skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yes they spent a lot of money and time creating the vaccine. Now open source it and let the rest of the world save their citizens.

And who’s going to pay for it? The whole PPE shortage was exactly because of this entitled attitude. If you artificially limit prices, you’ll only limit the supply (to possibly nothing, as vaccines have high upfront costs), and enable scalpers.

One obvious solution is to have a UN initiative that buys the IP and opensources it. I don’t know how hard this is. Generally, one big problem is the lack of gratitude on the part of freeriders. Otherwise, the goodwill it generated for the sponsors would probably be enough to make it happen.

PS: I live in Iran. I am not defending my privilege here.
Unrelated, but does anybody remember a site called astalavista.com? It had a lot of script kiddie tools, among them sub7, msn messenger flooders etc. I miss the early internet.
NIMBYism or in English: F the younger generation, we got ours

But who knows who'll pay for the extortionate rents if the whole thing falls apart
> IF YOU SO MUCH AS SET FOOT IN OUR STATE WHILE HAVING LIQUID ASSETS WE WILL NEVER STOP HUNTING YOU

k, very normal stuff, carry on
Robinhood fined $65M for misleading customers about how it makes money
Mapping the Republic of Letters
I think that's only possible in extreme inflation.
I missed the part where the code change example was driven by a DevSecOps process. Maybe I haven't had enough coffee, I think I'm to assume that Huawei was following a DevSecOps process.

I'd say that having goals and achieving goals is not the same thing. And checking your achievements against your goals is important, however you do that.
A lot of the practitioners seem to believe in the stuff and I guess if it makes them and their patients feel better that's OK? I mean we all peg out in the end so if it helps you feel better during the process that's something. Of course it's a problem if you then skip chemo or some such to do it.
Nothing like old money.
Wealth inequality is inherently higher than income inequality, so transitioning between the two seamlessly is a mistake.
it's using rail tracks, so as long as there are usable tracks and tunnels, the route will be perfectly fine for bikes
> that does not absolve such studies from merit and impact

Not completely, but is it justified that meta analysis papers are among the highest-impact things you can produce when it is known that the chance of type I error is particularly high? Really, I think we should strive to improve data retrieval capabilities in our healthcare systems to conduct trials based on hard data as extensively as possible instead of bickering over the dubious scientific interpretation of clinical facts gathered, analyzed and interpreted by people having little to no scientific education.
And for the Europeans: https://en.eurovelo.com/. I've done parts of a few routes on a tandem. Would highly recommend it. Still annoyed that 2020 prevented us from biking. Hopefully next year will be better.
Post-It Extreme Notes – Waterproof Post-Its with “100x the Stickiness”
Like always, browsers are a funny ecosystem and very unpredictable. In all this time I thought that I could see a rise in the adoption of C and Rust libs by the community through WASM but now instead we are building around AssemblyScript. Touche.
Yeah it's a shame. Digital could have been the Google. Probably a much better one (it can't get much worse than Google's privacy invasion, after all).
Quite the opposite for me. It gave me the needed time and open-ended-ness to play around with methods and tackle problems in a way that best suited and interested me.

The things I learned during my PhD makes my bachelor’s and master’s subjects seem almost worthless.
Agreed. I've been shipping software for over 30 years.

Shipping can be quite "boring."

For example, I am about halfway through a social media app (90% of the way, if we include the backend).

The backend was written in PHP. I decided to do that, because it was an "all-purpose" open-source system, designed for low-budget orgs.

Also, I was already an experienced PHP programmer, and PHP is just fine as a server stack. It's not crazy good, but it works great.

The frontend is being written in Swift, which some companies might consider "edgy," but I'm using traditional UIKit, and storyboarding, which many folks would consider "clunky" (I'm supposed to use SwiftUI).

The thing is, is that SwiftUI is still trying on outfits, and the app is going to be very complex. I am not yet convinced that SwiftUI is "ripe" enough to do an app with the complexity I need.

