skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of it is a panic mode--December is going to be a very cruel month. And if the medical system collapses under strain, a mob will be at public health officials' throats screaming bloody murder. "Why didn't you shut down restaurants when you could?" I don't envy their position.

What they should be screaming is, "Why did you squander the last lockdown? Why aren't we testing and tracing on massive scale? Why didn't we build more hospital capacity in the time we had?"

The state squandered the time we bought ourselves with the last lockdown. For example, where is the army of contact tracers we were supposed to hire?
Just had a corporate counsel seminar on this: Under federal and most state harassment/discrimination laws the company actually can’t fire her for any of those “protected” activities unless the accusations of racism are shown to be untrue and made in bad faith.

I personally do not have enough info to decide who is telling the truth in this case.
So conversely would you want to be warned that your tires are too low when its warm because if it were cold they would be under pressure?
OK, we agree on the facts.

I'm just more pedantic and count a terrible increase still as an increase.

Mostly just to be precise, so that we have words left for the situation when there's an actual decrease. Like the collapses in individual countries you mention.
A cynical assessment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320102
The policy could be shorter: we don't monitor you.
Their proposed evaluation strategy is interesting - playing Go. And they cited Googles AI research using Go as reason behind it.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Elements of Typographic Style is an excellent introduction to typography written with so much passion it makes you want to become a typographer.

We’re mostly programmers here, but The Soul of a New Machine describes the creation of a computer, which is not something people do a lot these days. Fascinating stuff
The downvotes on this are proof that people don’t want to navigate the benefit trade offs.

I just feel sad. Sad for people who have died from this. Sad for their loved ones. Sad for small business. Sad for people who were already struggling. Sad for my own children. This is just awful no matter how you slice it. We’ve got to acknowledge that we only have awful outcomes to pick from. We just disagree on which outcome is less awful and I’m sad that we can’t even do that.
I've seen them used with data.table, but I don't use them myself. Reason being that I don't want to load a lib just to make my chains look a bit better. I usually have chains short enough that it's okay doing

DT[..][..][..]
Nice writeup, but the word "Pancriticalism" showed exactly zero hits for me in Google.
Before the pandemic, did the quantity of litter decrease over time? I mean not drastically but subtle enough to notice?
There's a reason they are called "hard" drugs.
The SLS reuses liquid hydrogen engines and solid rocket boosters from Shuttle by law, which has made it antiquated, massively expensive and paradoxically five years late.

“ In 2011, Rep. Tom McClintock and other groups called on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate possible violations of the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA), arguing that Congressional mandates forcing NASA to use Space Shuttle components for SLS are de facto non-competitive, single source requirements assuring contracts to existing Shuttle suppliers.”

“ In the summer of 2019, a former ULA employee claimed that Boeing, NASA's prime contractor for SLS, viewed orbital refueling technology as a threat to SLS and blocked further investment in it.”

“ In 2019, the Government Accountability Office found that NASA had awarded Boeing over US$200 million for service with ratings of good to excellent despite cost overruns and delays”

“ On 1 May 2020, NASA awarded a US$1.79 billion contract extension for the manufacture of 18 additional RS-25 engines. Ars Technica, in an article published on the same day, highlighted that over the entire RS-25 contract the price of each engine works out to US$146 million, and that the total price for the four expendable engines used in each SLS launch will be more than US$580 million. They critically commented that for the cost of just one engine, six more powerful RD-180 engines could be purchased, or nearly an entire Falcon Heavy launch with two thirds of the SLS lift capacity.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch-sys...
Zig has the best C interop I've ever used. Just a simple import and it figures it out:

const c = @cImport({
@cInclude("types.h");
@cInclude("stat.h");
@cInclude("user.h");
});
You should be able to avoid using mktemp by:

pman='some-pdf-viewer <(man -t "$@")'
if we only learned from china how to combat this
Once something gets commercialized, prison enters the picture.
I understand its value as well as I believe I need to in order to do good work. I'm sure you hold beliefs that are different from mine, and I think that diversity--and the fact that we can talk about this stuff honestly and respectfully--is what makes our industry great.
Whether caffeine is good for you or not seems to be largely inconclusive, similarly to the question of whether caffeine is bad for you.
This is my experience too. True insights take hard work and time to gain.
> It really is beyond belief that an organization with so many employees can fail to adhere to a uniform vision and standard and focus on correcting details.

