skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The line of reasoning was that masks were in deep shortage, and in the scenario it made more sense to get supplies to front line medical staff, and particularly to avoid people hoarding masks. The effectiveness of masks was purposely downplayed to affect desired outcome of the population.

No. The line of reasoning was there was a deep shortage and with the information they had at the time, they did not think that masks were necessary or useful for the average person. They didn’t lie and say masks don’t work, they said masks don’t work like people think they do and they didn’t believe it was necessary or productive to wear them. And masks don’t provide meaningful protection to the person wearing them. They provide meaningful protection to the people around the mask wearer. So going and getting a non-N95 to keep from getting covid, was and is wrong.

> “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” - Dr. Fauci, March 8, 2020…How on earth could we pull a 'moral 180' on some behaviour so quickly without really any new information?

This can’t possibly be serious. We have been learning new information about this completely novel virus every single week. It is a completely new virus we knew nothing about a year ago. That statement was made on March 8th, when there were a few thousand cases in the US. We had a very different understanding of the fatality rate, the R naught value of infection rates, the methods of transmissibility, the incubation period, the rate of asymptomatic cases. The list goes on.

> This is a pretty good example of what propaganda is because it demonstrates the moral ambiguity of 'truth, communication and outcomes'.

This is a terrible example because it relies completely on both hindsight bias that people knew then what we know now about a novel virus, and on a basic lack of understanding of how masks even work, failing to understand the statements made about them.

What was true about masks 9 months ago is true now. Wearing a non-N95 mask will do very little to protect you if you are exposed to Covid. Wearing a mask will drastically reduce you transmitting the virus to other people. The mask shouldn’t be seen as an individual prophylactic. The mask should be seen as a collective protection measure.
What has burned me the most is that I actually did pay about $10 way back when for Scrabble and thought I was good to go for the forseeable future. They eventually phased this app out though I believe under the guise of incompatibility with an Android update, and later renamed it "ZZZSCRABBLE Free." I have never felt so burned- this was clearly a "Heads you win, Tails I lose" situation. For online play, maybe I understand since there are costs involved in running the service, but why can't I just play the computer?

I think this may have happened again because I see another version that I had installed called "zzSUNSET SCRABBLE." Its maddening, I can still play the Scrabble game that I have on CD ROM from 1997 in a VM, but can't play Scrabble in an ad-free environment on my phone in 2020.
It's a virus, of which we have cured maybe 2 in history, last I checked. There have been viruses chronically infecting people for many years. So, we could be looking at 30+ years of covid, unless it puts enough impetus on us to cure it, and perhaps more virii.

However, if not, perhaps we do treatments, to make survival rate high enough so no one worries, but is merely wary to get checked. Or, perhaps we have 30 years where even if a single person gets it, the whole community needs to shut down for weeks, and people become suspicious and grow animus toward neighbors, being spiteful and lashing out more frequently, through rudeness or worse.
Or, there's Sweden's route, which I'm kind of envious now. I'm surprised I haven't seen more countries jump in with both feet.
What other options am I missing? Or which of these would you strike?
As a non-native English speaker, your blog post and your interactions and feedback to replies and suggestions to fix some "mistakes" on your blog post is an inspiration for me, because I've always struggled to start writing fearing that I'll make "banal" and "obvious" mistakes that will decrease my credibility on the subject I'm writing about.
You should try RxDB. It is based on pouchdb and therefore supports offline first [1]. Also you can use the graphql replication so that you are not limited to couchdb backend. Also there is a course made by hasura about using RxDB with their backend [2]

disclaimer: I made RxDB

[1] https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb

[2] https://hasura.io/learn/graphql/react-rxdb-offline-first/int...
Are you sure that it removed figlet, and didn't just change the config in the alternatives system? I have both installed on 16.04.

Try:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config figlet

I have two choices: /usr/bin/figlet-figlet and /usr/bin/figlet-toilet

to see what package provides each binary:

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/figlet-figlet

figlet: /usr/bin/figlet-figlet

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/figlet-toilet

toilet: /usr/bin/figlet-toilet

you should be able to choose figlet-figlet with update-alternatives if you want to use real figlet. But IIRC toilet is intended to be 100% backwards compatible, so there's probably not any real reason to do that (?).