That said, I want to learn SwiftUI this year, and explore its edges.
Oh yes I remember it! It was a great place for software serial numbers too.
With such localization capabilities from on images in public/outdoor, stalking/doxxing based on social media will get more common?
I doubt they even think about the ethics. It’s not like they weren’t doing nefarious cyber activities before Covid-19.
Being a predecessor is not a failure. Au contraire.

One of Dawkins' memorable lines is "Descendents are common. Ancestors are exceptionally rare"

You could say crocodilians succeeded and dinosaurs failed. A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. If you think about it though, both are ancestors... an exceptional success.

Altavista is a Khan.
Well, in a way all businesses want to become monopolies. And hence they try to build moats around their core businesses to prevent competitors from entering that market, or in the worst case, causing the entire market to become commodified. The form of that moat varies depending on what said core business is. One version is even mentioned in the article:

> An­other way that I like to ex­press that is “cre­ate a desert of profitabil­ity around you”. I once had a strat­egy pro­fes­sor de­fine the Google busi­ness model some­what like that, where “Google tries to make every other busi­ness around it free or ir­rel­e­vant”…A desert of profitabil­ity shifts con­sumers to you, and keeps com­peti­tors away.

> Wouldn't a Zero to One / Blue Ocean mindset be smarter?

So if you're about to start a business, should you create a new market (becoming a monopolist in that market), or should you enter some existing highly competitive and commodified market? The answer sounds obvious. Once you do that, then the next question is how do you maintain your monopoly position within that market? See above.
Google AppEngine Autoscaling cost me redundant €500 in 2 weeks due to oversight
Sometime in the '80's or so, parents complained to educators that America was falling behind the rest of the world in math and science especially, and demanded more homework.

High school is now overlarded with busywork, and boys especially have little tolerance for staying up till 1 in the morning to jump through these hoops. There needs to be a return to an emphasis on quality and curiosity over quantity and soul-crushing tedium.

Competing with women to be the head of the relationship/family is not working well for men. Yes, the top performing men are doing fine, but your average guy is feeling defeated and useless. What his dad got by virtue of being a man he now has to fight for. Is that progress? Maybe. But men are paying the price. Not just men, but mothers of boys should be concerned.
Did you read it?

> Take, for instance, the fungus genus Coccidioides, whose species live in soil. When a fire tears through a landscape, it disturbs the soil both directly, by chewing it up with flames, but also indirectly: All that hot, rising air creates an atmospheric void near the surface, and more air rushes in from the sides to fill it. This can produce fierce winds that scour the earth, aerosolizing the fungi.

> When firefighters inhale this rotten air, the fungi can lead to a condition called coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, with symptoms including fever and shortness of breath. The condition may progress to cause pneumonia or meningitis, an infection of tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord. (Infection by another fungus genus called Cryptococcus, also a concern in wildfire smoke, leads to similar symptoms.) Coccidioidomycosis is common enough among firefighters that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the profession at-risk for the fungal infection.
> When GRRM says the Dothraki is an amalgamation of various cultures, what, specifically, is he talking about? Dress, or something else?

Have you even read the series? There is practically nothing that comes from the historical cultures, besides maybe "non-white, non-settled people that have horses".
altavista starting serving pop-up and pop-under ads. Google, at the time I switched, was serving tiny text-only ads. Both had good results.
I think the languages with multi-page exception dumps are a great example of design patterns applied to the point of absurdity.
> think maybe the HCQ should have just been one point, I got 5 points in about hcq

There were only 3 on HCQ.

> and how President Trump is dumb

President Trump was mentioned once, in the second HCQ piece, and not in a context which particularly suggested he was dumb. (Arguably, it could be viewed as recontextualizing something for which he was viewed as dumb by many people independently.)
* don’t confuse with astalavista ;)
The results were crap and it was slow that’s what killed it. While other alternatives were getting better
Something like this seems really important to (some branches of) the future of WASM, but this is still just a proposal, right?
> The truth is I should make less, as should you.

That some people make a lot of money is a good thing.

The bad thing is those who make too too little money.
Sure, this is simple! You provide them with a definition written in Coq and make them implement a proof that their implementation satisfies that definition. Use probabilistic couplings to make sure the output of the biased coin function adheres to specified distribution.

