skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, I believe hiding the semantics of futures is not the way for most languages I use with concurrency primitives either.. And it would seem the language designers agree.

I believe it's important to expose the fact that an asynchronous(potentially parallel) task is doing something for you. The runtime semantics of an assignment would appear the same in code by be very different behind the scenes otherwise. Also, a lot of code is written to manage those tasks in use-case specific ways. How would you race or cancel transparent futures?
There's little link between lockdowns, and mask wearing, and actual final COVID cases and causalities. Original pandemic plans for this category of virus never called for the level of shutdown and disruption that we are now experiencing. Those advocating for individual rights are correct.

We have lost more years of life from Lockdown - from suicides, overdoses, destitution, and disrupted education and procreation.

These healthcare workers should be fighting against oil, coal, and sugar, which together wreak much more havoc on human health.
> The issues you are bringing up are out of scope.

No, they're not. Scientific research and debate are not the only topics that get discussed at academic institutions; in fact no topic should be off limits for discussion at academic institutions. Nor should the institutions themselves have any privileged position in deciding what counts as relevant for a particular topic, whether it's scientific research and debate or anything else.
The GMP change is the most exciting one for me!

Years ago when I was really trying to get into Haskell, I wanted its binaries to be as portable as those from Go. I was so sad to see that this _one_ library made that impossible.
In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. Someone tried to sue us. We sent the last of the Bushplugs to the Smithsonian's presidential museum. We made our investment back but didn't become buttplug millionaires.
Built a quick MVP (https://xboxprofile.com/) for an idea I had, realised the unofficial API isn't being mantained as my logged issues aren't being looked at, so dead in the water.
There is also huge support to reduce high crime rates. People will compromise some things to achieve this.
> That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.

In its inception yes, because that was new. It's much much quicker now and certainly far quicker than 9 months. Vaccinating people is not new and the technology to assist in making that process smooth is also not new. What's new is the restrictions upon which the vaccine can be stored at certain temps and the scale at which they can produce the vaccines. Neither of which are really logistical problems, at least not in the areas they're currently falling short on. Which brings me to:

> the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.

That's not where it's failing though. They knew that part well ahead of time and knew where to distribute them. The failure is occurring at other junctions along the way. In fact at Stanford, one of the biggest issues was a software algorithm (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stanford-apologizes-doc...)
https://github.com/sirherrbatka/vellum is maturing and already usable as a data frame library.
OpenWRT: A Linux operating system targeting embedded devices
This is close to one of my pet peeves about FreeBSD: They're happy to say that they've had containers for longer than Linux and that Jails are better than Linux containers, and I don't really disagree on technical merit, but they seem to completely overlook that UX and images are Docker's killer features and FreeBSD doesn't have an answer to that[0]. I personally think that implementing a jail-backed OCI runtime and getting docker running on top of it (all of which should be fairly simple to do) would be a huge boost to getting more users - bonus points if it can run FreeBSD-native and Linux images by using the existing Linux-compat layer. I've even looked into actually implementing this myself, but the runc-containerd-docker codebases were too much for me to make sense of so far, unfortunately.

[0] Actually, partial caveat: cbsd and bhyve are at least meant to fill this space, I think, but they're neither a perfect match nor as easy to use IMO.
Oh 2020. It's a crazy thing to say out loud (or even to type), but there is substantial doubt about the origin story of this virus in mainstream scientific circles.

The National Academy of Sciences published an opinion piece from a reputable scientist containing fairly strongly worded (for PNAS, anyway) conjecture regarding a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. [0]

(you might recognize Relman's name from his work on identifying the human gut microbiome.)

This is particularly strongly worded for this publication:

"""
Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory. Alternatively, the complete SARS-CoV-2 sequence could have been recovered from a bat sample and viable virus resurrected from a synthetic genome to study it, before that virus accidentally escaped from the laboratory.
"""

0: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
1) US foreign aid generally consists of money earmarked to buy goods from specific cronies in the US for specific elites in the target country. This lagniappe creates influence over those elites that greases other private import/export political/banking schemes between that country and large US firms.

2) That aid is generally also contingent on not taking aid from designated US state enemies like Russia and China, who are often eager to create the same relationship with the target country. Our eternal aid to Egypt, for example, would be happily replaced almost instantly if we withdrew it, along with any Egyptian weapons and infrastructure contracts with US firms.