Or, you should be able to invoke figlet with 'figlet-figlet' on the CLI.

...assuming, of course, that my assumption is correct and it didn't actually remove figlet... :)
Heh, in the state I used to live in there was a huge controversy regarding a power company, corrupt politicians, amassive infrastructure project failure who's cost was passed on the the consumer, and strange mergers
. People were promised compensation and the the three cent checks eventually trickled in.
Well, the open API isn’t free as in beer.
This was an "accident" waiting to happen.
Show HN: An interactive live map of regional European Covid-19 cases
Yes. Also, I’m assuming[a] that a GPU would take about the same as a CPU because despite GPUs having billions more transistors, they have a lot of duplicated modules compared to a CPU which has many more different modules but probably only one or two of each (per core).

[a]: My knowledge of creating hardware is very limited. So I could be completely wrong.
Unless I'm missing something, the substantive difference hereis that GrubHub is still ordering from the restaurant that the customer is ordering from.

Your comparison of pretending to offer GrubHubHelp but then going to competitors is like if I ordered McDonalds, and you brought me pasta.

I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with what GrubHub is doing, but I could see them needing to clearly note the relationship. There are lots of personal shopping/delivery services which phone in orders and go pick something up without having a pre-existing relationship with the restaurant.
Unrelated to the contents of the article but why do some of these cookie disablers “take time” to process? Is it just to discourage people from disabling them?
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This is both true and false.

I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems.

So more engineer then scientist.

Choice for college path.
Computer Management or Computer Science.

Once of those was about buying software and managing people.

Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.
This is typical of Bluecoat and the like.
I dont know why you are getting downvoted, the mortality rates are on the WHO / CDC website etc. FOR EVERYONE TO READ!
Ask HN: Run Home Office on Solar?
Anyone in U.S. know of a solar kit that is reliable, and easy enough to run laptop and possibly lights off daily? I live in a high sun exposure area & need it to be pre-constructed or else I'll lose interest after purchasing ;)
> Well, that is a take. It feels like it must be exhausting to have that take, and I certainly don't share it, but I acknowledge that it is one.

That's the kind of comment to which dang would usually say something like:

"Your comment would be fine without the snark. Would you mind reading the guidelines before commenting again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html"

But, of course, Mr. Ptacek has 330,000 karma points. Every community has its elite. (Funny that this happens on a thread about rules and enforcement.)
I don't think I will ever be comfortable shaking hands with strangers.
Especially given the domain is davidwalsh.name, and the article isn't on a subdomain or subdirectory or anything, this is all the more confusing.
Frank, thank you for the good words. We feel privileged to help your family capture its amazing stories.
i'll go even further... the other thing about it is that the owner has to have the money is order to bring the lawsuit to court. also, depending on how backed up the courts are, it could be years before the case brought into court by which time the owner could be out of business.

it really is horrible how screwed up our civil court system is.
Show HN: Nucleus – Unite your communication in a centralized platform
No, running apps remotely. I specifically don't want to run desktops within Windows. Having remotely running programs on my desktop within my native window manager (or even on Mac and Windows) is much better.

I mainly use it when logging into headless servers by the way. Saves me setting up a complete desktop environment there. All they need is the GUI apps I need and some X libs.
I think the main problem is grubhub don't make it clear that this isn't "officially supported". Imagine someone set up a website claiming to sell your services, without making it obvious they have nothing to do with you, then after accepting jobs would ask you to do them (ok, this comparision doesn't quite work, but I think it gets the basic idea).
Formal rules only make sense when there is sizeable bureaucracy to execute them. Otherwise they just get used by privileged individuals for their own purposes, adding a veneer of legitimacy. And creating bureaucracy is just not compatible with software communities - developers want to focus on software, and continue to do software outside of work to get away from heavyweight management and HR. The rise of COCs have more to do with the corporate colonization of software communities than the desire for social justice.

If OP had just been informally ostracized for whatever they actually did that made them not liked, they likely wouldn't be writing this blog post. They might find a different community, they might learn the unwritten social rules, or they might never learn. But they wouldn't need to write a blog post attempting to exonerate themselves from the black mark of a "COC violation" and rationalizing how the system attacked them.
Data Quality for Everyday Analysis
CoCs has made life scarier.

