ROI if you gave him your money?
I had a big one at reading one phrase, "lithic braking"
OK, go on, trash my karma too for the perfectly valid comment, you angry narrow-minded internet warriors, I don't care, I'll create a new account when you trash this one completely.
Being an island is a huge advantage for sure.

But China is also kicking ass. Everyone in a city gets tested if there are even a few cases. Thailand also seems to be doing ok. Italy also has it under control for now.

There are clearly strategies that would work for non-islands.
>The problem with windows for personal use is that it gets in the way too often with pop ups, notifications and crap ads inside start menu.

I turned those off within a day after I installed it and haven't had those problems in years. I do recommend getting the Pro version as it makes that stuff more easily configurable. Some people will take issue with that, but for me as a power user it's worth it to have that additional control over something I use all day every day.

ETA: I use linux and MacOS at work, and linux is quite good for that. I find MacOS infuriating though - worse than Windows even for basic window and file management functionality, and worse for configurability.
Why is he being down voted?

And why do so many people have almost near certain confidence that there will be a vaccine?

We have never made a successful beta corona virus vaccine, some doctors think it impossible because of the the nature of respiratory viruses.
It has nothing to do with your particular situation. This is a reasonable assumption to make if somebody comes and wants a solution in Excel.

But ok. So what you are saying your Excel was reviewed by somebody else. How is this any different from reviewing somebody else’s code?

I work in a company where even the least technical analysts are capable of using numpy. We have libraries to use Google Sheets as input-output data. So you get the best of the two worlds.

What does Excel resolve here?
You're making some interesting claims there. Got any sources?
Heh.. As somebody who has studied a little Japanese by the end the voice in my head had taken on that of a Japanese person struggling with English..