Foreign aid is not charity.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rheller....
Mainly finishing and polishing https://deploymentfromscratch.com/. Pre-release in VERY soon. I could not do it for Christmas, because I got Covid and had to work less.
Perhaps entrepreneurs wanting feedback on ideas could be good niche to start with?
550–600 million years of hyperparameter tuning and neural architecture search using an evolutionary algorithm is nothing to laugh at.

But the actual learning process of a single brain uses very little training examples and is very energy efficient. A brain that uses only 20 watts of power.
The other alternative to the pointy nose theory was that there just weren't a lot of people who were into having W up their butt, but we felt that must not be the case.
I see them mention a change in that study and that they did some binomial regression for ethnicity in those years. But it seems that's for secondary attributes like ethnicity, not for the main cause of death (suicide). Or am I missing something?

I'm aware of those examples. Those examples were before the internet, meaning people commit suicide they way they know how. Socially, you couldn't just ask someone how to commit suicide with an alternative method, but now you can look it up on online so you don't have to ask anyone.

The coal gas example does show a reasonable reduction (18-13). But after the conversion process was completed, you see it's still creeps back up to 15 just within a couple years.

The paracetamol example might actually go against your argument. We see that the suicide rate overall is very steady after the package size change, which suggests that people found other methods.
I could easily go back to Europe. But we are employed here. I did look at Finland and their tech-hiring program a bit back during the pandemic, but they ended it. America is just short-sighted. For all the good things here, there is so much that is simply broken and for no good reason other than "NIH". If I could convince my spouse to move to Finland or Norway, I would do so in a heartbeat, but with 11 years as a doctor here, and with kids... I've been given the green light if I can make it work, and trying I am. I'd like Americans to have access to quality healthcare, great schools, and the lot, but apparently they don't want it because it's "socialist". The percentage of taxes that would be raised is still far less per person than anyone pays monthly for health insurance.
Super interesting. Any other ideas from your testing, or feedback from the YC interview on where there could be traction here? If you're willing to share, of course :)
Are working conditions generally more progressive/sensible in California than elsewhere in the US? I've always had that impression (I'm in UK), but would be interesting to hear in actuality.
The local governments downplay anything and everything to not look bad so I don’t think that is a particularly strong claim.
Huh, they haven't called once since June, when I bought the keyboard. But it's possible they will in the future, though.
To be fair, deciding to get a STEM PhD isn’t a financial decision at all. At best of the distance between getting a job in that field vs not but you should be cognizant off there being other alternatives.

But if your goal Of to be an academic or researcher (in higher education or industry) the name of the school on your diploma masters. A mediocre Harvard PhD graduate will probably still have Job for life somewhere (depending in the field).

But choosing to get a no name PhD is certainly not a decision optimized for earning potential or job opportunities.
Slightly off topic:

Something funny is happening in my native Belgium. Some people drop their fifth formal working day to become bicycle couriers, Uber drivers or whatnot in the "sharing economy". The reason is taxation regimes.

80% or 100% gross wage as a median income employee will hardly make any difference in net wage around there. A friend for example recently got a promotion from an entry level job (with tax discounts) to something more in line with her qualifications (without tax discounts). 600€ gross salary increase translated to 155€ net salary increase. All the rest got eaten by tax and social contributions increases.

Belgium combines high formal job taxes combine with a low tax scheme meant to formalise "sharing economy" jobs. These enjoy super low 10% taxation up to 500€ per month. Many people actually do the math. They switch to 80% formal jobs hardly losing any income. Some actually increase their income by becoming pizza couriers or Uber drivers in their 20% time...

UPDATED: corrected the net wage delta from 100 to 155€.
Machine learning is essentially a brute force. No surprice it is not efficient.
The author of this piece is wanting to stream possibly multi-MB messages with sub-linear memory use. See more in our Twitter conversation here: https://twitter.com/richardstartin/status/134406813297822105...
This type of surveillance doesn't reduce crime rate, and your vote on the matter is meaningless if the people doing the surveillance are LYING to you about what that surveillance entails.
For what it is worth, they say there is an 81% probability, based on their analysis, that it was a lab leak. That is not the same thing as "claims COVID-19 originated in a lab" - so I think the title is a little misleading - which is probably why the title actually seems to be "What is the source of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)?"
Oh look sarcasm! On Hacker News!
The British Office for National Statistics concludes that the impact of the lockdown in terms of QALY (quality-adjusted life year) is higher than that of the disease itself:

> from March 2020 to more than five years from now, the impacts of lockdown and a resulting recession are estimated to reduce England’s health by over 970,000 QALYs – the health impacts of contracting COVID-19 are still unclear in the long term, but between March 2020 and March 2021, these represent 570,000 lost QALYs[1]