You can easily implement a grader that checks the the proof.
Floating Signifier
Skip to the section at the bottom titled "It wasn’t all COVID-19"
No one is forcing you to take the vaccine. What’s wrong with you?
Proxima is flare star, massive stellar winds would outstrip any atmosphere, habitable zone is on approximately 11d orbital period, more x-rays than sun, etc...
Pfizer is spending a considerable amount of money on their cold chain, for example buying up pretty much all ultra-low temperature freezers they can find. I personally doubt they'd still be spending that money if they needed it, there's been plenty of time for a stability analysis by now.
Hi, I'm the author. I've read about how they constructed the RAM and how it's different from the usual architecture. That and YouTube reviews convinced me that if I should save money on something, I could risk it with RAM. I observed how my potato Macbook works with its 8 GB RAM and I could see that most of the capacity is idle, while the computer is slow. That made me think that RAM just isn't the bottle neck I'm fighting. My budget is limited and based on what I knew I decided the RAM is less of a risk than a small disk.

In the end, honestly, I don't care that much if it's the processor, RAM, or a pixie dust. The machine's snappy whatever I do on it and that's all that matters. I'm happy with my choice so far, but only time will tell, of course. If you do RAM-intensive stuff on your computer and have the money, buy RAM, good for you.
You don't necessarily need to replace the language. Python can be used for large projects with some discipline, I feel. But I might look into compiling with Cython or Nuitka (I have no idea why Nuitka isn't a bigger deal in the Python ecosystem!)
I'm not sure what the problem is. When Democrat supporters demand more more more via the politicians who promise more more more, where did they think the money would come from?

Believe it or not, the bottom ~50% don't have enough money to tax. The next 30-40% have some but not enough to raise enough money to help. The taxes have to be focused on the top 10% and more likely the top 1-3% to raise enough to meet these demands.

I think the biggest problem will be trying to enact this on people who aren't California (or even US) residents who are now out of state. You can tax visitors for actions they take while they're in your state (sales tax, hotel taxes, even income) but when they're not there and haven't been there for years?

The State of California may get a rude awakening on this one.
I think there is something to be said about snappiness during basic tasks like web browsing. I had a 2012 macbook pro that had an ssd and memory upgrades, and functionally tooling around Mojave felt no different than a new computer; just as snappy and performant. You don’t always hit a point of strain with your device just doing basic tasks. Now if that 2012 macbook of mine connected to a zoom call on the other hand, then the computer would overheat to the point where the battery would swell and disable the keyboard until it cooled down.
Is it really important though, as the only solution is still just HEPA filter. Expensive air filters usually have dust sensors/particle counters in them, so there is some indication when the air is dirty and, you know, anything PM2.5 is harmful either way.
If anyone is curious how this difference will make an impact in the big picture, I cannot recommend highly enough the Youtube video on Covid vaccine logistics by Wendover Productions (I can't search youtube at work to provide a direct link but it should be easily searchable).
That it seem to come from our closest star system should be a very big coincidence if it comes from an alien civilization. A natural, or somewhat human origin seems more likely.
We will, with our privacy and our freedoms? Hey - can I at least get my change back? No?
What’s New in TensorFlow 2.4
> Building playlists on a streaming service is not the same as building a music collection.

If you aren't pirating, it is a lot cheaper. Whenever this topic comes up, somebody boasts about their 2000 album collection or whatever and simple math demonstrates that you'd get like 100 years of streaming services for that price.

> When all you had was physical media, you listened to albums over and over got to know them, relished the new albums you purchased and had to take the time to decide between one or the other.

This feels like "yells at cloud" to me. I don't buy the "worse product forces appreciation" argument in any circumstance. I am far more able to appreciate a wider range of music now than ever before, in large part because it isn't a $15 dollar commitment to listen to an album and decide if I like it.
Does anyone know the mechanism by which they can possibly make the out of state tax stick? If it doesn't, I'd probably move to the Midwest. If it does, there are other citizenships.
The bill says:

> 50306. Worldwide net worth shall not include any real property directly held by the taxpayer.

