skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I checked, Libre Office Calc had Python as an option for scripting language, why aren't more people using it?
If you manage scale in the milion messages/sec you really don't care about some TB/month. Most compagnies are still using REST/json in places where a binary protocol "would be better".
> They genuinely get to work for competing services and pick their own hours.

I don't know about other countries, but in my country, Uber (and other companies) offers drivers a bonus for completing X amount of rides in Y days. Except that completing X-1 rides, earns you a pittance, far below a livable wage, and X rides earns you just above.

Also, X is also quite a large number. I don't think it's possible to complete it without working for 8+ hours during peak traffic time. So, in effect, drivers are not free to choose their working hours, if they intend to make enough money to live on.
Global by Nature (Part II): APIs
Yeah, that was the month. I couldn't find a recording of it.
The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region, but because all people know is that COVID-19 is new (and none of the history) they immediately jump to that the lab specializing in this type of disease at the epicenter is too big of a coincidence to ignore (rather than it being there exactly because it is a common epicenter).

It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.
I've had some success with WinPython, where I just install the whole kit and kaboodle on their computer. Before I share anything, I try running my code on a fresh install of WinPython.

Learning to distribute Python code is on my to-do list for next year. We now have a younger programmer on the team who is up to date on this stuff, and has agreed to train me.
Makes you feel a little less aristocratic if you have to actually pay a fair wage for your chaffeur's time.
I've been surprised that there hasn't been any societal "aha" moment about how awful the lives of misfit loners can be. Still the same old "get out there / be yourself" ideology... even as people who've never been isolated begin experience how bad it can be, there somehow still remains the belief that misfit loners would choose that over the obviously super easy socializing/popularity games that humans play.
AIR was wildly popular for making games and cross-platform applications around 2010. These could even be submitted to mobile apps stores, even for iOS.

But AIR produces packaged applications you need to install, and not the embedded-in-a-webpage experience that Flash was.
It's that important to me. Maybe it isn't to you. So be it.

Computing has been a major part of my life for 35 years. I wish that I didn't have dependence in proprietary software but I do. Within that context this matters a lot to me.

Normalizing the idea that the developers of proprietary software are acting ethically (if within their legal rights, which I would dispute) when they remove functionality is very troubling to me.

I would rather that this kind of behavior, on the part of developers, be both socially taboo and illegal. Failing illegal I'll settle for socially taboo.
Thank you so much for such an insightful suggestions. We learned a lot during the process. As its our first client we ignored some obvious things. In future we will definitely take a stand for ourselves.

Also will rephrase our wording to mention the client.

Are there any suggestions on how to tell this to an investor?
Are there any decent CER encoders for C that are free?
For a comparable case, Ian Plimer, an AGW denialist geologist, of repute in his own field, but now notorious for making completely outrageous statements to his side of belief in the climate science.

He's off-piste, outside his competency, arguing outside of the peer review process.

Why do senior scientists do this? Is this some form of relevance deprivation syndrome?
It's probably better that it doesn't have political stances, as 1) that is hard to moderate and maintain high quality discussion, 2) there's plenty of political discussion elsewhere, better to keep HN focused purely on deep tech, and 3) in an overly politicized media atmosphere it's actually a feature and differentiator to not have it and instead be a refuge from it (such venues are scarce).
No, the premise is that not locking down and not sending COVID-19 positive patients to nursing homes with healthy ones would have left us better off than locking down and sending COVID-19 positive patients to nursing homes with healthy ones did.
Think about the calculation of an insurance product with a Fund Value. Everything is forward recursive with respect to time. Been a while, so I might butcher some of this. It is likely that you'll want a 30 year projection, so you'll call fundValue(30 * 12)

fundValue(t+1) = if t > 0 fundValue(t) - charges(t) + intCred(t) else initialPrem

charges(t) = netAmtAtRisk(t) * costOfInsurance(t) + riderCosts(t) + policyFee(t)

netAmtAtRisk = (FaceAmt - fundValue(t))

Now think layering on decrements

surrenderMargin(t) = lapseDecrement(t) * (surrenderCharge(t) * fundValue(t))

mortalityMargin(t) = mortalityDecrement(t) * netAmtAtRisk(t)

investmentMargin(t) = (earnedRate(t) - intCred(t)) * assetBase(t)

Now think layering on calcs necessary to calculate the assetBase (e.g. reserves + required capital)...
He expressed to others that he wanted to be famous. The lyrics of that song deal with loneliness. My first instinct is that he's one of the infamous incels, since these are common themes that come up when one of them goes on a destructive and/or murderous rampage.

