skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The study was designed to tease out mask-wearing by attempting to control for other factors via its study design. — They did this specifically by comparing a mask-wearing city with a synthetic control unit based on reference populations without mask-wearing rules. So the hypothesis “mask-wearing helps” is, by design, not post-hoc.

You’re right that it’s a single data point (though with a strong effect size). And, being an observational study, it simply can’t exclude all confounding factors, and will never approach the strength that a controlled study could. Nobody is disputing that. Interpretation of observational studies always needs to be tempered by the reality that it’s impossible to control for all confounders.

But within these given constraints the study essentially provides as strong evidence as could reasonably be expected (unless the study has a flaw that I’m overlooking and which, as far as I know, hasn’t yet been pointed out elsewhere). Their design of the synthetic control is statistically sound and controls for a very large number of reasonable confounders. And, contrary to the claim in the comment I’m replying to, data from other cities does not invalidate the study’s findings. As far as I can see, the study’s inadequacies are all due to external circumstances and not because it’s a bad study.
In Nagoya, Japan, volunteers drove to pharmacies and bought 520,000 masks in three days,

Seems like it was a global phenomenon. There were articles in the local newspapers where I live (US) interviewing Chinese expats who were buying all the PPE they could find and shipping them home.

While it put other countries in a bad position, I think it was probably a perfectly normal thing for an expat to do since people didn't know how bad it would get outside of China at the time. Most times there is a disaster somewhere in the world, the people from that country who live elsewhere try to help.
Show HN: TeamBuddy – team building for remote companies
Hey,

I'm the author of TeamBuddy - a web app integrated with Slack, designed to help you build better remote teams.

As a remote worker myself, I very often find that it's very difficult to get to know other teammates better. Of course, we all have video calls, use a bunch of different tools, but almost all of them are focused only on work...

It's not enough to build stronger social connections. Wouldn't it be nice to talk more about our hobbies and activities other than work? Discuss together the latest sports events or share book and movie recommendations?

This is how the idea of TeamBuddy was born - it introduces "Clubs", which group team members around similar interests. Each club has its own set of questions that members can answer. This way in our teams we all can know each other better and find topics to discuss.

It can be also useful when onboarding new employees. New remote hires will get a chance to introduce themselves to the team, but also to learn more about their new teammates.

I was working on TeamBuddy for the last couple of months as my side project and I'm very keen to see what you think about it. Do you like the idea? Do you think it can be useful for you & your team?

More information:
https://teambuddy.app

Demo:
https://demo.teambuddy.app

Thank you!
This could be funny but they completely fail to emulate Chomsky's way of talking. I don't know about Zinn.
Tufte would disagree, and at least some consider his thoughts on design to be very solid.

Would you be amenable to "A well-designed web page does not need to rely on custom fonts, provided their impact on page load is absolutely minimal"?

You can unobtrusively serve up a single font embedded as base64 on a static site - a world of difference from some of these sites that load up 5MB of a UX person's vision off some remote CDN.
Shameless plug for two related articles, one about the privacy problems with Google Fonts and the other about self-hosting them (especially if they're variable fonts):

- https://brycewray.com/posts/2020/08/google-fonts-privacy/

- https://brycewray.com/posts/2020/08/good-stuff-without-googl...
No it doesn't. There are mostly PC laptops with 1080p precisely because of people like me who only want 1080p because more pixels are pretty useless. Have you actually shopped for one recently? Top hits on Amazon are all FHD.

> "Retina Display" has been a major marketing point for Apple for years...

Exactly. And that's all it is - marketing, particularly for egoists who want to feel like they're better however they can. The vast majority of the market, mostly those who don't use Macs, don't give a shit.
Cache partitioning (prevents cross-site tracking):

Safari: since 2013

Chrome: since v86 (October 2020)

Firefox: planning to implement

Edge: most likely soon

Opera: most likely soon
I'll go you one better. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor, whose "models" were the basis of the draconian lockdowns were pretty sure they did not apply to him [0].

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8289921/Scientist-a...
Joke with a kernel of truth. I'm not saying they didn't do a great job with the M1. I'm just saying it's an unusual direction for their business to take unless it was initiated to serve their core strategy of delivering visually appealing devices with nice software.
Its every chairmans final duty to grow into the chair, and become a mummy on the throne.
Did someone manage to convince him to OSS or sell licenses to his system? Seems similar to http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors but more dynamic and with some extra link discovery. I am trying logseq right now but the bullet-point format is a bit limiting (equally so when I compare my own freeform paper notetaking with bullet journalling).
I've seen it.
I think this is a common reaction. We're built with fraud detection as social animals.