It wasn't until PyCon that I considered anyone could be for for a joke(?) told to a friend next to you, overheard by someone who was supposed to be a developer advocate!.
I am fortunate enough to wait out anther year, I hope herd immunity would have kicked in by then. Not sure about these rushed vaccines will wait for six months after they are released.
For people who are generally interested in these kind of identities relating a fraction to a recursion, please check out the generatingfunctionology book [1]. The basic idea is to define f(x) = sum_n f_n x^n where f_n satisfies some recursion equation. Very often you can find f(x) as p(x) / q(x) where p and q are polynomials in x. Now you can simply evaluate f(0.1) or more generally f(b^-l) where b is a base and l a positive integer, which gives you on the left-hand side your rational number as a fraction, and on the right-hand side the decimal expansion.

[1] https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/gfologyLinked2.pdf
The parent commenter may not have been referring to those in the military.

There are many non-military citizens that love guns (that by itself isn't a problem), but do have a sick fascination/desire of being in a firefight and who frequently talk about being willing to lay down their life for America....all while being incapable of wearing a mask. They may be referring to that hypocrisy.
> It was at -1.5780591, 13.

...at least at the surface.
The fraction, the decimals, and the series, are in the same base.
Not sure what kind of response you expect here, but I’m ready to go back to the old ways today.

Incidently, the way New York and Sweden have tackled the virus have been the most consistent. There was a large first wave, but no second wave (measured in deaths).

On the other end of the spectrum there are countries such as Poland with no initial first wave back in March. But it seems you can only go for so long before the virus turns up.

But it is very hard to do a good response on all counts when you have to do it for 18 months (time from first outbreak until virus is expected).

Links:
Poland
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/poland/

New York
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/

Sweden
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
> why shouldn't those folks' ratings of the food be factored into the restaurant's rating?

Because a lot of people are not capable of differentiating between product and delivery, and poor delivery (which they have no control over in this case) shouldn't result in low ratings. Have you ever looked at Amazon reviews? A good chunk of them seems to purely give their stars based on delivery.
So, you’re telling me there’s a chance? Dumb and Dumber, got to love it

But in all seriousness, there was so much printed money thrown into stabilizing things by the Fed that a fear that the economy isn’t ready to pick itself up without that money being injected isn’t unwarranted... I just don’t know what you do about that concern...
gwbas1c did not reject the idea that CoCs could be used as a weapon. They rejected that is their only use case.

barumi referenced OP article as an example of CoC as a weapon.

pindab0ter argues this not a fault in the CoC itself per se, but in how it was enforced.
At least for Chinese buyers, they like BC for the weather, and east coast for convenience of flying back to China, and Canada in general for the now defunct investor VISA programs that made PR/Citizenship relatively simple.

>money launderers

I wonder if evading Chinese capital control is technically money laundering if such capital controls does not exist in Canada. That's like punishing Chinese dissidents for speech in Canada because said speech is illegal in China. Rich people get to escape repressive governments too amirite?
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I think one of the big issues is that if this is done honestly, telling the customer that this is what's happening (and the restaurant), that's ok. But both the customer and the restaurant were misled into this transaction.

But perhaps that would have led to a much lower CR on the site. Who knows.
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.

Assuming there's something to go back to. General purpose computing has been limited by the rise of mobile. These devices are both limited by battery and CPU and more constrained in their abilities by tightly controlled operating systems.

And yet surprisingly many young people don't have anything better. Most still have laptops but it's also not a great hardware platform for torrenting.

Internet connections have been moving away from wires to more convenient but less spacious radio. And even wired connections are often degraded by carrier grade NATs.

Now, the very tools for gathering content are under assault. We need to act because a free and open Internet is not one of the laws of physics and corporations are capable opponents.
A lot of companies do things like this where they pretend to be another company to scoop in business as a middleman. Recently googled a tradesperson and called the number on the top result that came up. It quickly became clear that I wasn’t talking to the outfit I was trying to call but someone trying to insert themselves in the middle and collect a fee. When I grilled them it became clear what was going on.

I eventually hung up and found a new number which put me in touch with the company directly. When I told them what happened they were like “yeah (insert name of one stop shop for home repairs) has been doing this... we have nothing to do with them but they keep trying to pretend we work with them and put out adverts under our name.” Super frustrating and I can sympathize with the restaurants where the same sort of thing seems to be happening.