If you’re not spent time in a huge company, this might seem to be the case. But really, Apple’s uniform standard really is the exception. I’m sure there are other organizational costs for this, such as it being harder to take risks with products or execute quickly.. but gosh they are good at producing a cohesive, mostly consistent set of products. I deeply appreciate their attention to detail and long term commitment.
Caffeine forms an addiction in a few weeks, and requires increasing doses just to keep you normal.

What's good for you are other parts of the coffee bean.

I avoid taking caffeine with any regularity, let alone daily. This is why I can get a full kick from a cup when I need it.
> Anyway, the BTC-enthusiast argument to that is "Well, if BTC replace banks, imagine how much money that would save."

> That argument holds some ground - think of all the armored cars, shipping containers, and facilities that serve to move and store cash and gold, as well as all the labor involved in maintaining the system.

There are very good counterarguments to that as well.

The idea that the "banking system" functions primarily by shipping cash and gold around is nonsense. 99.9% of traditional banking nowadays happens on computer networks. The Visa network for example handles 150 million transactions per day (that is, 500x more than bitcoin) while using a tiny fraction of the electricity. When a bank in London wants to send money to a bank in New York, they don't ship a container full of gold, they send the money electronically using the SWIFT network. To the extent that cash is still physically shipped around, it's only because people still sometimes use cash to pay for things, and banks collect and distribute this cash and replace damaged bills.

And your estimate of labor is similarly flawed. To begin with, the "banking system" includes an enormous amount of services that Bitcoin doesn't provide (loans, mortgages, securities), and retail banks are part of that as well. The transactional parts of banking can be (and are being) largely replaced with mobile apps and ATMs. The other aforementioned parts of banking aren't replaced by Bitcoin, so all of that labor still needs to exist.

So the efficiency argument shouldn't be "what if BTC replaced banks", it should be "what if BTC replaced SWIFT, ACH, BACS, Visa network, etc." there is a value proposition here but it is much smaller than the one originally proposed.
The people who installed the accelerometers that open the parachutes as well!

(Yes, this is a reference to how the accelerometers were installed backwards on the Genesis space probe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(spacecraft)#/media/... )
I have the complete opposite experience. Through my whole career writing C++, that language has been in the way due to all its idiosyncratic behavior. One spends so much time trying to figure out a way around some crazy boiler plate code requirement in C++ only to realize that no, it simply isn't possible to do it in a sane way in C++.

Switching to Swift I felt almost everything worked as it should. It was almost a bit boring not having to deal with all the usual crap that C++ would give me. I am willing to be you can write any C++ system much better in Swift. C++ would probably have a performance edge, but in 95% of cases not enough to be worth dealing with an ugly language like C++.

> C++ will continue to see a lot of usage as long as it is difficult or impossible to write code in other languages that is functionally equivalent to C++.

I would challenge you to give me any language construct that is indispensable for a particular type of program which cannot be done more elegantly in another language and with less headache.

I cannot think of a single feature in C++ which I have ever missed in any other of my preferred languages.
Are we comparing the "walkers" to people that do no exercise at all?

Of course walking is going to be better than a sedentary lifestyle. I'd like to know if going on walks has any benefits for people who already work out regularly.
There are things that aren’t likely enough or important enough for the individual to commit resources to explore intellectually. But these things may be likely enough or important enough for society as a whole for some small group or even individual to explore and report back on.

That is why it is important to support your local crackpot. Much as staid English society always valued their eccentrics. The more ultrarational the person, the more important for that person to spend quality time at the fringes.
Man, the mental health crisis is just bad for certain people. I basically got thrown away by the professional mental system because I'm classically "untreatable" and got left to fend for my own. :(
Meds and other drugs can help some people. Others not so much. It’s highly individual. We have different brain chemistries.
The biggest lever they could have pushed was releasing a vaccine earlier.
> The top layer, the fabled 1% or 10% or wherever you want to draw the line, don’t lose everything when somebody gets cancer.

The author describes as “plausible” the random Twitter story that someone with insurance lost 20 years of savings when their wife got cancer. It’s a big country and stuff happens, but it’s useful to know the actual facts: https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/cancer-patients-pai...

