skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is.

If you remember, this is exactly what China did. It failed because despite how hard you try to tell people that it's nothing to worry about, people will start to realize that hospitals are overrun. Your solution is not only demonstrably poor, but is also how we ended up in this mess. It's a tall order to tell people there's "nothing wrong" while nurses are working 12 hours shifts.
Big no on Big Sur: Mullvad disallows Apple apps to bypass firewall
The world isn't entitled to knowing whether something I'm alleged to have said or done really happened or not.

For the people who lack imagination: suppose I'm a public official, and a photograph comes out depicting me doing some kind of "dirty" sexual act. Maybe it's real; maybe it's a deepfake; but if confirmed to be real it certainly would do reputational damage. Non-repudiation by definition prevents me from disavowing it, to no social benefit, and it's an anti-feature, in the sense that the large majority of users would prefer to have the ability to repudiate certain message contents than not.

Non-repudiation should be opt-in.
The last time this happened to me, it turned out the update had just set the screen brightness to zero. Took me hours to diagnose.
As a hand-waving technical pedantic, you are literally correct.

But, "literally" actually has a specific meaning in english, and it's not always to be literal.
>how do you get your head around disappearing messages?

I get my head around them by thinking they are bad? As in, not good. An undesirable property.
this would persist kafka traffic to database to make it available long term and at high speed :)
Did you read the new policies? It sounds like in the future it will be way more difficult to get repos taken down with DMCAs, and even for legitimate ones they'll allow devs to respond or fix the repo before it gets removed.

Maybe GitHub didn't nail it this time but in my opinion it takes some mental gymnastics to not see this post as a really positive turn from GH.
I think you're right, the article definitely oversteps its bounds and ends up claiming that Apple apps can bypass all VPNs and firewalls. The correct summary of the situation is probably the first tweet in the article:

> Some Apple apps bypass some network extensions and VPN Apps. Maps for example can directly access the internet bypassing any NEFilterDataProvider or NEAppProxyProviders you have running

But then the article sloppily goes on to say:

> What Wardle found is that the Mac App Store on the latest macOS bypasses any firewall.

(emphasis mine)
I find it unlikely that you would have much insight into the severity of disease in the 400 people in an entire community unless you just mean that no one died or hospital admissions were low. Because covid (or the flu for the matter) can be awefully severe and miserable and long lasting without requiring hospitalization.
Okay thanks, that all makes more sense now.
Key innovations taking e-scooters
And if that isn't enough of a reason to not use them, surely their gimping of their website on mobile should be. I DONT WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP!
How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important?

I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity.

Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely keep a dev from making much progress on other issues that day.
Seems technically possible - example.com/12_3456 would calculate out pi, read 12 digits starting at position 3456, then convert those digits to ascii and you'd have your result. Given how far into the digits pi you'd have to go to find the exact right sequence that matches, eg, https://google.com, though, I suspect the resulting position number would be longer than the original url!

Also, conceptually, it seems like you're not so much using pi as a database as you are using it as an encoding mechanism: turning "abc.com" into a string of numbers whose length is relative to the original string. At that point you might as well pick an easier encoding, like base64. :)
I tried upgrading a 2019 iMac with Catalina to BigSur. It failed after the black screen with the apple logo and a count down, by going to a screen I've never seen before that said something like "failed to _apply_ update". If I restarted, then I would land on the same countdown screen until it inevitably failed again.

I ended up deleting the hard drive and reinstalling Catalina, but the weird thing is that now my 2019 iMac with Catalina plays the boot chime, which is the only part of Big Sur that worked for me...
Show HN: 'Google Earth for investors' is launched
The way that people invest money has a big impact on how the world evolves. So far, making financial profit has been the key incentive for the majority of investors. But with the increasing urgency of global societal and environmental issues, long-term investments require a completely new perspective, one that helps maintain the world through forward-looking investments.

Globalance Bank aims to respond to this need. As a bank they want to increase transparency in the investment world, and help their clients and potential new investors understand the extensive effect of their wealth on the world.

Globalance World is is a personalized digital world map that allows you to discover the extensive impact and returns of your investments.

Dive in and assess in real-time how sustainable and future-fit certain investments are and compare different portfolios with each other. Search among over 6,000 assets and see how they perform in terms of warming potential, footprint, megatrends exposure and financial return.