The likes of Google could of course police this a lot better but they’re happy to take the money for the ads.
Thank you for the good words!
It is going to crash for several reasons

1. Trump, and the Senate, are doing everything they can to tank the economy ahead of a Biden victory, so it can be blamed on the democrats
2. Covid
3. When a republican is president, more money can be extracted from our economy, which is what the stock market represents. When a democrat is president, more money is invested in our economy, which is not necessarily the best for the stock market.
4. When a republican is president, they bailout failing companies. Whenever a bailout is imminent, stocks go up. This is because risks have been socialized, meaning that they are no risks.
5. When a republican is president, they lower taxes and pay off corporations more. This results in stock buy-backs. Instead of reinvesting in their company, owners use the money to buy back stock and consolidate power. This buy-back causes prices to spike, due to increased demand and decreased supply. The spike is temporary, because it does not represent an improvement in the company's prospects, just a consolidation of power that benefits no one except the powerful.
6. When Biden wins, all the countries that have been sinking their tentacles into our system to keep a puppet president in power are going to pull back, and do everything they can to make Biden look bad, so that another puppet will get elected that benefits them and harms US interests. We will no longer be slitting our own throats, so the aggression will pick back up. More terrorist attacks, and more clashes with other powers around the globe.
What about "don't touch your face?" Who is advocating to start touching your face? If you don't have to touch your face, don't do it. I've heard that advice well before covid and all throughout the pandemic.
Honeywell announces its H1 quantum computer with 10 qubits
A middle man is responsible to the consumer. A subcontractor is not. Grubhub does not tell the consumer whether they are acting as a subcontractor or middle man for a particular restaurant. This is deceptive and harms the restaurants who do not subcontract Grubhub.
What's the difference between the Soviet Union and the USA?
In both countries you have freedom of speech, but in the USA you can use it more than once

In America you can call the President an idiot. And in Soviet Russia, you can also call the American President an idiot.
> Almost zero actual technical work was accomplished.

This is 100% my problem with this article.

At no point is it ever implied WHAT or WHY or WHERE actual work is being done. Only HOW they organize it. It looks to me from the article they are using every “cool” tool and seem to care more about the how than the why. And that’s fine if it’s the point of the article which I guess it is, but it seems like it’s “reliably” structuring a husk.

I defend the costs of IT and in this case the costs of an SRE approach - but these aren’t the things that make you money and keep your business afloat.

When I spend a couple weeks making a system wide event bus to get messages from n to m that’s cool and I need it... but customers don’t pay me for that. They pay me to fix a problem they have.

I’m very cautious of articles like this that say all “the right” things but don’t even hint at solving customer problems.
The main reason why we won't know which vaccine works best is because they're being tested in separate studies against placebos, rather than in combined studies against each other. This is partly by design, because getting the various pharma companies to actually work with each other was deemed infeasible.
> > Restaurants may not be able to handle the additional load placed on them by these services.

> I empathize with this one and don't really have a rebuttal.

Isn’t that classic supply and demand situation? Raise prices to drop demand until load drops to acceptable levels. More money for the restaurant as well as acceptable workload for the restaurant staff.
If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen

The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery

(This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
The thing is, you're not exactly ending segregation here.

What I see is an ever-shifting goalpost of harmless aphorisms that are newly considered 'offensive' by a bunch of upper-class people. What does that do for George Floyd's family, exactly? Did it prevent Jacob Blake from being shot in the back a few months later?

If you want to embrace critical theory, you should include the critical theorists in the analysis -- what's their power incentive? What do they stand to gain? Let's not just assume they're saints but everyone else needs an inquisition.
How are you certain that the food you are getting is from the establishment you ordered it from? Why can't I run a shadow kitchen pose as your restaurant and steal your business?
The problem is I dont really feel like an engineer or a scientist. I'm definitely not a good engineer partly because I don't care enough, but I'm neither smart nor educated enough to be a scientist. I'd personally describe myself as more of a hacker, but thats not particularly useful for much.
They don't. No single person or organization can speak for a decentralized movement.
Yep, you wrote that above. But it doesn't help.

Ordinary people still get in trouble because others enjoy being judge, jury and executioner.
There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid.

Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).

What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.