People who talk as experts about areas their experience and accomplishments haven't aligned with always raise this. In this case, don't tell me how to learn when I question how much learning you've done.

The opposite of this is Adrian Colyer's the morning paper [1], where I'd love to learn Adrian's process of ingesting so much technical information.

As an aside, there are folks with expertise in certain areas that dip into a wide ranging set of topic. I try to remind myself of their expertise and discount heavily their opinion on other things:

Elon Musk talking about anything not related to launching a car or space company. Elon's opinions about Covid-19 testing the latest example.

Sam Atman talking about anything not related to VC investing.

[1] - https://blog.acolyer.org/
It was faster. A page with JavaScript loaded instantly, a page with Java locked up the whole browser for around a minute while the JVM started. (That was probably also the start of the "Java is slow" meme: anyone who had ever visited a page with a Java applet immediately learned to associate "Java" with "slow".)
From the article: "then you’re best off downloading your used Google Fonts and self-host them"

I read that as "use Google Fonts"?
Especially when you couldnt even google it (the other search engines never found anything related to my keywords...)
Show HN: Pretty Logger for Java – colourful logging for Java CLI
This is an interesting question. I moved into to IT/Security from another sector, and I'm trying to figure out my endgame. At least at my company, there aren't any jobs I covet. Most of the higher ups don't impress me, and they don't seem to know what's going on in their company very well. It seems like if I moved into leadership, I'd have to spend a lot of time lying-via-powerpoint. (that is, taking a complex problem, and both simplifying and misrepresenting in a powerpoint which shows "progress" happening.)

I wasn't a loser in my old career, and I don't want to be a loser in tech. But, it seems like everyone is a loser here. IT/Security is seen as a well-paid janitor; someone you need, but not someone you really care to learn about. Worse, becoming "important" in a company seems to be useful only in so far as you have sway at that particular company. ie, it's a lot of work for some very local, and very useless prestige. And worse, there's no external meaning other than your own status. Why do I care if I have a little fiefdom within company walls? Nothing worthwhile is being accomplished, it's just more sales.
Also a proxy for not wanting to build a team where people don't like each other. Culture fit isn't a bad thing unless you take it too far.
TIL that Stripe's Treasury service is a marketplace connecting bank treasury services to marketplace services that require a treasury.
That's pretty normal, happened to me too. You can't expect to be able to say anything without consequences. Businesses are there not for you, but for their owners. Start your own if you don't like your place in someone's else company, we live in the best times ever for that.
I hate to tell everyone this, but this isn't new. It's been this way for 25+ years. This is just a new form. There were the "brain teaser" questions in the late 90's (How Would You Move Mount Fuji), and then there was the whiteboard coding (reverse a linked list). It's always been this way, and IMO it's stupid, but there will always be companies that do this. I've been discounted, because even though I did what they asked I didn't go above and beyond on the "test assignment." You know what, I don't want to work for those companies anyway, so I consider it a boon they asked it in the first place. There will always be people are that are gatekeeping and trying to show they are the smartest person in the room. If you and I can't sit down and have a conversation and determine whether or not I can help your team without some silly test about writing a loop, you're wasting my time.
I checked. It's really 15 GB of textual emails, from 2012 until December 2018 when it hit the limit.

Admittedly I don't know many cases with such a traffic.
I think plasma stability is very particular, outside of the confinement environment it should quickly dissapate
Congratulations VonC for reaching a million reputation
I'm sorry you are getting downvoted.

Reasonable or not, one difficulty I have with keeping any kind of journal is that I keep thinking of the fact that it may eventually be read and exposed to the cruelest, least charitable interpretation.
Classic ASP had JScript, I once had the dubious pleasure of using JScript instead of VB on an ASP website.
User tracking and analytics, like most technologies, is ethically neutral.

It's how people utilise it that has an ethical/moral component.
It's hard not to see Bay Area software developer wages, especially at the big "tech" companies, as something of a bubble. They're completely out of line with engineering and science jobs more broadly, including software engineering jobs in much of the US.

Which does suggest that someone going into software just for the money or, as GP or so commented, going through the motions and spending all their time prepping for Google interviews may be chasing a pretty transitory target.

Historically there's very little to suggest that the segment of one profession that's largely in one geographic area can sustainably capture super-premium compensation even though it doesn't really require a higher level of skill than many others have throughout the country (and the world).

