skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I do not have a question whether to vaccinate, for me it is more like when COVID-19 is going to be available for me (non-essential worker, no underlying conditions, middle-aged) and the differences between specific vaccines.

In Canada, if all goes well, I should be able to get access to vaccine around middle of 2021 (unclear which one). As a Russian citizen - if pus really comes to shove - I can go there and get their adenoviral vector vaccine with unclear efficiency pretty much right now - but is it wise? That is my wager.
No, FDA standards for the safety of medicine that you give to healthy people are much more rigorous than for medicine that you give to sick people.
Thanks for the reminder.

Initially I was a bit disappointed HN didn't have more of a political stance on the current myriad issues which seem to affect us. It is what it is and does it well.

I hope you all have a better year in 2021.
This is because the MLM/anti-vaccine market penetration into healthcare professionals (nurses especially) is unfortunately really high. As it turns out, not even a lifetime of training and knowledge can prevent being suckered by grifters.
... Except that Amazon also has a problem with counterfeiting, especially for known brands.
> even if they spend $10/day on fancy ones or the equivalent per year on owning and maintaining a fancy machine (and few people will do either).

Assuming the machine's lifespan is 5 years (and that's a very short time for an espresso machine) you are looking at 18K over 5 years at 10$/day.

That's high traffic commercial espresso machine (La Marzocco) territory.
Read the book! It’s different and, imho, better, although the movie is very good as well.
Crushing the myth that creatives require delicate management
One of the only reliable ways I know to convince people of anything is:

1. Make them implicitly commit to finish the conversation and not run away

2. Explain how the X thing works and how it doesn’t, to eliminate strawmen and educate (eg mRNA vaccines inject RNA into cell, not DNA into nucleus... masks reduce R0 by massively reducing the momentum of the airflow that carries particles going out, they don’t prevent particles from coming into your eyes etc.)

3. Ask them, given the information in 2, what they are still worried about. Really listen and understand their points.

4. Present them with a double standard where in other areas they do Y but here they do the opposite where the criteria are met at least as much

5. When they say “it’s totally different”, explore how, and be prepared to genuinely have your own mind changed if it turns out they don’t have a double standard

Use the seat belts analogy for example, when asking about vaccines. Seat belts can harm in certain rare cases, but if the “bad” stats are higher for seatbelts, why do you use them?
Several of those aren't treatments (colonoscopies, x-rays, ultrasounds don't actually aim to treat or change anything) and actually the whole statement could be considered tautological -

Every treatment is aimed at an existing pathology, by definition, otherwise can we really call it a "treatment"? For what does it treat?

Circumcision is not really preventative of anything much, it's a cultural thing at this point.
Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.
‘Hellish Quart’ is inspired by Bushido Blade and is apparently currently in early access: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000360/Hellish_Quart/
Ask HN: Giving Junior candidates home assignment in unfamiliar programming lang?
Hey,
I've been interviewing Junior/Mid-level candidates and been giving them home assignments so I can get a better understanding of their programming abilities. Many of them do not have any previous working experience whatsoever and I personally think that this is the best way to test their abilities.

The thing is, some of them aren't familiar with the programming language we're currently using, and I've been wondering whether they should be required to use it nonetheless in the home assignments, or use their language of choice.

What do you think? Is it too steep of a learning curve for a home assignment or is it legit? What did you do?
Circumcisions are unethical and offer no significant health benefits.
If we are comparing the relative safety of medicines, which this article does in its conclusion, then it is the highest bar.
And they are all correct.

Except for when they haven't slept, or aren't paying attention etc.

That is not a good baseline to compare self-driving cars against. That would be horrific.
A big part of music piracy these days is ripping music straight from streaming services.

I don't know how it works or how to do it, but I know that it is possible to rip music from the Deezer music streaming service in lossless quality.

It's crazy that this hasn't been patched yet because it has been a thing now for a couple of years.
While I agree with the broader point you're making, circumcision is an odd addition to the list of preventative medical procedures. It may offer mild benefits for reducing transmission rates and infection time for STDs later in life, but it also comes with risks.
What you listed are examinations and diagnostics, not treatments.
Graham Greene is also my favorite writer. Many of his books fantastically explain moral dillemas of people in extreme situations, and force you to think how you would behave under extreme circumstances. I see the value in his books not in the stories he tells, but in the soul searching that he provokes.
You should google "the Cutter incident".
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising...

Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer

Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.

On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
Father Reginald would have approved this comment.
Maybe there is and that is why the listing took the path it did. "Horses and cars are both modes of transportation, so I guess this change is ok." then "Horses and drones are both hobby activities in this day and age, so I guess this change is ok." I lean towards change in package size ok, but just about anything else is not. Otherwise you can anneal the product page to fit your needs.
Even for non-counterfeit books, I’ve often got shit quality print-on-demand versions with plates that look like an inkjet printer running low on ink and with the letters having fuzzy boundaries.
How do you come out this end and think “we did too much”? We have definitive proof that we actually did too little. Look at S. Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, etc.. More contact tracing, stricter targeted lockdowns, paying people to stay home. The problem is that we didn’t do enough, instead we took half measures and took all the damage with barely any of the benefit.

The idea that death was inevitable is wrong. There are plenty of nations and extremely dense cities with very low death numbers. Sure, Americans are higher risk because they are more obese (or so we think) but our death counts were avoidable.
It's not mainstream, but some of this is going on right now with emulation portables like the Odroid Go Advance and its various knockoffs. The devices are all made in China and some even ship with the SD card preloaded with ROMs, but generally speaking I think it's the same framework of "the device is neutral, choose for yourself what you want to do on it."
Hi Cory, this is really inspiring for the starting indie-hackers like me.Could you please share how do you continue building audience around your projects?
That was unexpected of Rubio. I mean I dislike him, but that was a good thing.
I’ll bite. So what? Goalposts changing isn’t some sign of shadiness. Science isn’t a soccer game. Goalposts change all the damn time. Newtonian physics was considered as something that explained almost everything. Then we discovered that it doesn’t really, there are other theories that are better in being able to account for experiments. It’s not some sign of some big con. There was a goal, it was achieved and we moved on to the next one.
Brighton Rock is one that can read a lot like a noir gangster thriller.

I do think that to really 'get' Greene's writing, you should have experienced the cognitive dissonance that comes from religion.

I was introduced to his writing by an English teacher who saw that in me. Truly a teacher who influenced my life's trajectory.
Well, in terms of overall crashes and injury crashes, you don't get safer than the 80 year old until you're 30 [1]. Though the rate of fatal wrecks is about the same between 16-17 and 80+. I think that may be due in large part to the fact that 80 year old humans are far more fragile and likely to die in a wreck where a younger person would walk away from.

[1] https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
Agreed. This debate over the covid vaccines is getting weird. Especially when it comes to the HN demographic, I'm pretty sure 99%+ are perfectly fine with vaccines in general. As I am. Vaccines and a lot of modern pharmaceuticals are awesome and save many, many lives. However, I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals. Especially when there are hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to be made. Big pharma isn't exactly known for doing the right thing when big money is on the line... ever.

As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.
What?

I can’t make sense of what you’re even trying to say:

1. That the mechanism of harm is different tells us nothing about the relative risks. I don’t OD on cars, but cars are riskier than Asprin.

2. You can have long term negative impacts from, eg, vaccine carriers. (Which is why we stopped using some....)

3. Overdosing a live virus vaccine happens all the time, the result being you get the illness. A flu shot can kill you by giving you a deadly flu.
Which could be true, assuming the median skill level of drivers is sufficiently higher than the average.
I've met quite a few doctors that believe in homeopathy, being a doctor doesn't guarantee a strong statistical background or critical thinking unfortunately.
Its a short and elegant proof set in pure theoretical general relativity (GR). The idea is that if there’s a sphere of space where if you try to emit light rays and the light rays don’t initially start separating, then they can’t start separating due to gravity, because in classical GR, gravity is always attractive. You can then show that this implies that inside that sphere, spacetime must end, basically because you can’t outrun light.

The proof is important because it was previously believed that black holes are not interesting because they require very special perfect conditions to create, like balancing a pencil on its tip is physically possible but requires perfect aim. But these aforementioned spheres are very common and easy to find so it turns out black holes are common too.

If you think (as almost every physicist does) that GR is approximately correct to describe reality, but needs fixes at very tiny lengths because of poorly understood quantum effects, the proof does not directly carry over. One immediate problem is that the proof assumes that energy densities are positive, implying that that gravity is universally attractive, which for quantum matter can never be always true for every quantum state (this is a consequence of Reeh-Schlieder, that every QFT contains states with negative energy density).

