skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It is "might makes right".

It is and always has, since the beginning of conflict. That's the only rule that can't be broken.

>Hiroshima of the bioweapon age.

It's not crazy, it's certainly plausible. I've heard theories that China would suffer the outbreak better because they would be better at locking down the population than the West and therefore suffer less economic damage. Such a thing could destroy the Western economy, particularly the US economy (no safety nets) so China could recover more ground or possibly take the economic lead.

It's the, "lets both take poison but I have built up an immunity," strategy as seen on The Princess Bride. Total lockdowns being the immunity.

Having said that, if it did come from a lab, I suspect the lab was designed to counter outbreaks (China has been wearing masks for several years now due to various outbreaks), and an accident happened. Due to the contagiousness during the incubation period and lack of serious symptoms in much of the infected, it had spread and already taken hold of the population before the government could effectively react.
> With so many bitter stories to share about his Tesla experience, Chan said he likes the cars despite how the company treated him over these years.

This mindset just baffles the hell out of me. Why? Just...why? You're paying a staggering amount of money for something that's broken from the start and the seller's response is "well, that sucks, doesn't it?" and you turn around and still like what you got sold?

All of the hassle involved in buying a car, new or used, is a big reason why my family didn't replace our last one when it went out of service. It's disappointing that an "all-new entrant" to the automaker scene like Tesla falls into the same sort of take-it-or-leave-it stuff that used car lots have long been known for.
This post sounds like propaganda for relationship hero
There are people in my town running for office who absolutely do believe that Q is the only trustworthy source of information, have declared so in public, and receive a nontrivial amount of support from folks who agree.

You may have tried to use hyperbole to illustrate a point, but you wound up looking like you're trying to either discredit a news organization you don't like or legitimize a bullshit artist by placing the two on equal terms.

It came across as disingenuous at best and you don't seem to be willing to recognize that divergence from your stated intentions. Why is that?
> The one area of valid debate is whether good mitigation strategies were chosen and implemented wisely. Often they weren't. Test and trace, masking, and PPE provision should have been central, allowing more limited lockdowns.
> In the most badly hit countries none of that happened, and without them full-spectrum lockdowns were the only (blunt) tool that was left.

This exactly. I get really frustrated with the simplistic argument over whether lockdown measures have been better or worse than doing nothing, because it misses that these were not the only two options. Not even close. When you look at how countries that reacted quickly to the virus and implemented, masking, testing, PPE provisions and sensible social-distancing requirements, it is clear that those countries were able to recover, both economically and socially. In areas, like the United States, that waited until it was too late to do anything, and then were forced to implement lockdowns, the outcome is far worse and the aggregate human toll — irrespective of death count due to the virus — much greater.

As a strong supporter of civil liberties, I’m in a difficult position, when I try to balance some of the more draconian state-run actions of places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, with the effects we see in the United States. For all of the many negatives of that kind of government/militaristic control, I can’t help but think that if the US had done that, the global economy, not to mention all of the industries that have evaporated in the US, would have recovered much more strongly by now.

This is absolutely not a trolley problem. This didn’t have to be a choice between two negative outcomes. There were ways to mitigate exposure that could have saved people from dying from the coronavirus, while also limiting the debilitating impact of lockdown. The world's biggest superpower just didn’t do that.
That doesn't mean that Walmart and McDonald's are the cause of those people's need for government aid. They are earning minumum wage because they have no skills of any value coming in to the job, and the jobs don't require any.
Thanks, that lays the idea better than I can. But some of it was misunderstood, or perhaps I used the wrong words. Most of what you said is truthful to my original comment.

Let me share a bit more from my experience living in China for 20 years. In China, taking street people (mostly beggars or orphans who were used by gangs as pick-pockets or whatnot) into custody is systematic for as long as I can remember. (There's news that this system is to be abolished in 2021 by a new law amendment.) It's systematic as there are full-time employees who job is to do this. It is considered "help" by the general society (but there could be abuses by bad actors for sure), the system has good intentions. Because they are not criminals, it's not exactly like prison but it is true that they are taken by force to go through a "program" where they need to listen to propaganda, be educated or trained for a certain skills (mostly factory jobs such as making toys, shoes etc.) and be forced to work at a given place for a certain period. The system is not perfect, it is outright offensive to "individual freedom" (where you are "free" to be just like the US homeless drug addicts). But it is net positive for the society by sacrificing some of these people who are unwilling to go through it.
Nothing so fancy. We got an email asking us to merge the threads.
a) I think for the landing they will use a different tower from the launch tower. Launch tower has fuel/oxygen lines and in general is not well suited for landing catching role.

b) I would imagine landing tower(s) as lightweght specialized structure that can move relatively fast to catch a rocket within +/- couple meters of ideal landing center.
Having never heard of literate programming, I started poking around.