And the fact that a lot more flexibility in living location has come in essentially overnight means that a lot of companies are going to start looking more skeptically at some of the premiums they're paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human

I always look for opportunities to recommend Osamu Dazai.
> a national, Austin based real estate firm

I can't help notice the irony that they wanted to put you through a gauntlet of leetcode style interview questions only for you to be working on what are most likely basic CRUD apps.
That’s the feature I really like in Brave, which stores that setting persistently per site in a convenient side panel. For things like unoptimized news sites it’s the difference between 10-30 and <0.5 second load times on the subway.
That's just replacing one passable scripting language with another passable scripting language, just with worse performance.

I don't see the point.
That's not at all what I'm suggesting. My point is merely that you cannot derive an ought from an is. (I suspect most of us agree about what is, but we probably agree a lot less about what ought to be.)

I'm suggesting that it might be wise to try to keep our baser instincts at bay -- as well as we can, at least. Sure, we'll fail from time to time (or often even), but that doesn't mean we should give up that struggle.
Roomba I3 Review
> he wrote about note-taking

Did he? I though we have his archive and we know how he used it (from some interview, I think). Didn't thought he wrote about it directly in his system. Do you have source on that?
I HATED sites that used custom fonts when I lived in the country.

There are only two ways loading such a site goes:

a) you get to stare at a blank page for a couple minutes while the font downloads, if it downloads at all. (this seemed to be google's favorite way to screw over people with bad connections; acknowledgment that it's going to suck and doing it anyway)

b) you get two minutes into reading the page only for everything to suddenly jump somewhere else when it switches to the font. (this seems more like the result of ignorant web designers)

JS sucks but webfonts consistently make the web an awful place.
Ask HN: Recommended reading on help documentation metrics
I manage the help documentation for a SAAS product and want to learn more about measuring the efficacy of our help docs, however this is a really tough topic to surface relevant content on. I've tried Google and DDG without much success - most results are help docs for analytics products and methods. What I want is the reverse - analytics products and methods for help docs!

To explain more about why I'm less interested in the 'normal' metrics for content - our help docs aren't the product, they're a supporting structure. If we optimise for page views, conversions etc, I'd be worried about losing important signals in the noise, like which product features people are interested in or having trouble with. This is information that gets fed back to the product managers to help them focus their efforts.

I know HN has a fair few writers, tech writers and product managers who must be interested in the performance of their documentation content. Can anyone recommend useful sources of information?
I needed this a few (9, wow) years back and wrote this Python library:

https://pypi.org/project/shortuuid/
For one, YouTube gives you time codes, which are good when translating, but just in the way when reading or editing (say to find a quote). Second, while a minor annoyance, the text is hard scroll and read, due to how constricted the reading area is. Hieroglyph gives you a huge blob, which isn't super-fantastic either, but IMHO it's slightly better than YouTube's "view transcript" functionality, if nothing else, than for reasons of presentation.
I have a lot of experience using concurrency in Go, and for the last couple years have been at the bleeding edge of Python async. The tradeoffs between the two approaches are immense.

With the virtual thread model you have:

* No function coloring problem. This also means existing code is easier to port.

* possibility of transparent M:N scheduling.

* Impedence mismatch with OS primitives.

* Much more sophisticated runtime.

* Problematic task cancellation.

* Lots of care still needed for non-trivial inter-task synchronization.

With the async API model you have:

* Viral asyncification (the method color problem).

* Simpler runtime.

* Obvious and safe task cancellation.

* Completely orthogonal to parallelism (actually doing more than one thing simultaneously) for good and for bad.

* Inter-task coordination is straightforward and low-overhead even for sophisticated use cases.

* Higher initial learning curve.

I'm leaning toward liking the async approach more, but that might be just because I'm deep in the middle of it. I think the biggest argument in favor of virtual threads is the automatic parallelism; that's also the biggest argument against: free running threads require more expensive synchronization and introduce nondeterminism.
GUI based Ubuntu Linux on Google cloud
I've been wanting to buy a System76 laptop for a LONG time now. For me, the increased markup is worth it knowing that I'll be able to get a laptop that runs Linux and plays video games with little to no configuration.

What makes me hesitant is the build quality. I've seen enough comments online (and in this thread) with complaints about parts needing to be replaced.

That being said, I want to note that System76 has great documentation on repairing their laptops. For example, here are the docs for the Oryx Pro 6: https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/oryp6/repairs.html.

It's pretty straightforward to upgrade the internals, replace parts, re-paste the CPU, etc. Repairability is an important factor for me, especially considering the next laptop I buy I'm going to use it for a while (I'm currently using a 2013 T530).

Still, the complaints about needing to replace things makes me hesitate.

It's nice for a machine to be easily repairable and upgradeable, but I don't want to invest so much money in a machine where I'll need to replace parts right away. Also, I imagine most people looking for a new laptop don't own the tools needed to repair nor are they comfortable with opening up a very expensive machine. Heck, I'm only comfortable with fiddling with my T530 because it's so cheap.
> The interviewers had no idea I would decline the challenge, and I politely ended the call.

