skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fairness what the media deeds important and accepts as truth is as cherry-picked by some random newsroom editor.

That's why you see things like the Iraq war everyday on tv and then never again. People are still blowing themselves up over there. There is always a bigger story with a greater theme that uses daily news stories to paint a broader picture.

People who seek out truth themselves are more likely to find it.
How to enhance old batch files by adding GUI
How to Secure Network Services Using TCP Wrappers in Linux
We could also be wrong in the other direction. The European COVID could have been a mutation to the point where the 15% or so death rate that Italy was seeing was actually the natural death rate for COVID. COVID could have been far more devastating to children, who do not have the immunity adults do. It may have been completely resistant to a vaccine for years, like viruses like HIV.

The idea that uncertainty about COVID reduced the need for a lockdown in March April when we knew that China was scared enough of the virus that it shut down Wuhan completely, and Italy was seeing an epic disaster, is completely backwards. The uncertainty at that point was MORE reason to lock down, and use fiscal and monetary tools to handle the economic effects which we did know about and could predict and defend from, until we got a better understanding of the virus.

Sweden, once again, is very instructive. Their PHA’s position was to basically protect the eldest by insisting that anyone showing symptoms stay home and not go to care homes to work or visit. But our complete lack of knowledge meant that Tegnells did not know that asymptomatic carriers ans transmission existed, which essentially made a mockery of this plan and wrecked any hope of Sweden handling the pandemic well.

The idea that just because there are no proven studies that show what works and what doesn’t means we don’t do anything is beyond stupid. A lack of confirmed evidence means we need to take actions based on the slight evidence we do have, while weighing the cost of those actions to individuals and society, and whether those costs can be mitigated or not.

So, for example, requiring masks once we had a suspicion that it was spread via aerosols and droplets as opposed to fomites, which was the initial understanding, meant that mandating masks was a no brainer. Worst case scenario if you’re wrong is that people are out $20-$30 each, but you will more than make that up in the reduced spread of other diseases that we do know masks would help with, such as the flu, which has basically been non existent this year thanks to COVID measures.

Lockdowns were obviously more drastic, and the complete lack of knowledge and disasters unfolding in Wuhan (remember China constructing 2-3 hospitals in days to handle what happened there) and Italy, and uncontrolled rise of cases in other parts of Europe and the US meant a lockdown was almost necessary.

Once we did find out more about the virus, once we got testing under control, and now that doctors understand treatments better leading to a much lower death rate, a full lockdown like in spring does not appear necessary. Distancing and mask wearing and gathering outdoors seem sufficient to control it. When people do not follow this leading to a spike in cases, temporary, localized, soft lockdowns make sense until we get people to follow this.

The contrarians in Sweden and the Great Barrington Deckaration (which is hilariously not scientific at all, and is basically completely wrong at this point) are not holding a contrary scientific viewpoint. They are holding apolitical viewpoint which they are promoting with the absence of science.
The web is horrible now because of the tooling and the functions.

The tooling is bloated, very heavy codebase and the million ways to do the same thing even gave a way for Google AMP and despite developers hating it AS A USER I always tap on the search result with the lightning icon because it means that it will load fast and give me the text I am looking for right away.

Also, the functionality or business model usually needs to recognise you. So the first time you visit a website you have to go through the install process.

To use a website, the first thing is, you need to decide how much you should be tracked so you have to deal with the tracking settings(BTW, no EU doesn't make anyone to put tracking consent popups, it's just that somehow the Web people decided that they must track and this is the way to do it).

The next step of the website installation process is, creating an account. If the website provides periodical content it will slap you the "subscribe to our mailing list" pop-up. For some reason the close buttons usually work slow for me, takes multiple taps on the (X) to close this. It will have this annoying fade-in, fade-out effect with the content barely visible beneath it.

Then comes the monetisation part of the install process. I will be presented with %80 suggestions to do something else instead of using the website that I just installed(in other word, ads) and there would be %20 content and most of the times that content would disappoint me because it is yet another low quality thing that was made to take me there and show me the %80 of the page and collect my information.

Do you know why the old web was great, in my opinion? Because we were freeloading the great pre-web content and the tooling was just advanced enough to show it to us but not advanced enough to make money from us.