"Physically Based Rendering"'s intro to literate programming can be found here: http://www.pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/contents.html (chapter 1.1)

And then answering my own first question about this: how is this different from copious comments? (Source: Wikipedia)

> Literate programming is very often misunderstood[12] to refer only to formatted documentation produced from a common file with both source code and comments – which is properly called documentation generation – or to voluminous commentaries included with code. This is the converse of literate programming: well-documented code or documentation extracted from code follows the structure of the code, with documentation embedded in the code; while in literate programming, code is embedded in documentation, with the code following the structure of the documentation.

> This misconception has led to claims that comment-extraction tools, such as the Perl Plain Old Documentation or Java Javadoc systems, are "literate programming tools". However, because these tools do not implement the "web of abstract concepts" hiding behind the system of natural-language macros, or provide an ability to change the order of the source code from a machine-imposed sequence to one convenient to the human mind, they cannot properly be called literate programming tools in the sense intended by Knuth.[12][13]

I was then curious if any tooling has been created for literate programming in TypeScript. I haven't given a close look yet, but here are some relevant links:

- https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/31364

- https://johtela.github.io/litscript/

- https://mistlog.github.io/ray-tracing/index.html
I don’t know which world you live in but in SV from my 10 year plus experience, 90% tech managers were software engineers in the past.
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare – Top Seven Use Cases
I did not try to say that it's impossible to identify the sarcastic nature of the comment, of course :)
> "Water is blue because it mirrors the sky."

Seeing that people believe this was quite unexpected, at first - it's such an obvious phenomenon looking down into any slightly deep body of water. But on reflection, it makes sense: many (most?) people in the world might live most or all of their lives without going beyond the shorelines of a sea, ocean, or larger lake/river.

It's a good reminder to always be critical of the assumptions you make, and how much they depend on your own context.

(If you ever get the opportunity, visit Crater Lake. The drop from blue to midnight to pitch is beautiful.)
> Amazon has paid $0 in tax a few times.

This is a very misleading statement that I see thrown around a lot. Either it's done in bad faith, or it's ignorant of how corporate taxes work (and why).

If you don't earn a profit, there's nothing to tax. Amazon has been (to the credit of their extremely patient investors) funneling their revenue back into growing the company instead of giving it to investors and the government.

Amazon could jack up its prices, stop hiring, cut wages, lay off tens of thousands of workers, slash investments that grow the company, and they would realize a tidy profit. Now they are paying corporate taxes. I guess that would make populist politicians and pundits happy?
Quantum numbers have a very nice property: they allow express sum of angles as multiplication. So anything periodic can take advantage of this property. Even if it's not periodic if you can take advantage of Fourier Transformation you can use complex numbers.
Mentally I've compared this experience to the Blitz, which my grandparents lived through. Heightened fear of death or injury striking without warning; massive changes to daily routines; no timeline for how long it would endure but the likelihood of it lasting for years. Some people were psychologically prepared to cope and some weren't.
As i've said many times, expecting the government to be anything other than a hinderance is such emperically false assumption.

Here's where those beautiful taxes everyone hopes will help end up hurting industries that are trying to satisfy the market and keep themselves afloat.

What exactly does the public get for this fee, are they retroactively checking all the hand santitizer produced, that seems unlikely, or rather is this just a system built to extract wealth and doing so as effectively as possible?
Not in the top tech companies, specially in a technical product, most PM roles prefer previous software engineer expeience.
Straight out of Accelerando.
Tokyo coverage is also not very good in comparison with Google Maps unfortunately. Considered moving over but the combination of poor search results and the lack of ability to move my places from Google to Apple Maps means it won't be my focus any time soon.
I feel like part of the equation that gets ignore is the fact that the amount of screens and UX that need to be supported these days just doesn't make sense for Flash/canvas based apps.

We all invested in responsive layouts and dropped the rich, absolute and hand made layouts of yesteryear.
The point is, the probabilistic model treats it as “very surprising” that the virus originated in a city where there is a virus lab. But that becomes less surprising if you consider that virus labs will often be located in cities at high risk from zoonotic outbreaks.
Brand outreach in photography is so endemic that I just can't trust any reviews for the first three months or so after a release.

It's only when working photographers get their hands on the product and use it that the real story emerges, but it requires someone to take that risk for the benefit of others.
The site is also an ad riddled mess
Thanks! I will :)

Good thing LA is nicer than I used to think.
Can you give me an alternative? Duckduckgo does not cut it.
Relevant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17471324

Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:

- waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
This isn't realistic at all. Assuming actuaries know Python like they know Excel, the only other added cost is someone technical to slap together a working environment, which isn't particularly hard when compared to the state of what Excel offers in a collaborative environment.