The difference is that he didn't target women in his rampage, and at least a year ago he did have a girlfriend.

The next question that comes up is, was that site one of his past customers or a competitor that maybe got one of the gigs he hoped to get?
But didn't other developed countries like the UK make a transition from manufacturing to meta industries like finance/technology licencing/intellectual property?.
Pyinstaller + Gooey has been my go-to combo for sharing executable python with simple/intuitive UIs.

https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey
To add to the ‘different set of accidents’ point - the accidents caused by autonomous cars will most likely also be harder to accept. They will be accidents that a human driver (at least with the benefit of hindsight) would appear unlikely to have caused.

Things like that Tesla driving straight into a wall and killing its driver. Or not seeing a van right in front of it because the sun was too bright. Things where a bit of common sense (not something AI excels at) might have avoided them.

On the flip side the lives saved will be based on having super human reaction times / situational awareness and will be things no person would have been able to do.

So maybe there’ll be a battle of public opinion (and PR!) weighing these things against each other.
We've changed the title to be that of the article, in keeping with the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

(Submitted title was "Uber will charge 25% starting Jan. 1 in Seattle as per minimum wage law". Submitters: please don't do that.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There will always be nut jobs willing to go as far as to assassinate people they disagree with. The point is that "just" cancelling people you disagree with used to not be mainstream or common.
> but that's not how people really used Flash

4chan's /f/ would disagree, they're posting stand-alone flash games and animations just fine and those also worked locally.
Better title for the article would be: "Should I buy a house in the US as an investment?"

For an actual answer whether to buy a house I'd consider one of the many region specific rent vs. buy calculators instead.
That was my fear. Do you have a reference for a meta-analysis or something?
Can you elaborate about UEFI?
the animations and aesthetic are lots of fun, assuming you intend them to be a kind of retro hip nod to an older web era. all these people hating on it have no sense of joy. but i think it might not be right for a site that sells medical gear for a pandemic. also, its hard for me tell based on the masks whether you are extremely online and irony poisoned (very likely) or a right wing grifter (very unlikely but possible)
GUIDs Are Not Enough
This is nonsensical. Lockdowns aren't a binary system. The countries that did real lockdowns combined with testing, contact tracing and isolation are doing extremely well. Look at how China is doing today. Or Taiwan. Or New Zealand. Or Australia.
The major issue here is that the sensitization of priors can be a marketing ploy.

It's very easy to "make guesses" that present your conclusion, throw in a paltry amount of money, then make bank off the publicity.

This possibility poisons the well for the entire process. If they can make money off this even if they are completely off-base, then it's not rational to build up the trust necessary in their process to engage with their model.
HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.
Thanks! This is why I keep saying that all my good ideas are already taken! ;)
> That's 9 trillion dollars worth of money.

I'm not sure how you're getting 9 trillion dollars. If there's approximately 250M adults in the US, at $600/week/adult, that would be $150B/week, or $600B/month. So far, over the course of 10 months, that would be $6T.

Also, that would be the max amount so far and could ask people who don't need the money to either opt out of receiving it or to donate it to an org or person they think needs it.

> Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.

Fair points. I think often political parties can get so insular they miss the point that for some problems, we are all on the same team.

> Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.

I don't know too much about what you mean here regarding the reserve status and how it prevents inflation, but I'm curious to learn more, so thank you for mentioning that.
Remove plastic covering from Apple products' packaging
The 4-5x is based on statistics of a sample with a high ratio of human drivers to autonomous drivers, if done on the road today.

Autonomous won't be known to be N times as safe as human driving until there are sufficient autonomous cars on the road and the varying ratios of autonomous to human drivers have been at equilibrium for a some sufficient amount of time to gather sufficient data to compare to human driving safety statistics.

So- 4-5x times is a lie. It could be much more dangerous with only autonomous drivers or much less dangerous. They don't know yet.
The Seattle rule doesn't require Uber to pay drivers while they wait for a trip to be assigned, only once they actually have one. (This might seem intuitively gameable by making drivers wait longer, but there's no reason for Uber to do that, since one way or another they have to pay out the statutory minimum for every ride.)
What sort of capabilities are you looking for? Newton-Raphson (which Excel has with GOALSEEK)? Sensitivity analysis?
The last major redesign broke/removed "Undo Close Tab", with a promise to bring it back. I found that decision to be staggering. It's not even clear what purpose the update served, except as an example of the development approach that jwz assigned the epithet of "CADT" 15+ years ago.
Is this a joke? The PyXLL add on costs $25 a month. Hard pass.
My guess is the numeric inputs would be changing significantly each call?
You shouldn't need product reviews, manufacturer name, or country of origin to know that a $23 quadcopter is trash.