This happened to me too, despite assurances from the recruiter beforehand.

Don't believe recruiters. They'll tell you anything to get you in the company's hiring process.
What's the difference from any kind of resource extraction industry that produces waste heat in addition to the resource?
What turned me off about Joplin was how awkward it was to link to other pages. I might have missed something, but by default I think that takes creating the other page first, then manually copying its id -- way too much clicking, and breaks the focus on what you're writing.

In the end, I ended up using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md). While typing (even in an outside editor), I can just go [[random reference]] -- and that will turn into a link, even if that page doesn't exist yet. When I eventually get to creating the page, it will already have back links from all the places it is used (something else I think Joplin doesn't have).
> colorless white Greco-Roman temples: all the paint faded away, leaving the underlying white stone

Wait, I get that the statues and the bas-reliefs were painted, but were the columns too ?
Looks great, when more browsers are implemented. I'll do a switch.
This is probably little of a grey area. I don't think that the IP-address by itself is considered personal data since it usually doesn't single out a specific living person. Unless you pair it with other information, like date and time.

But if IP was considered personal data you would need an active consent from the user where you also inform them why you are doing this, which paragraph in GDPR gives you legal right to do this, how long the data is stored and you will need a data processing agreement with Cloudflare. You will also need to be able to prove that you made sufficient effort to make sure you are not handling data of someone under 16 years of age.

People often think that GDPR is made to forbid processing of personal data. Actually you can pretty much do anything with peoples information and still be GDPR compliant. It's more that it becomes such a hassle to do it and still be compliant that it's just not worth it to collect personal data "just because you can".
I's really a bigger feat than what google achieved last year[1] and yet almost nobody will hear about it because google took all the hype. It's a pretty sad story actually.

[1]: the google achievement was designing a specific problem for which their quantum computer could perform better than classical computers. Now, this is a solution to a preexisting problem. Not to say that Google's result wasn't important, but this one is “one rank” higher.
Don't tell people this, they'll start making larger fonts.
It looks quite viable to miniaturize.
Good post as always.

Interestingly, the books also debunk the Fremen mirage at several points. GRRM is quite keen on armour solving a lot of your problems in combat.
I assume you have never used VBScript, which was the major alternative back then.
Ask them the same question: "What whould you ask a product manager in a job interview?"

Andvanced version: "Create and describe some case, puzzle, exam that you whould give your future product manager on the interview"

This will give you a good perspective of how he sees himself as a product and rich soil for open discussions.
From a utilitarian perspective, probably not.
> One point to call out that the author doesn't emphasize is that steppe cultures (both in North America and Eurasia) were integral parts of vast trading networks.

I expect that this will pop up in the next blogposts of this series...
You're not. uMatrix makes the web sane and I'm never lettign it go. What I did (on Firefox) is disable uMatrix in Private windows and I just go there for payment sites. All the rest of the wading through internet-crap is done from within the safe cocoon of uMatrix.
Unless your font shares (exactly) metrics with the ones the user has installed there's no way to implement this correctly. This is something you can't know so there's no way to implement this correctly.
and so is free (FSF-style) and open source software.
but apparently a healthy economy (with a 'free' market) is more important... o̶h̶,̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶u̶r̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶r̶e̶n̶.̶
Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place? A CDN basically. I know jQuery and Bootstrap recommend using their CDNs so browsers have the copy in their cache.

Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.
Y'all had an A+ execution: https://hey.science/dumpster-fire/clip/?id=128758875.
It's only for presentation. He writes in Bear on MacOS and use his script to make backlinks https://github.com/andymatuschak/Bear-Markdown-Export . He made a video presenting how he works, should be somewhere on YT.
But if you're asking specifically about that website source code then yes, he was asked about it. He didn't publish it. There are some alternatives: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
Anyone who has worked with remote programmers, unless they happen to have hit the jackpot on them, really has no desire to ever do it again. Timezone differences, language differences, cultural differences, communication differences, etc, etc, all combine to chew up so much more time and money than the nominal savings of hiring someone local. And the good remote people don't cost appreciably less anyway.
> You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail

Why would I ever want to touch a webmail interface with a 3 m pole?
Numerous government-affiliated organizations spearheaded the effort. That is far beyond some expats individually being concerned.

Keep in mind that this was also right around the time the WHO reported there was “no human to human transmission” based on data from the CCP.
We have to go back Marty!
Ah that makes total sense!
It's very odd, if someone nowadays called their language CSharpScript, they'd get slapped with a C&D