Ultimately the platform enables Globalance Bank to obtain their mission to increase transparency in the investment world by offering new perspectives beyond financial returns.
Literally, in TFA :

> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.

https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...
Wow, as a fellow solo founder, building in public sounds like a great idea! I've always dismissed it in the past, but that's because I've never considered it from the perspective of getting some of the same benefits as having a co-founder.

Will definitely try to give it a shot.
how would this compare to something like a Protectli?
Its pretty crazy. Report about a bunch of people denying COVID exists with their last COVID induced dying breaths.

www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/11/16/south-dakota-nurse-intv-newday-vpx.cnn
Another github for data:

https://www.dolthub.com/
It's interesting that he asks for this solution but not the more easy to implement solution to the other side of the problem (which you can do if you run your own server): remove the DKIM signatures upon delivery to your inbox. Google can just add in a tag in their database that says "this message was verified". Or at least make it an option for users if they want that ability.

In the case of Podesta, the emails were stolen from his gmail account. If the headers weren't there, the messages would have been unverifiable.
Oh yeah, it's certainly not small! It just looks that way if, like me, you're used to seeing the mercator projection. :)
I suspect that if the system gets overwhelmed, various processes will break down as they start accumulating tent cities outside the hospital and run out of equipment.
Wow. This blog post is appalling. I completely disagree with it.

Consider this excerpt from the blog post:

> But DKIM authenticity is great! Don’t we want to be able to authenticate politicians’ leaked emails?

> Modern DKIM deployments are problematic because they incentivize a specific kind of crime: theft of private emails for use in public blackmail and extortion campaigns. An accident of the past few years is that this feature has been used primarily by political actors working in a manner that many people find agreeable — either because it suits a partisan preference, or because the people who got “caught” sort of deserved it.

> But bad things happen to good people too. If you build a mechanism that incentivizes crime, sooner or later you will get crimed on.

The author seems to be arguing that if after a certain point it becomes impossible to verify whether an email was genuine or not, that would somehow be a good thing.

This reasoning seems harmful to me. It's incredible that the author treats this moral argument as self evident. Let me state my objections clearly.

1. The truthfulness and reliability of the historical record is important. The fact that politicians are protected from blackmail when they write incriminating emails is utterly insignificant by comparison. Is the principle being defended that protecting politicians from blackmail is stronger than a public interest in having a historical record?

2. Making historical emails impossible to authenticate after a certain period of time makes it more difficult to prosecute crimes. It helps criminals, the very thing the author claims to be trying to avoid. If a politician, or anyone for that matter, sends an incriminating email which is evidence of the intent to commit a crime, why on earth would you want to make it easier to cover your tracks?

Seriously, can someone present a moral argument for why this should be adopted? It seems only harmful to me.
Or take it to the next level: https://hackaday.com/2020/11/11/homebrew-slide-rule-gets-bac...
Why would new users start at 1200? Aren't most beginners below 900?
While I never used anything Apple, I’m a Mullvad user. This just popped up in my RSS feed and I thought it would be relevant.
The blood libel stuff is absurd. Unfortunately, we have blackmailed politicians. So many of them have been caught doing absurd and evil acts that the absurd possibilities become oddly believable. I'm not saying it happened... but I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Pizzagate being "real" is ill-defined. Things happening in the basement of a specific DC pizza place seems unlikely, though not impossible. For example, the claim that it lacks a basement is reasonable but unproven. We'd have to excavate to be sure that there wasn't an unauthorized basement that is now filled-in to hide evidence.

We do know that pizza-related codewords are used by pedos, and that pizza-related codewords are used in the leaked Podesta emails. Are they unrelated? Not many people will rent a specific number of slices of pizza for a specific number of hours, but that is exactly what the emails reveal. The number of slices is commonly thought to mean the age of the children, but it could be the number of children.

Would you consider pizzagate "real" if everything was as stated, except that the actual building was next door to the pizza place? Supposedly a near-by building was owned by Epstein.

Would you consider pizzagate "real" if the pizza place was just a location to meet up, but not where any child was actually harmed?
This is going to be a massive class action lawsuit, I think. I wonder if firms are just trying to find the right post to take advantage of this.

I think the good lawsuit elements are:
-incorrect statement about some big group with defined membership. Maybe a Facebook group with 500k+
-harm as a result of the statement, preferably with something that is made better with like 20 counseling sessions at $200 a pop
-lots of shares of the incorrect statement

So it could end up as something simple as a form where group members can choose to get cash as some percentage of 20x$200 unless they opt out.

Facebook would pay $2B (500000x20x200) with the law firm taking 30%.