(It does include real estate held through an LLC, though, so any smart commercial landlord is still going to be subject to it.)
Fair nitpick - as I said, I was recalling the book from memory having read it quite a while ago, and couldn't remember what the exact tradeoffs were. Thanks for linking to an original source.
Surgical Placebo – Professor Ian Harris
That’s a bit harsh. It was the best thing available at the time, and it held its place for a while, until Google came along.

Progress is always about moving from one thing to the next.
I found J in 2011 or early 2012. I fell in love with it due to the terse, expressive notation set against pages of typical programming code from other languages. I have since moved to Dyalog APL. Roger Hui of APL/J fame, now contributes to Dyalog APL, so a lot of the novel ideas in J have made their way back into APL (Dyalog and NARS).

I read my first book on neural networks in 1988, and I got the matrix math and the implementation of them, but this year I was able to really grasp them in a more basic way with an implementation of Convolutional Neural Network in APL in only 10 functions/lines of code [1]. Amazing! What's even more surprising is that they manually translated it to SAC (Single Assignment C), and it is faster than TensorFlow. The interpreter is not bad either - 20x less time to init than TF, but 20x and 5x slower to train and test respectively. Compilers for APL are being worked on to make it work without the manual translation. To me the similarity to the math formulas, being able to view and work through the code in front of me in one view, is priceless. I also enjoy it, and I believe (no evidence here) that it is exercising my mind on the problem more directly than winding my mind around pages of Python/C or other PLs. Certainly a lot of the original ideas of APL and current successes of things like Pandas and NumPy owe a lot to the array languages in the APL family.

There's an example of an Extreme Learning Machine in J, but I don't have the link at the moment. I go back and forth with J and APL, and I am currently learning Rust. Somebody coded APL in Rust, but it has not been fleshed out. I find myself attacking problems in J/APL on my desktop, and sometimes that's it, I don't require another solution, or if I do I recreate it in C/Python or now Rust.

Aaron Hsu does amazing work in APL. He is/was a former Schemer [2].

A taste of J or APL with an average function implementation:

J: avg=: +/%#

APL: avg←+/÷≢

They both map/apply the '+' operator over a vector/array, then divide the sum by the tally or count of terms given.

Great tribute to Ken Iverson!

10 line CNN implemented in APL (the stencil operator ⌺is great! It allows you to move a window over your array):

blog←{⍺×⍵×1-⍵}

backbias←{+/,⍵}

logistic←{÷1+-⍵}

maxpos←{(,⍵)⍳⌈/,⍵}

backavgpool←{2⌿2/⍵÷4}⍤2

meansqerr←{÷∘2+/,(⍺-⍵)2}

avgpool←{÷∘4{+/,⍵}⌺(22⍴2)⍤2⊢⍵}

conv←{s←1+(⍴⍵)-⍴⍺⋄⊃+/,⍺×(⍳⍴⍺){s↑⍺↓⍵} ̈⊂⍵}

backin←{(dwin)←⍵⋄⊃+/,w{(⍴in)↑(-⍵+⍴d)↑⍺×d} ̈⍳⍴w}

multiconv←{(awsbs)←⍵⋄bs{⍺+⍵conva}⍤(0,(⍴⍴a))⊢ws}

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315454.3329960 (PDF link is on page)

[2] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Aaron_Hsu
More staff scientist positions.

Academia, especially in the US and Canada, only has one viable long-term job: a faculty position. Everything else is ostensibly “training” for that job and there’s increasing pressure to make that transition as quickly as possible, in part because the low pay and stability of the other positions.

This is stupid. Since professors produce trainees, the competition gets exponentially worse. At the same time, using mostly new workers that are constantly churning over makes it hard to do good research. This is exacerbated by the emphasis on first/last author publications, which disincentivizes division of labor and teamwork. Furthermore, studies have found that outcome for the trainees are better when a mix of senior people are around.