You just don't jump from "humans in Excel" to "CI/CD perfected pipeline" overnight, nor do you need it.

Excel shops still have costly expenses rewriting entire workflows/re-doing Excel files constantly as people come and go, it's not like there isn't already maintenance cost with the current method.
Tesla is a great software company with unique battery technology, but they are in no way a good car company. Even the expensive model S has terrible build quality compared to the entry level models of the typical German brands.

I'm curious whether they can fix this on time, because VW is making progress on the EV side of things and several other big car brands aren't far behind.
A part of that could be that no one wants to accept they paid a lot for a broken product. It hurts the ego.
The official term is yard hold. This is nightmare for any engineer who’s part is responsible for yard hold. The vehicles are made, but not allowed to be shipped to a dealership. And everyone’s breathing down your neck unless the issue is fixed and they are allowed to leave. Issues can be anything from simple part squeaking to major design flaw. Each vehicle is test driven over a course before the manufacturing teams give it a ‘ship it’ tag. Door fit is a major issue for anyone and everyone. You simply cannot engineer doors to fit right, the assembly line guys always have to pull it, twist it and ‘align’ it. Tolerances exist, but the tighter you go the more parts you’ll reject, the more the cost of that part will be i.e. cost of your car will go up. Everything can be fixed and it’s never too late, the only problem is the cost of the fix. The later in production a fix is issued, the higher is the cost.
Sad to see an accurate take on GMO be so fervently downvoted on a site full of people claiming to be scientifically minded.
A rep from Adobe once told me that about 90% of Photoshop installs were pirated (this was around 2002). I'd bet that a similar amount of Flash content was made using pirated copies of Flash.
Thank you for reminding me why I come here. Happy New Year.
About Ogden's Basic English, prominent Esperantist and United Nations translator Claude Piron[1] had this to say[2]:

> ""Basic English cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words", says our critic. Let's not discuss the fact that the 850 words of Basic English do not enable you to say, for instance, "Waiter, a tomato salad!". But what is amazing is that Mr Rye appears not to know that people whose mother tongue is other than English have to learn by rote probably twice as many words as what they need in order to get along in an average language, and something like ten times as many as what is necessary to express everything in Esperanto.

Esperanto's basic vocabulary, unlike the basic vocabulary of English (as in Basic English or Nerrière's Globish) is a source of many thousands of words, because the right to combine elements is unlimited, or, to put it otherwise, because of the multiplying effect of many morphemes. The first level of the youth magazine Kontakto uses less than Ogden's 850 words: only 520 lexical elements. Since these include a hundred of vocabulary-enriching words, like igi, (words the Chinese call "empty words"), the list contains only something like 430 semantemes ("full words" in Chinese parlance). But when you read the short stories and the articles written with this limited vocabulary, you don't notice that the author was restricted in his choice of words. Esperanto enables him to be lively, expressive, fun, with a very small lexical basis, precisely because nothing restricts what French speaking mathematicians call the combinatoire (do you say "combinatory"?).

In Esperanto, most roots give birth to dozens of words, easy to form, or forming themselves automatically, by simple reflex, since the patterns are regular, whereas in English, you have to learn a new word for each new concept. Where in Esperanto you make up the adjective with a simple - a, in English you have to learn it by rote, and English differs from most other languages in that very often no similarity of form helps your memory. You don't derive lunar from moon, annual from year, rural from country, urban from city, avuncular from uncle (Esperanto: luna < luno; jara < jaro; kampara < kamparo; urba < urbo; onkla < onklo). And the same problem confronts the learner in other aspects of what is, in most languages, derivation: you don't form dentist from tooth, fraternize from brother or stallion from horse. Rye's statement in this respect is flabbergasting. How can one compare two languages and reach a conclusion so much at odds with reality?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Piron

[2] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm
I get your position, but I also expected that "showcase" was going to be showcasing your engine or at least features of your engine.
AS2 conformed partially to ECMAScript 4 and I believe AS3 was a superset of ECMAScript 4. They had a lot of features that current developers complain about vanilla JS even today such as compile-time and run-time type-checking. Flash/AS had its creative uses, I wrote a client library for a SAAS medical records applications for doctors that worked around some of the limitations on filesizes for multipart forms in 2012 that allowed me to chunk the upload of multi-megapixel webcam images so doctors could take pictures and attach them to patient records. A fun chance to solve a vexing problem, at least at that time.
representation of all N (where N = 2^n) states simultaneously is due to superposition, not entanglement.
I'm pretty sure I made the first website that sold bitcoins directly to users. It was called "btcnow" and it launched in maybe June or July of 2011. I pretty much glued a google checkout widget to a Bitcoin dispenser, but people loved it. You could use your normal google account to buy coins, and three seconds later they were in your wallet. I was selling maybe a hundred or so bitcoins a day for a couple years, but the insane levels of fraud ensured that it was never profitable. It didn't really matter, the goal was always to make it as easy as possible for people to get started playing with Bitcoins.