This should be repeatable and will turn Facebook/Google (through YouTube)/Twitter into the new mesothelioma/lung cancer cash cow (see Owens Corning and Phillip Morris).
I second this motion.
Dashing to IPO
I am honestly surprised people still us Yelp, I have yet to find them useful at all
(Presumably) Sarah Iannarone, who declared herself "the Antifa mayor" during her campaign. She lost to incumbent Ted Wheeler.
Dev Workflow for AWS CloudFormation Custom Resources Using Sam
The important factors for Vitamin D are that it's cheap to manufacture and has well known (low) risks. We have reasons to believe that it might help fight Covid, especially in deficient individuals, even if we do not have controlled studies.

Making it freely available and recommended for anyone who doesn't obviously get enough already is a reasonable strategy. It might not work - the correlation may not be causal. But it might be worth it anyway, because the downsides are minimal.

You could make roughly the same argument for wearing masks.
TikTok has 2 more weeks to unload US operations, regulators say
Show HN: I pulled items from 5k online stores and created Tinder for shopping
> Re-paste from my comments below

Please don't copy/paste HN comments and certainly not in the same thread.
> because researchers didn’t appreciate how sensitive CovidSim was to small changes in its inputs, their results overestimated

As a software engineer who has written simulations before, I can assert that this is almost always the case with simulations. The more complex the phenomena is that you're trying to model, the more likely it is that the simulation is completely wrong because you got a single parameter slightly off.

That's why I'm skeptical of climate simulations too because they are insanely complex and they're certainly missing a lot of parameters. For example, just off the top of my head, I wonder if climate models factor in the fact that tree populations will evolve to adapt to increased CO2... I don't think they can model evolutions of tree populations because it gets into genetics. Which is a level of complexity far beyond what even the top supercomputers can simulate and even then, a lot of things would have to be simplified to the point that the model ends up having nothing to do with the real world. The butterfly effect is one of the reasons why complex simulations are not useful in predicting anything.

Simulations of complex phenomena are completely useless IMO.

You can always cherry pick one simulation out of thousands which is reliable for a few years in a row but they fall apart sooner and later so you end up using a different simulation every few years... And people keep coming up with excuses every time saying that the supercomputers were not fast enough the year before.
I literally dread ever having to Google for help on Windows related issues because the various forums are some of the worst cesspools of crowdsourced ignorance out there[0]. Every question has a dozen or more responses and almost none of them have anything useful to say. Absolutely awful.

I suspect the reason the quality of the community support for Linux is so much better is that the community is smaller, self-selecting, and generally more knowledgeable versus the majority of the Windows community. Up until recently it required a certain commitment to run Linux on the desktop and that still bleeds through.

Normally when I buy a new computer I just get a Macbook Pro but, with Apple seeming a bit off the rails, and working from home making a desktop machine more viable again, I'm thinking about building my own machine. I'm also seriously considering Linux because Windows 10, I'm afraid, drives me to distraction most days (I have to use it for work unfortunately).

[0] The StackExchange sites aren't quite as bad, but the other forums are absolutely grim.
I think you'll get more responses if you add "ASK HN: " in front of your title.

A very similar question was asked recently and is probably still available on the "ask" page or at least through search.

My opinion on this is that a PhD is only valuable in certain fields or job types. Having a PhD will help you get a research position, teaching position, or select 'high-end' jobs. You can still do research jobs or teaching jobs with a masters, but people with a PhD would likely rise to the top of the resume pile over a masters degree candidate. What I mean by 'high-end' jobs would be things like Data Science or AI/ML researchers/leads for Google, finance, etc.

That being said, if your current company will pay for the PhD (or allow you to pursue one while paying your normal salary) and you have the time to do it, then it just becomes a question of how much do you want it.

I thought about doing an online DSc for data science since my company would pay for 90% of it. But in the end I felt that it wouldn't give me enough benefit over my MSIS to be worth that 10% and, more importantly, my time. I have come to accept that I'm just a midlevel dev with no potential. I'll work my job (that I hate) for as long as I can and save as much money as possible so that one day I can quit.
The largest percentage increase may have been in that age group, but since the base rate is very low, it still amounts to few deaths overall.
It was one account, but during that time period, there were tons of reports, every single week, from miscounted deaths. The No Agenda Podcast guys covered it pretty well.

If it's just a couple here or there, there are miscounts for sure. But with news report after news report from local stations, I think the issue might be enough to be statically significant, or at least warrant investigation and not outright dismissal.