Despite this, the NIH funds virtually no staff scientists: only one institute (NCI) has a staff scientist mechanism and it’s very small (~50?) compared to the rest of the program. Give people longer contracts (5 years) renewable bases on the output of the teams they enable, and everyone would win.
I wish there were still a search engine that followed my query strings and operators to the letter instead of attempting to be extra clever. Even Bing seems to be doing that no longer.
Yes, I know you are OK with that. I said it wasn't a compromise, it's the default.

Did you even read my comment?
Problems of rich people and all other people who are employed by rich people. Elon is not the only person moving to Texas: all the new jobs created by him move as well.

Also I'm a digital nomad, right now living in Brazil, and thinking of going on a trip to the US, but I have to make sure to be updated of these laws that don't exist in any other country in the world.
What does "free as in beer" mean? In what way is beer free?
Show HN: Anuvaad – Machine translation models for Indian languages
while i agree with your point, i think many trail tracks will need rebuilding for modern trains anyways. at least if you want trains to go faster than 100 miles per hour.
Can't be everyone! Something like 1 in 5 households has negative net worth.
This proposal is 0.4% tax on wealth above $30m.

The Dutch equivalent is 1.6% tax on wealth above €1m.

The number of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals in the Netherlands is still increasing.
Viruses, microscopy and fast radio bursts: 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020
Number of death for 2020 are not significantly different than previous year:

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

yes it said the dec 2020 data is only up to dec 11 but its unlikely that the number its going to be substantially increase with half month to go.

another stats:

death per million for 2020 is not much different compared to five year average:

https://legionsletters.com/mortality#SWEDEN-MORTALITY
For a moment, I thought you were gonna suggest that Electron developers should be tased in order to make them associate using Electron with pain.
Feed Control – monitor RSS and Twitter feeds, receive email and webhooks
An Interview with Ravi Sharma of OOTify
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_free_beer
Cover art has virtually nothing to do with quality (and is accessible on spotify). How much money did you pay for records that you ended up not liking?

It is so easy to expose yourself to new music on spotify. Far easier than relying on whatever handful of records happened to be in the listening station.
Hey, welcome to HN!

Just so you know, the HN guidelines [0] say "Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion." So [1] is something that is pretty heavily discouraged.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/could-you-upvote-my-hacker...

Mods are very active at hn@ycombinator.com if you have any questions (I am not a mod just a concerned citizen)
what the honest fuck is wrong with people? We've got loads of litter near most roads around my town, and I just don't get it. bottles, cans, boxes, bags, etc. I saw a guy pull off the side of the road and dump a bag of garbage - like... opened the bag and dumped it out, then drove off. He was 200 feet from a convenience store that had garbage cans and an open dumpster. He explicitly chose to avoid that, pull off on the dirt, and dump trash.

I was going to approach him and my wife said "no way, he's probably got a gun". And she was probably right. Somehow my objecting to him open dumping trash in public (8:45 am) would be some form of liberal aggression and he'd have been within his rights to shoot me.
> Some journals used 2020 to purge what readers perceived to be offensive articles.

I hate this so much.
At boat shows, a certain boating magazine guru will host "cruiser parties" after hours where you may attend and have beer and pay no money. To you, the beer is free.
i would hope the rails can be converted without the right of way being lost
NSA Advisory: Malicious Actors Abuse Authentication Mechanisms to Access Cloud
It blows my mind that these supply issues are happening in CA of all places. Where I can go to Koreatown in LA and buy 10 kn95s for $10 from about a dozen stores.
Atlantic City to auction push of “Detonate” button for casino/hotel implosion
The mechanism of action is actually a good reason to believe lots of things about them long term.

The mRNA is delivered, causes cells to express proteins and is naturally broken down (it's normal for the body to sweep up mRNAs over time).

Once the mRNA is gone, the long term effect is the immunity, which there's no reason to expect it to be different than immunity to similar antigens, which is something that is well studied.

So the immunity side of it is not a radical departure (antigens are presented to the body) and the delivery/mechanism is quite clear and has a natural brake (mRNA degradation).