> In a case study, a patient with lymphoma paid out-of-pocket healthcare costs from $6,446 in a large employer-sponsored health plan to $12,931 in a health plan on the individual health insurance market.

These are significant sums, but not at the level of wiping out someone’s life savings unless they’re very poor. (And in that case, they’d be covered by Medicaid, which strictly limits cost sharing.)

Note that annually, Americans spend about $5.6 billion on out of pocket costs for cancer care. There are about 1.8 million diagnosed cases of cancer per year, so that’s about $3,100 per case.
> So much outrage has been channeled into destructive memes like denying that Covid is a problem and rebelling against simple measures to stop the spread.

Here's the problem, it has been a do as I say not as I do attitude from the leadership in this country and even people who were supposed to remain non-political made moves that were suspect. For example early on when Fauci was asked if we should limit the BLM protests, he refused to make a recommendation. Now keep in mind during that same hearing he made recommendations about all kinds of other things from restaurants to sporting events. If you agree with him it's easy to overlook that, however take a moment and walk a bit in someone elses shoes, someone who has spent the past decade working to build a business or trying to support a family and was impacted by those measures and if you are honest you'll admit that it would probably piss you off to see that.

Leaders need to understand that people react on a emotional level to things and if you are asking for someone to make great personal sacrifices you need to be above reproach when making those requests.

To illustrate it from the other side there is a new anti-vax movement that popped up among progressives due to the fact that these new covid vaccines are being produced under a Trump presidency. When I read about the concerns they tend to have more to due with Trumps personality than the science. Again if Trump conducted himself in a more socially acceptable way and spent more time considering how his words and choices appeared to others, I suspect this new vaccine would encounter less resistance.

In the scheme of history much of the suffering caused by covid can be placed squarely on a lack of leadership. It has been a long time since the United States has had a threat like this to deal with and we have learned that our leadership is woefully unprepared. If we were smart they wouldn't be our leadership for much longer.
It's really nice to see so many space missions going on - even at the same time! :)
Castanhas do Pará (Brazil nuts) are not that expensive in Brazil are they? I'm seeing R$50/kg on an ecommerce site, that's like like $5/lb. I'll try to get a better price quote tomorrow. You can't have too many of them anyway, it can cause quite a movement of the bowels.

Caju nuts I'm assuming are expensive because they are mostly exported. It's probably the same as arabica coffee in Colombia, it's too good to consume domestically.

Caju fruit you're probably right, does not travel well. Same as açaí, that won't go far without refrigeration or freezing.
A study was just released by Stanford University with the objective of estimating the infection fatality rate of COVID-19. The results are as follows: "In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%."[0]

Is it right to shut down the entire economy with these statistics or are people overreacting? High risk individuals do have the option to get food delivered to their home, if they're afraid of contracting the virus. Shouldn't they also be able to make that decision for themselves, if they're OK with taking that risk or not?

On the other hand, we don't want hospitals filling up past their limits and putting tremendous strain on health care workers. It's definitely a tricky situation.

[0]: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
That's... not something that state or local authorities have the ability to do.
Why do you associate the pain with your job when you had the job before running and the pain arrived after running? Seems to me that the running brought to light issues that were a bit slow to heal.

The secret, while you have the pain, is to stay tuned into it while doing different exercises and activities until you find the muscle combinations that avoid it. General physical therapy exercises that make you use your hip muscles, and weightlifting, both help you notice that your hip hurts when you do this, but not when you do that.
They'd better let participants solve Go problems (aka tsumegos): much quicker and much more measurable.
I use the right scroll bar to very quickly scroll to a letter, then scroll visually to find the exact app. I think I'd probably like a text search most, but this is still fairly efficient for me.
Humans are so very cool.
C is not C++. There is a reason core services for DHCP, DNS, etc are built in C and not Rust. If you're a careless developer you can have security vulnerabilities in any language.
These are presumably students that have signed into the wifi, not just passerby
If this isn't over by summer 2021 it's time to quarantine the olds an allow the rest of citizens to return to normal life. We gave it a year. we can't go on expecting younger folks to give up all social life, development, sex and so on so old people can sit on Facebook alone at home or in nursing homes.
Wittgenstein is an important philosopher in the 20th century, not just for having answered questions, but because he also pointed out important questions,that we did not see. Seeing them now in this way is bringing us closer to answers needed now. He raised doubts about functionalism, the theory that is the basis of the computer revolution's theory of mind. So for example, he showed that just knowing the rules for computation was not enough to bring forth intelligence, much the less the wisdom that is the deeper need.His private language argument, that language is not private, speaks to the community needed to make computers work. One of the more important aspects in philosophy is Kant's
post Church, post science goals, was for us to think for ourselves; we can't just pass the problem off to others. Much of this is happening now, even taken for granted, but Wittgenstein helped bring it about.
You mean, ignore it? It beggars belief that countries like New Zealand, which have significant geographical and population advantages over China, have had to work so hard to get where they are today, yet China was able to quietly beat it.
Income from sales and service of computer hardware and software with Apple-sized gross margins for (the same) decades.
>>"The state government has not provided evidence that outdoor dining is responsible for much of the spread."