Furthermore, Sweeden seems to be doing alright as far as fatality numbers across their population for the year, even though their covid orders were much more limited:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

> because I don't trust you to have used the other 42 citations in good faith.

We're getting into this really interesting era where we're attacking people's views for their sources .. even though there has been obvious bias in all mainstream reporting for over a decade. If you're not willing to entertain viewpoints you don't agree with, that's on you, not on me.
Hmm, "counting the number of requests made to Apple Maps for directions" is different than people actually going places, though. If you look at the Google location data reports, the retail and recreation category was down 16% when the Apple graph was at its peak: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-08-14_US_Mobil...
The Future of Tun and Tap VPNs on macOS
Most people on this list have done similar shenanigans on Windows and Linux too. No OS/manufacturer comes without these kinds of edgecases.
What will the world look like after Covid-19?
> That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed.

This has not been my experience.

If you work at a company where it's possible, I strongly suggest shadowing a supporter for a day. You'll leave with a 5 page long rage-list of issues that weren't adequately captured (and would take you a few minutes to knock out) and a new relationship established that will help unblock that bottleneck of information flow.

IME, this is in part because supporters aren't as familiar with the technical aspects and don't know how to frame the issues they encounter in a way that would get traction with either PMs or engineers. As such are not well prioritized relative to issues that are fleshed out technically. I've worked at a company where supporters were spending huge amounts of time resolving issues that I knocked out in 5 minutes after shadowing and materially improved their operational efficiency.

In a word, what's missing is a culture of ownership.
Just as a reminder, don't forget and buy more apple products. that will teach them
It's not farfetched to believe a crack-addicted wealthy individual who seemed to live a very "promiscuous" lifestyle, would have forgotten some cheap laptop at a repair shop. These people are humans, at the end of the day.
100% agree with your take in this comment and your others in this thread. Thanks for the nuance and perspective!
Flexible, Wearable Sensors Detect Workers’ Fatigue
> Has this kind of repudiation ever been tested in the real world? It's hard to imagine a court throwing out email evidence because it lacked a DKIM signature.

They're more likely to ask their expert witness to testify about the evidence, and the deniability of the DKIM signature could be brought up by the expert witness as a reason to distrust the evidence. I wouldn't expect lawyers to discover this argument from first principles.

Has it ever happened? Not that I know.
I have been a Vim user for as far as I can remember. Now I am transitioning to Emacs. I keep hearing that you can "live" in emacs but I can't seem to have that revelation, yet.

For example, I often find myself quit Emacs to jump to a different directory just to open a file. I think I am doing this wrong. I have tried Dire/Neotree but those are not providing enough convenience imo.

Do you you a workflow or setup to "live" in emacs? Note: I use pure Emacs and not spacemac or Doom.
I've read this story countless time, and after having worked in a few places, I realize that software being missed is quite rare.
“ In the west of China where there’s a lack of ultra-high-voltage (UHV) power lines Bitcoin mining may be one of the only suitable consumers of the excess hydro energy. Without UHV lines, much energy is lost to resistance during electrical transmission. Bitcoin mining can, in theory, transfer the equivalent value of the energy to the main cities in the east of China, avoiding loss due to resistance in the lines. If you think of a transaction over the blockchain network as the movement of stored energy it is frictionless and akin to sending an email.

This is just one example of how the bitcoin blockchain could be used to harness energy in a more efficient way. And it’s a good example of how the world of energy and the world of the blockchain are beginning to blend together.”

Does anyone else find this argument dubious?
It's like free speech - you either support it whether or not you strongly disagree with the speech in question, or you give up the right.

Edited to change wording to be more nuanced and convey my actual beliefs.
> spares [...] are not best practices, they are the basic cost of doing business

I think you overestimate some professional people's income (especially if it's sporadic) and underestimate their other expenses.

I've known many freelancers who buy a new laptop twice a decade at most. It will be the single most valuable object they own, and may be the result of saving for months and careful consideration of what to buy, intending it to use it for many years.

A spare good laptop "just in case" is not a realistic option for them.

Most of them could buy a second laptop if circumstances arise where it's absolutely necessary, but it would be hardship. So they wouldn't get one just as a "nice to have", a spare laptop lying around doing "nothing". Especially if it's going to be outdated by the time you have some use for it. Events where you need a spare device are quite rare after all.

That might be below "the basic cost" of running a sensible business, but for people on median and/or sporadic incomes it's a significant cost, only worth bearing if and when it becomes necessary.
New sensors track dopamine in the brain for more than a year