None of this invalidates Penrose’s work. Physicists have always used different physics to describe different scales. Newtonian physics is great to describe most physics on a human scale, but it’s “wrong” in the sense that GR supersedes it. Similarly GR is “wrong” but still approximately right for a ton of questions of cosmology. But if you fall into a black hole, once you wait long enough, we don’t know what will happen.

In string theory, there are objects that are black hole-like. It is generally believed that the singularity is “resolved” (not truly present) in string theory but the details are very tricky to work out. It still is true that geometry breaks down near the singularity and whats left is some stringy stuff, something very new and confusing.

Of course it might turn out that string theory does not describe our reality either...
Saving time by not punctuating your comment?
> Can you imagine any other product we accept killing thousands of people a year and we're fine with that?

Unhealthy foods?
I like the adaptive cruise control, because it drives more carefully than me. I have the same experience as you when I use it, regarding other drivers, but then I realize they're going to drive that way whether I'm using it or not. Therefore, I'm of the opinion that human drivers other than myself will cause the same amount of accidents, but I may cause less using while using it, so in the end there will be less accidents caused by human drivers as more people use adaptive cruise.
10 deaths out of 200,000 is much safer than COVID in the general population. In hardest hit areas, COVID has killed something like 1 in 100.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
Fakespot can help reveal which products have misleading reviews

https://www.fakespot.com/

Obviously it isn't perfect but it does help.
We can eventually make AI do any of that better than a human by a long shot.

We tend to overestimate the power of the human brain. There is a lot we don’t know yet, but we shouldn’t treat it as magic and unsolvable by AI.
This [1] may not alleviate fear, but it may help you understand mRNA vaccines.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0C5tFHze8
Should I Buy a House?
By "safest medical procedure" they mean safer than aspirin, not safer than surgery.
> It is just an new brand of hatred, which is very difficult to reconcile with the values of equality, mutual understanding, and respect that are the heart of social justice and progress.

Do you have any examples of social justice standing for equality, mutual understanding, and respect?

All I have encountered is hatred and witch-hunts but I would like to believe there's more to it than that.
Information Control (Four Types)
Limited brand selection is actually a benefit. I don't want to spend an hour flipping through shitty USB-C cables to find the one that won't nuke my device. I want to pay the buyer at the retailer a few cents to do that for me.
Still bitter... and still using Gmail and search and maps and whatever else. I dunno guys, we don’t have to like it but it sure seems like they know what they’re doing over there in Mountain View.
So you are saying that you have a better chance of dying if you get hit by lightning then if you get a few medical procedures? I hope so.
This did it for me: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
Very nice, Cory - congratulations :)
Here is an upvote for engaging.

Kind of a non-sequitur, no? I was talking about toy drones.
This is 100% just an artifact of a system going from human control to non-human control. Nobody bats an eye at systems which were never human controlled - or transitioned so long ago that nobody recalls human control.

I've never seen anyone hesitate when getting on a fully automated train system at an airport or an elevator. Even more-so with amusement park rides that literally put people in extreme situations.
I've heard this phrased as "buy once, cry once".

A few years ago my New Year's resolution was to stop buying cheap crap, and to consciously save up for nice things. This had a few unexpected consequences:

1. I accumulate less junk and produce less waste.

2. I buy less stuff and end up spending less money in the long run, since there's only so much you can save up for at once.

3. My purchases bring me much more pleasure; the anticipation and research heightens the joy of actually getting the thing.

Number 3 was the most surprising to me, most likely because I have a rather strong anti-materialism streak. I'm not the kind of person who "goes shopping", but even I must admit that deliberately saving up for something makes its purchase a bit more meaningful, and loads more satisfying.

Oh, and I basically don't experience buyer's remorse anymore, which is nice.
It's not really an either-or situation. They can be genuine, but also heavily trained and coached by PR professionals.

It's a misconception that all PR initiatives are attempts to mislead or lie to people. The best PR work is completely transparent.
> I don't see that ever happening

I don't either. But a boy can dream.
I dunno. I don't think anyone actually wants D2C, for rare-purchase (ie the mass majority of goods).

It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper.

That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
The discussion was toy drones, not USBs.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

Not going into the safety side that much, but a lot of background and technical details.
Indeed. Why would 1.00000001x safer not be a no-brainer?
> essentially socialism

In what way did this article allude to anything remotely describable as "socialism"?