Eventually BitInstant came around they actually had people that were paid to deal with this stuff, so they did pretty well. Then the dude that ran it went to jail, so I'm pretty happy with the fact that I got out when I did. Coinbase came around shortly after and they did a much better job than I ever could.

It was never more than a hobby project, and I would twiddle with the website, buy coins to restock the dispenser, answer support emails all on the train to and from my day job every day. Good times.
Hey, author here and I completely agree. One of the things that I meant to express in the article but couldn't was when as someone approaches a problem with an understanding of the context (business, people etc) they will be more likely to understand what's important, what's not and when good is good enough.

As a side note, I shared this article with Jessica as a draft and she shared it with her followers before I could add a few more things. Still my most successful post yet and comments such as these make me understand there is a lot of material for new blog posts.
I work in an excel heavy function (Corporate Finance). And while this sounds very exciting and fresh I am just not seeing it take hold in Fortune 500s I have/am working for. A few reasons:

1) biggest gripe: I don’t have time to maintain and fix models after I move to a new role. If it’s a Python based model I build, no one can seem to fix it when some tiny thing breaks 6 months after due to a change in the data. I’ve had to work weekends to help colleagues fix models that I don’t use anymore. I can hand Excel to a young or old worker and they can always seem to figure it out and take it over.

2) The tools seem limited when directly doing Python in Excel like the one mentioned nothing the article. VBA kind of sucks in 2020 but until Excel natively accepts Python as part of its base, I don’t love being dependent on these 3rd party tools. VBA always works.

3). I’ve recently complete an MS in Data Sci so I am very familiar with Python and R. My company doesn’t need that level of model for most things. We are a best in class in our industry and we get by using lots of Excel models. I mentioned in my first point that I have built a few things with Python. When I had to fix I just rebuilt in Excel and that was all I needed. When I kept fixing the Python code I always felt like I let folks down if I couldn’t fix their stuff right away. Yet our business makes money and we continue to do well without much Python.

I love Python. But until others start to see its value and a critical mass of individuals knows/supports/can implement Python, I will put emphasis on learning Excel tools or SQL first because those will always be supported.
WWII-era wage controls meant to combat inflation. Employers sidestepped them by offering other benefits to attract employees. Health insurance was a big one. It became entrenched and we're still stuck with it today.
macOS ships with both py2.7 and 3.7, `python` would call 2.7, and `python3` would 3.7
> And they are free to coordinate with a political campaign, they have the freedom of assembly as well as of the press.

lol. "None of these things are crimes" is not the solid argument you think it is. To be a useful idiot aiding an autocratic government in their intelligence operations might not be technically illegal, but you give up all pretense of being "journalists" when you do so.

> His discussions about Wikileaks weren't illegal

Again, not what we are talking about. I'll take your constant efforts to move the goal posts from what constitutes journalism to what constitutes a crime as a tacit admission you don't have a leg to stand on.

> Daniel Ellsberg

A famous leaker is pro-leaker, what a shocking revelation. Difference is all of the pentagon papers were relevant to the ongoing crime of the Vietnam War. 95% of what Snowden leaked had nothing to do with domestic surveillance. Funny how that's never mentioned.

Also, maybe listen to people that actually know what they're talking about in 2020. Here's a lawyer that specializes in representing intel officers in whistleblower cases, talking about how Snowden did have options, and it's a lie to say otherwise.

https://twitter.com/MarkSZaidEsq/status/1339383062120062978

He chose to run, he chose to avoid the consequences of his actions. And in more simple terms, a whistleblower is a legal term for something he chose not to be. He leaked, then ran away. Calling him a whistleblower is an insult to the brave people that actually did seek whistleblower protection in serious matters and were willing to testify and face the consequences.
> It was not the first time Chan tried to buy a Model 3. In 2016, he placed a reservation for the EV and was charged seven times by Tesla. He canceled the reservation and only received all his money back three and a half years later – without any compensation or interest.

Jeez, I was thinking of getting a model Y but some of these stories are scary.

Also the video and images in the link show some pretty bad quality engineering.
Indonesian fisher finds drone submarine on possible covert mission
Middle management is the worst, leading happens at the very top level.
Pure Digital CSS, Swiss Made, Clock. No JavaScript, No HTML
If the water very slowly gets more and more polluted, will the clams notice? Do they need to be periodically recalibrated?