- This is outrageous. This is the same government who has been shutting beaches in Northern California few months ago, despite all the "science" (which they claim to follow) pointing to the fact that outdoor transmission is very unlikely.
Yes, it has. It doesn't mean it does it well.

Quartz today is Vista's WDDM of yesterday.
It's not a dealbreaker, but it is a tiebreaker. Having one charger and one cable in my backpack is really nice.
The fully-general continuations that call/cc creates require copying chunks of the stack to the heap for storage and back again when they're used. (Or pointing the stack pointer at the heap, which I find even more cringe-inducing.) They're memory hogs whose lifetimes are hard to reason about and they provide relatively little benefit to most programs, which is why Common Lisp doesn't provide them.
The problem with such fancy meta programming in C++, is that while it may be a thrill to program for a C++ wiz you may end up with making something that is completely unmaintainable, because nobody else can grasp what you wrote.

Compare to writing a database system in something like Go. Sure you make end up with 50% more code, but you could have anybody up and running reading and understanding the code within 3 days.

IBM have done studies of this and found that fancy code is not all that valuable. It ends up falling in disuse over time as people don't get it. I have seen my fair share of C++ code which simply had to be tossed because nobody at the company could understand what the previous whiz kid had written.
I wonder if this contributed to Apple removing the light-up Apple logo on the backs of MacBook screens. If it were still there, it would give it away when the backlight brightness is changing and potentially become distracting.
> I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population?

Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression.

> ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.

But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media.

If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click.

That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors.

> If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.

Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
So is this the reason why they removed the glowing apple on newer macbooks? Since it was powered by the backlight, it'd give that trick away real quick.
Exaggerating risk of “imprisonment, bodily injury, or death” is a hallmark of the “woke”.
For correctness sake, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy founded the MIT AI Lab in 1959. LCS, the Laboratory for Computer Science, was established in 1963 as Project MAC in the EE Department and was renamed LCS in 1976. The AI Lab and LCS joined in 2003 to become CSAIL.
I hear you. Given my years with Android, the five-across grid works excellently. The ABCs on the side just feel like a workaround.

Android does have a scroll bar on the right. While you're using it, a bubble with a large letter will appear, indicating where you are on the alpha sort. But that's additional information to guide you, still not a paradigm shift to a different control.
A few years later, those US marines will be quite surprised to learn that they are barred for life from possessing firearms.
I think that most of that exists. The state has an army of contact tracers, you just don't hear about them or their work because all of it is private and confidential. I know people through the grapevine who have been informed that they've been exposed through daycare etc. I'm awaiting the results of my second COVID test (out of an abundance of caution, I don't actually believe I have it), and the process for getting it is super easy - fill out a form online and drive through, you're in and out in 5 minutes. There's a first-hand report of a contact tracer's job here:

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/i-m-contact-tracer-san-fr...

The San Mateo fairgrounds has a field hospital setup that's currently unused, and I understand that Santa Clara County has a couple as well. The equipment is currently being moved into real hospitals because staffing and equipment is apparently more of a bottleneck than space.

The problem is that nothing can stop an exponential curve other than bringing the exponent under 1.0. You can delay by minimizing it, but an Rt of 1.2 vs 2.0 just means it doubles in 4 weeks rather than 1. You're still screwed, you just have longer to get there.
The chart on page 3 suggests cannabis has roughly the same harm to others as tabacco? And steroids present harm to other individuals? I'd love to hear these arguments.