They sell $50 watches there too. Do you think they compare to a Rolex?

If Amazon is at fault here it's for destroying the concept of value in and of itself.
I work somewhere that was stuck in even more simple excel usage, like sorting a list and counting rows for each type of category instead of using a pivot table.

I've done some more advanced work with python and xgboost for some modeling, but the biggest improvements in terms of both time saving and regular use of data for informed decision making has been implementing basic reports and dashboards. So much so that sometimes I feel like I'm creating kindergarten doodles that get praised as amazing masterpieces, which is a weird sort of embarrassment. I jokingly describe my job as "I count stuff" because a big part of what I do is still working with departments on what they want counted and the most useful way of displaying it to them. Percentages and year-on-year comparisons are magic.

I'm not quite sure what qualifies as a "legacy industry", but just about any organization that's been around for 40+ years could have the potential for massive improvements from taking advantage of improvement made during <= the past 20 years.
> as if that is an answer for the vast majority of PC users in the world.

The vast majority of PC users don't give a fuck if they "Own Their Hardware" or any other philosophical questions about their computer. They buy a tool and use it. Generally speaking, those tools work just fine for them until ultimately the drive fails or they drop it into a creek while hiking.

It's the nerds on HN who bitch about "Owning their computer". Literally the people who should have the skills and knowledge to fix the very problem they are complaining about. If you tried to talk to your mom or your sister about how they don't own their computers they would likely look at you as if you were insane.

FWIW, I'm only intermittently a Linux user, mostly I use MacOS.
I don't know that a post this arrogant warrants a serious response. If you think you can write a PHP script that does what BERT or ImageNet does, by all means go right ahead.
Well said. As it becomes more complex and intertwined, technologically and socially (employees, customers, etc), then it becomes harder to change. Thanks for helping to refine the analogy!
The lab theory is better suited for a movie, as no hard evidence has been presented.

Oddly enough, it seems the virus will end up transmitting the Chinese control over its people to several western countries.

At least where I live a quite scary addendum to the current epidemic law has been presented. If passed, it will grant the possibility to test people at an event and fine those that won't comply.
Yes, that is a moral problem that our society has.
It would be nice to see data instead of anecdote. My agency did an internal survey of attitudes toward remote work and found that opinions were quite readily (though not exclusively) predicted by hierarchy. Managers were floundering, but workers were flourishing.
Right idea, wrong time. My friend owns a sex shop in Provincetown, MA and has sold tens of thousands of Trump-plugs over the past 4 years.
You'd think they'd be let into the terminal until the issue was resolved.
Is there more context for this?
Fireflies serve a similar kind of function; they only thrive in low-pollution areas.
One thing that I think you might not have considered is that wjile $2500 in rent does include the things you mentioned it is on top of the cost of the space itself. The landlord probably pays $1500 in mortgage.
I like this idea! And not only because I have a long-running art project called This Like That.

But I'm not sure about using Mechanical Turk. If the goal is to have unbiased opinions, is that a good place to source them?

I would assume MT participants are trying to complete tasks as fast as possible. If I'm on MT and you ask me "A or B?" my incentive is to give you an immediate answer. I have no incentive to align that answer with my actual opinion.

Also I wouldn't expect MT to give me a particularly random sample. I mean, if I'm wondering how my B2B SAAS logo is perceived, is an answer from MT going to overlap much with the opinions of my target audience?

It seems like a fun thing to try as a toy, like rolling dice only with humans. I'm just not sure I'd use it for any question I really cared about.
I made a bot that bet on horse races. The strategies were succesful but ultimately I spent more than it earned on AWS fees. I might turn it on again next year.
Diffuse complexity is exponentially worse than concentrated complexity
Why is that absurd? Products used by billions of people may just as well not have serious requirements. I beg not to debate semantics, indeed my own fault, but in the world of network software requirements can start to get very serious, straight through to userspace protocol stacks on DMA'ed device buffers.

Would you go through all of the effort to rig an application with userspace networking only to return its results inside an `std::string` -- one of the few std containers where one can't even control the allocator if they wanted to? That's absurd, if anything.
Can you recommend specific parts? I'm hoping to build out a smart home lighting and sensor solution soon using local protocols. Part of it will be an IoT wifi network & VLAN without internet access but I'd like to experiment with Zigbee/Zwave as well.
This is nothing more than apologetics, and not even good apologetics. Instead, speculative apologetics, i.e. no solid footing by which to understand the premise.
It would make a lot of sense that SARS-COV2 was spreading in Southern China for a while, but going unnoticed, due to immunity. Then, as soon as one of those rural workers visits another major city further up north, it gets a chance to spread in a more susceptible population.
iirc, OVA deployment was unavailable, then buggy.
Thanks @dang and the other HN mods for your work on finding ways to maintain a floor on discussion quality. Hard problem requiring constant vigilance, but much appreciated by all.
Birth rates go down when people are in a secure situation. The solution isn't to make having children hard through impoverishment. That increases birth rates further.