The interactivity made the fun even greater but what we were doing was freeload the old content, create some new content and do all this on some investors dime. Now these investors own the thing and want their money back back and they are not sponsoring the "open web", so anyone trying to do anything on the web must pay from the pocket or make the experience horrible so can monetize it.

The web is dying because no one wants to pay for it. The people who used to pay for it (the investors) no longer pay, the remaining good quality web is just a sidekick for their actual business.
Yes. Hyperfocus and distractibility seem both related to trouble with managing attention.
They must or someone else will.
That is not the only mechanism for keys to leak. Timing side channels may reveal the key and not any of the old messages. The key could be guessed if it was inadvertently generated with a weak random number generator. The attacker could have an older backup of your device, which contains the long-term key and the older messages, but without forward secrecy they could then use the long-term key and traffic captures to decrypt the newer messages that weren't in the older backup.
They are announcing this ahead of the re:invent keynote. Now I'm more curious what they will announce later this week.
> It's clearly just looking for people looking at another computer or otherwise glancing elsewhere before entering answers

This assumes that the AI only picks up on patterns between eye movement and cheating, and not correlations between unrelated dimensions of data in the dataset that the model was trained on.

Famously, such correlations created AI systems that resulted in disparate impact on legally protected classes in the US.

Also, these systems are usually ill-equipped to handle anomalies in an accurate capacity.
Kind of hilarious. This is barely cloud computing compared to the rest of ec2, which has per-second billing...
Covid-19 Likely in U.S. in Mid-December 2019, CDC Scientists Report
Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.
Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates).

> The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours.

This almost sounds like they are using first sale doctrine to just lend it for a day. Like I can lend a movie but I can't make my own movie theater (right?).

Also I'm very curious of these are in-tack macs or shucked and put in a frankenstein case of dozens.
The fact the principal engineer was doing this does not mean doing this is a principal engineer skill. There's lots of software engineers who can deal with coredumps which is pretty much the same idea.
Are the SNS or research reactors not able to simulate the necessary neutron flux?
This seems super hacky though
These 'anti-cheat' softwares don't actually prevent cheating. One of my teachers tried to use one called MyPerfectice (thankfully we persuaded her to switch). I think most of these are built without any understanding of the constraints set up by the browser. I don't know about the others but MyPerfectice gives you 4 or 5 window going out of focus events before making your attempt invalid. The funny thing is that they allow students to upload files from their system and allow focus to be lost during that. So if you click the upload button, it opens the OS file selection window and you are then free from all the checks they set up. Open a new window and cheat as much as you like.

I'm wondering if it's possible to just do a custom build of Firefox/Chrome that does not trigger these out of focus events.

Coming to the video streams, just record a 1-2 minute video of yourself staring into your screen from your webcam and loop it through OBS. No one will notice anything. For MyPerfectice, it is even easier, they have their camera controls exposed as unobfuscated global objects. So you can essentially do something like `camera.stop()` and the webcam light turns off.
Tamil has Ural-Altaic root words(similar to Hungarian, Finnish). It is different from all other scripts/languages of south India.

Telugu and Kannada are probably more Indo-European than Dravidian.

Malayalam is entirely based on Grantham script. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_script

Dravidian is just geographical classification. Map gets it wrong at least for one language. If not the entire Dravidian category.

I suspect that classification would piss off all the four southern states of India. This is close to linguistic blasphemy for that region.

On a diff note: no mention of Georgian(Caucasus) and Basque languages. They developed independently than any of the other languages of the world.
As with everyone else, the answer is CI/CD. Having run a team that built out its own Mac build farm... it's a pain.
not to mention expensive.
It's probably very expensive, or maybe they haven't updated the aws landing page yet.
Yes they do:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2018/01/24/Hospitals-overwhe...

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-flu-demand-2018...

https://www.dispatchhealth.com/blog/ers-are-overwhelmed-with...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/overwhelmed-by-flu-cases-some-e...

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-c...

In Italy and Spain, aged care centres were abandoned by Eastern European workers fleeing the country before border closure, leaving residents ill cared for.

In New York, symptomatic patients were ordered back into aged care homes to free up hospital space.

These conditions would not have occurred without hysteria and excessive fear.

COVID in Sweden is about as deadly as the 2009 flu wave: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

Sweden is on track for an annual number of deaths in 2020 mostly the same as prior years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Forest fires, cars, power plants join list of factors for Alzheimer's disease
On the other hand it seems a major genetic risk factor for COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals, and that should be less common among Sub-Saharan Africans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3
Hey, don't drag me into this.
Re: Invent 2020 Liveblog: Andy Jassy Keynote
> It's authoritarianism to politely suggest that people do things differently?