That being said,

> While these negative health impacts of lockdown exceed the impacts of COVID-19 directly, they are much smaller than the negative impacts estimated for a scenario in which these measures are not in place; without these mitigations, the impact of direct COVID-19 deaths alone on both mortality and morbidity would be much higher – an estimated 439,000 excess deaths resulting from COVID-19, and 3,000,000 QALYs lost.[1]

[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/statementsandletters/estimatingt...
yah there fucking is lol. mega-wealth like bezos has accumulated is so so far beyond "reaping the benefits" of any of his own labor or imagination. that's the lives of workers he's hoarding in the form of wealth too great for him to use.

that is extremely wrong by my moral standards, both personally on him for doing it and collectively on us for allowing it.
Based on the Satellite video it looks like the US is the only place on the planet coding more during the night than during the day.
I don't see any _new information_ here, it's all stuff we've known for months. To me, this is just a conspiracy theory wrapped up with 'probability charts'.

Unless I'm missing something, is there any non-circumstantial evidence that this is true? All I've seen for the past year(!) is "it's not a coincidence that these two things happened in the same place" - which isn't science.
> calling for a colleague to be fired, or starting a petition to have them stripped of their positions on editorial board...in retaliation for expressing an ill-considered or unpopular opinion, ought to be unacceptable behavior

Why? Calling for a colleague to be fired might be an ill-considered or unpopular opinion, but that just puts us in a loop. We either want no consequences for ill-considered or unpopular opinions or we don't.

> putting their students on a public "re-education" list

This I agree with, but only because it is no longer about the individual and their speech.
That's because older movies were mastered for stereo instead of surround sound. If surround sound is downmixed to stereo, extra care must be taken to compensate for the loss of spatial information, otherwise the dialogs get overwhelmed by the sound effects from the surround channels.
Hacking the Nintendo Game and Watch
If you're relying on individuals making sensible risk assessments and voluntarily complying, you've already lost the battle. See also: drunk driving and seatbelt use.
Alcohol and nicotine help with writing and creativity... until they don’t.
> When you see a reliable public betting challenge with real stakes, you can be very confident the claim is true at a probability that is significantly above 50% (assuming 1:1 odds are being offered).

This makes the assumption that the overall stakes are even. What if Alex Jones puts up 100K that boiled frog eyes cure COVID? He could be absurdly wrong, but the additional credibility offered by this may let him sell a million dollars more of boiled frog eyes.

The problem is, there is going to be virtually no research on whether boiled frog eyes are a cure for covid, so it is next to impossible to challenge the claim and made all the more difficult by the potential for human error and the risk involved noted in the challenge.
>Because dentists are doing routine work.

To some degree. On the other hand, I had a crown a few years back and the temporary would not stay on. I lost it 2 or 3 times. (Like actually lost.) Pretty sure he lost money on that one.

I don't disagree. But when things are often not covered by insurance or when coverage is very partial, providers find they have to often give an upfront price.

Same thing with contractors for many types of jobs (or software consultants)--though there are pros to fixed-price vs. hourly.
Yes, I use SBCL daily. The fact that SBCL (like most CL implementations) is image-based makes CL the language for interactive and incremental programming and live debugging the program as it runs. (Shameless plug: I wrote a book about the last point and about how CL achieves it. https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484261330)
It has to be supported by the culture. If your culture is one where you must be in the office at all times this wouldn’t fly. When I managed large teams I allowed this on a few conditions.

1) Work/Delivery can’t suffer. No decrease in velocity because of some work/life balance. This is easily measured and padded with a +\- 5%.

2) Accountable. If you have things you are accountable for and they aren’t done yet, better get that homework done.

3) If your an engineer, we pay you to think, not to sit in a chair. The “office” benefits are communication, collaboration, and contemplation. If you can achieve that with cohesion with the team then +1 I’m all for it!

The ‘70s white collar management style doesn’t really work well for productivity in 2020. It makes unhappy employees which makes people leave. If you enjoy interviewing people by all means, continue that oppression. If you value your employees and their innovation they bring to your company (or your department, or team) then you should practice servant leadership and remove any blockers from them being able to bring their best work to the table.
Not sure why folks are defensive? The article is mainly informational.

TFA:

"What does this mean for the future of AI research? Things may not be as bleak as they look. The cost of training might come down as more efficient training methods are invented. Similarly, while data center energy use was predicted to explode in recent years, this has not happened due to improvements in data center efficiency, more efficient hardware and cooling."