Besides, in the case of this Somalian man, in subsistence-oriented societies having more children is often economically advantageous.
> well mapped highway driving with clear conditions

and perfectly visible unambiguous markings. The bar is rather low.
The older you are, the more convenient and comfortable staying anonymous becomes, especially if you have or have had serious responsibilities over the years. You are either a target and/or intimidating, and either one gets in the way of sharing information freely.

The older you are, the less interest or value there is in maintaining an online persona, especially in a community much younger than you. But the insights from such discussions, and the ideas you can provide, can still be valuable.

Hence a former Secretary of the Air Force becomes DiscoDuck, for example.
This practice is recommended by several safety programs. https://safestart.com/news/4-reasons-backing-parking-spaces-...
There’s really no way around this except avoiding third party sellers, except if it’s the producer themselves selling directly on Amazon. Unless you want the eBay experience, don’t buy in the Amazon marketplace.
31. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
> we anticipate that the number of people killed will be fewer, hence 'saving lives'. However, the lives lost in autonomous accidents will be a different set of people than those that would have died in human driven accidents. There will be cases where a court determines that the autonomous system was the cause. Families of those killed will want justice, while those separately saved by autonomous systems may never be heard from in the same case.

This reasoning was addressed with the VICP program for vaccines in the U.S., based on the idea that vaccines save many lives overall, but still injure a small number of people who will want to be compensated for that injury.

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html

Maybe there should be a self-driving-car injury compensation program along similar lines once particular cars are convincingly proven to be even moderately safer than human drivers. People might be mad about it, but maybe the precedent of the apparent success of the VICP would be persuasive (at least for courts and legislators, and maybe for some people actually injured by self-driving cars).

A counterargument is that vaccine injuries are generally unforeseeable and reflect absolutely no fault on the part of the injured person (or injured person's guardian), while some people injured by self-driving cars will bear some fault for their own injuries, which insurers or manufacturers might well want the opportunity to adjudicate. (Otherwise, there could be a perverse incentive to deliberately do dangerous things around self-driving cars to provoke an injury and receive a payment, something I've heard already sometimes happens with personal injury claims against human drivers in some parts of the world.)
Yeah, but Australians come from a notoriously conformist, law-abiding culture, so we can't extrapolate from them to Western society.

/s
This is addressed in the article, although I don't see sources, so who knows how accurate it is.

>The most similar coronavirus is found among bats that don’t live nearby, and scientists have not been able to pinpoint the exact point where SARS-CoV-2 transferred to humans
There was no app store when the iphone launched
Tracebox – A Middlebox Detection Tool
Imagine it's 2005 and Lebron says something unflammatory like "McVeigh had the right idea" or something. It would be in the sports news for one evening. Everyone would be like "ok weirdo". Some sports commentator would dredge it up in 2008 as a punchline to a joke and that would be it. The same thing in 2020 and someone would write a manifesto about how he's Literally Hitler(TM). There would be 50-50 odds a major outlet would publish that manifesto. The league would bench him for a substantial time. ESPN would distance themselves. He'd lose promotion deals. It would seriously negatively impact his career despite having exactly zero bearing on his ability to play basketball, the thing he's paid to do.

Edit: Better, non-hypothetical examples:

Mel Gibson had to drunkenly spout hateful things about people who are important in his industry to get kicked out of it. These days you don't even have to offend people relevant to you to get that kind of treatment.

Look at the flak that 2000s rappers caught for song lyrics that objectified women and glorified street violence. Now imagine what that kind of backlash would look like today. Probably much bigger.
For the past two decades I have worked nearly exclusively remotely, save for a few meetings here and there. I think this isn't a very accurate generalization.
> The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be.

That shouldn’t really change your policy. Some of those YouTubers might not have a choice in their thumbnails either. This doesn’t change the fact that the person or group is attempting to get you to consume some content by using irrelevant emotional manipulation. It sucks that some people in the group are probably well-meaning and competent.
No, just, like, an HTML file.

Put the JS in <script> elements, and the CSS in <style> elements, all within the HTML (in the <head>, or at the end, as appropriate).