There are frequent demands in the comment section of HN to break up Google, Facebook and Amazon.

There is a comment in this very thread suggesting nationalizing Facebook and banning advertising.

So no, your straw man does not stand.

There is already an open web. You are free to host whatever you want. The authoritarianism I speak of is when you tell other people what they can and cannot do, politely or not.
The idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious.

And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before.

This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
Kaavan’s not-so lonely journey to freedom in Cambodia
> But it's a "drug"

It is. It is not like other 'vitamins' and shouldn't even be called that way. It's a hormone. It is fat soluble, it will linger for quite a while.

> even though we know that it has effectively zero risk

Not true. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-too-mu...

Most people don't consistently take it in high doses for it to become a serious problem. It doesn't mean it's without risks.
Similar situation here. I needed to optimize a critical C++ function that took two 3D line segments and returned a transform matrix that would transform the first line segment into the second. I was able to completely remove the matrix multiplications from the function by using SymPy to pre-compose the scale/rotate/translate matrices and simplify the result, and the benchmarks showed a significant speedup.
Yup I think we all noticed this.

This has sparked me to think about all the platforms disallowing political content during election season. I know personally google shut down ads for popular content that highly sourced and generally accepted as fact, but because of the climate shutdown.

At this point I’ve been contemplating that maybe we are wrong. Fact checking and suppressing articles on these platforms feels like a good thing to do; but we can now see even with those measures an abnormally large portion believes obvious and blatant lies.

The fundamental problem is fact checking and suppression are an intellectual fight to a system of belief, and in that fight intellectualism never wins, never has. Flat earthers will not accept science, antivaxers will not accept science, people claiming a rigged election will not accept facts, and putting up warnings are ignored because it doesn’t fit the belief

Platforms are just the megaphone, and even when that megaphone is turned off the believers will find what they need to fit their system of belief. In the short term the fight needs to happen at the source; Fox, OAN, Brietbart, etc.... as long as the content is being generated people will find it to validate their belief system. Facebook, Twitter, et la are hardly blameless but the attack on them we can see didn’t stop the problem
But they run ARM docker images, not x86.
Ask HN: Will GPS and LPs of Y Combinator Be Charged with Election Interference?
It seems likely at this point with all the ILLEGAL election interference.
Vitamin D taken orally needs to bind with Calcium or Mg.

Sun Lamps may be a better option for the at risk group.
You think the US gov should just nationalize a private corporation? That would have much more disastrous implications than you think.
This will be huge long term for enabling cloud AI to automate human tasks when interacting with a computer.
/e/ provides its own Apps store, which have many apps including ones from F-Droid, but if you like you can also install something like Aurora and install any app. Not 100% work with MicroG but it is still great for privacy.
I’ll just point out the last one, because it’s terribly wrong, and how wrong it was pointed out in HN over the last couple of days itself.

Sweden, through early November, has as many deaths as it has had in its worst entire years before. And Swedens death numbers increase beyond the current year, as they attribute more deaths towards the previous year in the beginning of a year.

Sweden is on track to have 10-20% more deaths than normal.
Please find the link because about 2 / 3 months ago there was a story that was exactly the opposite finding.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006

I've been monitoring HN for Vitamin D info very closely.
Not much of a winter either, besides South Africa. I wonder how rates were there this last August?
I believe you're sincere, so I'll address each of your points in turn.

> half of them believe the Russians planted the current president via election fraud

> the other half believed that the current president's loss in the recent elections is invalid due to fraud.

The first half believe there was malign Russian interference on social media and direct collusion with the campaign. The second half believes mail-in votes were fraudulent. Voter ID would not allay either of these concerns. But let's not get bogged down in details, because I understand the wider points you're trying to make.

> the common trope is that black people are unable or unwilling to get an ID, but that in and of itself is a pretty racist implication

Not black specifically, but urban, working poor and the homeless. And it's not racist, it's rooted in facts.

> Any US citizen can go to their local DMV and get a state issued ID.

This costs time and money. At my local DMV in California, any interaction takes 2 hours of standing in line. That's not counting the time it takes to get there and go back to work. For a person without state ID means taking the bus or riding a bike or walking.