Also. One flight in and of itself isn't an environemntal problem; thousands of flights are.

Training this one instance of a model isn't an environmental problem; I would be curious to see some educated guesses about the number of models being trained over the next ten years. Not an expert but I know that use of ML is exploding - lots of new use-cases and thus lots of new models.

So it makes sense to me think about this stuff.

To
> Among the risks is the large carbon footprint of developing this kind of AI technology.

No there are no risks of carbon footprint. Energy is cheap. Just build nuclear power plants.

Or just build solar and wind and train models half of the time if one is paranoid about nuclear power plants safety.
Interesting concept, although the pricing structure seems at odds with budgeting. I would say 6-month or 12-month subscription blocks make more sense to allow for planning and budgeting.
Looks super nice :) Would you be interested in selling on flurly. Happy to feature your book on the discover page when you launch!
That's not what I am arguing in the slightest.

"Wouldn't it be funny and enlightening if we could point out how some people overreact and see monsters in every shadow?" is the whole (milk) of it. There's nothing more to it than that.
Do you think any schedule would make a difference?
No other government downplayed and covered up?
> I understand the difference

No, you clearly don't.

> The problem is that you can completely change the shape of the object that’s “const”

“const” is not a feature of objects, but of the reference to a value (which may or may not be an object).

You can't change the reference at all (unlike a var/let references), hence it is constant.

Object immutability is orthogonal to reference immutability and is attained by Object.freeze().
This means that ultimately, all tax-paying citizens are that whale. Even the very consultants/vendors doing it.
The reason I posted it here is because I think they don't get enough attention from people from the industry who understand biology, statistics and reasoning.
They are using the fact that no one challenges them as an evidence that their claims are true.
I just spent way longer playing this than I meant to. I know it's similar to a lot of other word games, but it's really fun and satisfying, and is meaningfully different than other word games I've played. Good luck with it!
Responsively App
The saddest thing I witnessed were consultants like you describe bragging about how easy it is "to milk the cow" (to quote one). They bragged that they never earned their bonus in such an easy way.
Police can't really face any consequences for lying, so why wouldn't they?

On an individual level it doesn't matter even if the lie is in a courtroom for the purpose of turning a murder into justified deadly force! Why wouldn't an organization of police lie even more when they know full well neither the org nor the individual officers will be punished?

Even in this story the truly disturbing part is this:

> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit eventually ruled in BPD’s favor in the case.

ACLU is appealing the decision, but where are the obstruction / perjury / contempt charges for all the individuals that lied?
You can’t interact with a video.
Just prior to smartphones, I founded a startup called Puhrump that allowed people to call into a call center and have the operators google anything for them. It was a way to solve bar bets and find things out before the internet was in everyone's pocket. Unfortunately, the internet appeared in everyone's pockets before we had completed our seed round of funding. Great idea but a couple of years too late.
Or their children. Or their lovers. Or ...
Ultimate package database, I think? Granted, including maintainers, bugs, metadata, etc., but centered around the packages.
"I think online only will become counterculture."

Interesting opinion, would be interested in knowing the rationale. Is it related to either a progression of the technology or a regression (like nuclear war taking out the infrastructure)? I couldn't help but think about the Homer Simpson quote ("The internet? Is that thing still around?")
Sure, I should have said identifier. I'm actually having trouble identifying myself to the government right now, because I lost my records in a recent move. It's a real problem, but ultimately I found a workaround in meatspace. That is, the workaround grants me access... but there's an unresolved issue: whoever's got that box of my records has everything they need to steal my identity. Is "the blockchain" going to prevent situations like this? Replace "lose a box of records" with data loss and/or exfiltration and you're in the same situation except perhaps that the "better mousetrap" will prevent the meatspace workaround from functioning.
Who is off Twitter? Turns out it's only Anima Anandkumar. No one else in this particular saga.

Whose career is destroyed? Pedro is still doing fine. Enumerate the damage for me, please, in dollars or jobs.
Yes the effects may last a long time, much of the effects should be mittigated by government though (suicide is often because of financial issues - something that governments can fix by issuing a new-deal style work program post vaccination to reboot the economy)

However if Covid ran wild and infected 70% of the UK, and assuming no healthcare collapse, based on medium IFR figures from https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/

There would be

38,413 deaths for those age 45-64

and

3,037 deaths for those age 25-44

In addition to the 100k 65-74 year olds, and the 350k 75+

Even if you felt those were acceptable figures, how would you deal with healthcare collapse? Decide to withhold hospital treatment from over 65s?