Literally the only part of the article that is not 100% directed at the individual reader is "(and others)" in the very last paragraph.

It is mind-boggling to me that parenthetically mentioning the single word "others" is enough to provoke "but that's socialism" responses. And let me be clear that there is a mile-wide gap between "socialism" and "the opposite of pure individualism".
If I understand correctly the news is about their new plane the C919.
If it’s wrong, then why isn’t it illegal?
This is false. 90%+ of physicians regularly get flu shots every year. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/healthcareworkers.htm
Absolutely agreed. It's a different topic though. Amazon even steals top sellers, copies them, and pushes out the originator! (I think there was a radiolab about a guy who invented a bunch of grill tools that Amazon duplicated, and bottom-listed him).

There are lots of problems with Amazon, but in hindsight, perhaps my original comment was a bit offtopic...
ps - source code: https://github.com/shiehn/SignalsAndSorcery

(Tone.js + SpringBoot)
Somehow related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#A_Theory_of_th...
I don't know how often this occurs. I know a specific case was Pandemrix, the vaccine administered in a few European nationas during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which seems to have increased the risk of narcolepsy especially for children [1,2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
Web service in C ?

dealing with http queries, strings, regexp, json... is a lot of (unsafe) work..
Big part of Latino culture is visiting each other, hugging, living in multi-generational dwelling. We've seen this in El Paso, same story in LA.
I had spent some time in South America and flew back into the US via Miami. We were a red-eye and so got in pretty early in the morning for Miami. The part of South America we were in is somewhat known as a fit place as well.

That said, it was shocking coming back to the US to see how fat and tired everyone was. I remember one of the TSA people who was just enormous. Literally wider than tall. Having been out of the culture for so long, I was a bit stunned at the size of that person and most of my countrymen too. I remember think to myself: how did this happen, how did we allow it to get so bad? That, and for being on a red-eye, most of the people in the US were more tired looking than the people that just got off the plane.

The combination of fatness and exhaustion was, obviously, quite memorable.

My big question is then: What is this doing to our society? Sure these changes must reflect in our education system just as they are reflected in our food system. Where else do they reflect? How have our politics been effected?
We have done the same post every year since 2016!
Yes, unfortunately FreeBSD has much better support for Intel CPUs and for Intel networking, than for alternatives.

On servers with Intel CPUs, FreeBSD warned me promptly, by e-mail, about some corrected ECC errors.

The errors appeared suddenly after many years of use and they kept recurring, pointing to a probable failure in the near future, but being promptly notified, I have replaced the offending DIMM and all went back to normal.

So yes, you are right, for FreeBSD it is better to stick to Intel, unless you have time to change yourself the sources, to add the missing hardware support, which is somewhat easier than attempting to make changes in the Linux kernel.

There are also examples of hardware for which FreeBSD has better support than Linux, but those belong to classes of hardware less likely to be encountered by non-professional users.

For example FreeBSD has better support for magnetic tapes.
Cool library, I might use this for a side project I have also parsing HTML data from HackerNews.

What are your impressions of scraper and html5ever? When I initially looked at HTML/XML parsing libraries for Rust, there didn't seem to be a standout library such as serde_json for JSON data. I was also considering using scraper + html5ever. However, I'm curious if scraper adds enough to warrant the additional dependency as opposed to directly using html5ever.
9th best selling flash disk is totally fake: USB Flash Drive 1TB - Thumb Drive, High Speed USB Drive, Portable Ultra Large Storage USB Memory Stick, Jump Drive Pen Drive Come with Keychain https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_...

Reviews are for Soda and the storage capacity is much less than 1TB so you will lose data if you film it.
The current mRNA vaccines for coronavirus do throw a wrench in the gears of how cells work.
The CDC estimates that seasonal influenza vaccine effectiveness in recent years has varied from 10 – 60%.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

I always get it because even 10% is better than zero and it doesn't seem to cause me any serious side effects.
Yes, as many templates as you like. An A* pathfinder, for instance:
https://github.com/glouw/ctl/blob/master/examples/astar.c#L8...

Although if you're interested in just a batch rename, it's something like this:

#define vec_char str
#define P
#define T char
#include <vec.h>
Are they all transliterated as "Satoshi" as well, or just pronounced that way? I know absolutely nothing about Japanese, so this may be a stupid question.