Working poor people are hourly workers, and DMVs are not open outside of normal working hours. So a working poor person must sacrifice half a day's wages to apply for an ID. And that's if all their documentation is in order the first time (don't scoff; I've had to go back multiple times because I was missing something or the official made a mistake).

Compared to that, an office worker can easily take a half day off with no loss in wages. Is this not a regressive tax in order to exercise a fundamental right?

> What it does do, is restore just a small amount of confidence in the election process

That's the stated reason for voter ID laws. However, good, fair, voter ID laws would also make provisions to ensure that the poor are not disproportionately affected by this new requirement. They'd keep DMVs open for longer or on weekends (in fact some states did the opposite after passing voter ID laws - by closing DMVs or reducing hours). They'd waive fees for low-income people. They'd automatically register graduating high schoolers - do it the same day as yearbook pictures. They'd let volunteers supervised by government employees run voter ID registration stations at grocery stores, churches, and community centers on weekends and evenings. Collecting documents and taking pictures isn't particularly hard - you could get some Boy or Girl Scouts to take ID pictures for merit badges.

Given the hyper-partisan nature of American politics, a good voter ID law has a very small chance of being passed anywhere. The point of voter ID laws, as they are written today, is to suppress the urban poor vote. So the side proposing the laws has no incentive to help the urban poor get voter ID. And the side opposing voter ID laws takes umbrage to anything that adds friction to getting voters in the booths on election day, fearing (rightfully) the intentions of such efforts.

How do you solve all this?
The fact that you use the term "flesh of murdered babies" to refer to embryonic stem cells, which even the Catholic Church simply refers to as "aborted fetal cell lines", indicates that you've bought way too heavily into the right-wing American culture war.

But anyhow, to answer your question despite the terrible way it was asked, no, the Moderna vaccine did not use embryonic stem cells in its development or production. Some partners, such as NIAID, did use embryonic stem cells for in-vitro testing of the vaccine: http://phillycatholiclife.org/life-affirming-choices-3/covid..., but the Catholic church does not consider that to make the Moderna vaccine unethical, as it's its direct development and production have never involved the use of embryonic stem cells.
There’s a good blog post from Macstadium explaining the recent EULA changes. 24 hours is mentioned there. https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
AWS have pretty heavily modified "pc"s they use to fit all their requirements for most of their servers.

I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them.

Do you think Apple is delivering heavily customised and rackable "Mac mini" servers to AWS?

Or is there a 3rd party converting Mac mini suitable for AWS.

Or is AWS actually rack Mac mini computers?

I wonder if this will be an AWS exclusive for N amount of time?
I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.
Liberals Shitting Themselves in Arizona Today
...and Apple was able to throw hardware at the problem because they got TSMC's manufacturing process. When everyone else is using 5nm, let's see if any of this other stuff actually matters.
In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.
> Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System

Similarly, other Mac server farms use Apple hardware. I can't think of the name right now but I remember one popular provider racking trash can Mac Pro's.
But, without the recently invented therapeutics you mentioned (vitamin d supplements, sunscreen), people will have negative health outcomes from living in an environment they are not suited to.

There is no need to get emotional here - just accept the scientific and natural fact that in the long term evolution means that people are highly A/B optimised for their environment - there is a reason why in nature there are different ethnicities in different climates

Your approach is well intentioned, but it will lead to unnecessary suffering
There are no excess deaths apparent in October or November for Sweden: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
Where do you see that? There's no price for mac1.metal instances listed on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

EDIT: It shows up now.

Ah, it presumably comes directly from @flardinois's reporting for TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to...
> Is there a reason to make this distinction here?

The original method, by Whitted, that looked much better than any previous methods, and yet looks horrible by today's standards, is ray tracing. It had no global illumination.

The method based on solving, explicitly or implicitly, the rendering equation by James Kajiya, and one that has built-in global illumination, is path tracing.

The distinction is not important for buzzword hijacking hacks, marketing gimmickers, and snake oil salesmen.
The study doesn’t even attempt to measure whether or not masks protect others, which, until recently, was the only claim health organizations were making. So the study doesn’t even attempt to study the primary effect of mask wearing.

Beyond that, as the link tm Taleb’s blog posted by a commenter below shows, if anything, the study shows a positive effect for mask wearers.