skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why don't we have more outrage against this outdated institution created out of 1600 era values?

Americans with nice lives, particularly the types to frequent HN, are insulated from the effects of our criminal justice system. Concern for schooling takes precedence.
Although the article begins with a photo of a quadruped robot, it focuses mostly on the software - path planning side of robotics. While still a very active research field, BD and any other places doing legs are much more concerned with mechanical - dynamics, actuators, battery, locomotion problems.

If you want to do some real work on those, pursuing grad school in Electrical (actuators, battery) / Mechanical Engineering (legs, locomotion) is the best, and for the legged robots industry probably the only way (same goes for biomimetics - robot hands). The related research area encapsulating the above is called passive dynamics and primarily is a control theory-based field.
It isn't stagnation!

The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Warehouse/Workshop Model

https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
Maybe this is true, but the one I got is a lid on top of my Instant Pot. At that point I have one device (read: fewer things to store) that can be everything from a slow cooker, pressure cooker and now dehydrator and fryer. It was a great addition to an already functional device.
I work with others to overcome dangers - by building things like missiles.

The breathtaking presumptuousness and pompous assumption that my life viewpoint is holding me back is...amusing, honestly.

I mean, you have your kid get cancer, then tell me if you wouldn't take a "blood on the hands" job like...working at Facebook?? Then tell me if my life experiences limit my views, or are perhaps just different than yours.

I'm held back by my viewpoint from joining a cult. I don't see this as a loss.
My favorite part of excalidraw over any other drawing tool is the messiness. With regular line and shape tools I end up obsessing over geometric precision and symmetry, with excalidraw it’s impossible to create “perfect” drawings, so I don’t worry about it (within reason). I wonder if this phenomenon has been named or observed in UX/game design because it’s so darn effective at making me productive when drawing.
I've never found rewards compelling, for myself or from others.

While dieting I had cheat days. But that was never a lifestyle that stuck. The only thing like that that stuck was a slight change in timing and veering towards less sweets and booze.

The only thing I've found compelling is my own internal drive and sense of accomplishment.
In the real-world on a 5 year time horizon it is better to be backdoored by foreign governments than local governments. There is a much higher range of things law enforcement can do to abuse the backdoor than some group of foreigners.
Ahh Zynga, the founder of which (Mark Pincus) is quoted by a former employee to have said, "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

Class act.
Look at the rollout of the playstation 5 to examine how society in 2020 uses the free market to float a fixed supply resource. You'll find some interesting insights:

* Electronic technology makes it impossible to guarantee equal access. Hackers in other countries could easily disrupt the supply chain

* A "temporary socialism" emerged to disparage the scalpers and middlemen -- the public at large was incredibly unhappy

* Existing middlemen (retail stores) were completely overwhelmed, as there was a gigantic information asymmetry between production, distribution, retail, and consumption

* A completely totalitarian rollout (e.g. Sony sells on its own without middlemen) seems feasible, and might have actually been more efficient, even if delayed by a month. More people would have a PS5 now if the solution was totally vertically integrated.
I think one of the most disappointing things about this pandemic is being able discuss difficult topics without being shunned by the masses/mobrule. Anything you say that is slightly controversial will get slammed on Twitter/Media. We need better mechanisms to express disagreements than the status quo without being belittled, insulted, shunned, disrespected and ousted. If you're a respected scientist, you can get your career slashed in half. Everyone is human, forgiveness, and being able to discuss politely is only may be on HN.

I went on Twitter expressing that the US surgeon general and a bunch of CDC folks shouldn't be lying to the public about the following: Masks were initially in intense shortage. What did the leaders do? They lied to the public about how ineffective masks are to make sure there is enough stock for healthcare workers. I tried to expose this and everyone shunned me down by saying that this is a harmful thing to say. Since when is transparency harmful? You could be truthful and say "While masks are effective, please dont horde them as they are needed by the hospitals". Even if we didn't know the exact effectiveness of masks, they're not harmful to wear. They can only help. Leaders should have told the public about how to make them at home, which did happen, thanks to a bunch of Youtubers.

Here is the deleted tweet (google cache) from the US Surgeon General:

> "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm"

There were so many things like this. Ventilators, testing ratio, death rate, etc. Coronavirus pandemic was horribly handled by the entire world, particularly us as Americans. Shame really that this is the best we could do.

Edit: Added the official wording of the US Surgeon General Tweet on Feb 29, 2020.
> Some people just want to find negativity in the world

Are you kidding? The author has (clearly) been dedicating his entire career to trying to solve these problems. He's not some drive-by hipster reminiscing about the good old days. The problem is that in a lot of ways programming is stuck in the "good old days"
Just because you imagine it's a problem doesn't mean it is.

Like they said, doc or it didn't happen.
I recommend a novel called Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips that is set on Kamchatka and a good amount in Petropav­lovsk. It is very much not a wilderness survival book, but more of a mystery and social commentary book.
Also, the free market is extremely slow! Remember the whole PS5 hoarding saga from like a week ago - if you let the free market figure out the vaccine, someone will decide they can buy thousands of doses and resell them for profit in a couple of weeks once supply becomes smaller, and in the meantime, as the author worries, exponential spread will continue.

Even if you apply rationing (you could say that every dose purchased must be associated with a natural person who is going to get the vaccine as soon as it's shipped), the vaccine maker is now in the same position - why sell the vaccine for $100/dose to Hospital A today if they suspect that the bigger, richer, more bureaucratic Hospital B will get around to making an offer for $110/dose tomorrow?

So the "free market" solution here involves compelling the vaccine makers to accept any price offered immediately as well as preventing a secondary market, i.e., killing every mechanism for price discovery, which is the core mechanism of free markets. You can't really call it a market at that point, and all your intuitions about market efficiency go out the window.
Shame it's not still available in some countries to order.
The experimental branches point is a good one. I'm not convinced about "large-scale truly distributed projects" though. Larger scale projects than that are hosted on github.
I love Excalidraw for rough mockups; I didn't even know it was collaborative, that's even better.
I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt".

> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.

Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.

In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.

Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.
As I understand, there are partial solutions to this. Using some of the brine, for one, and combining the brine with treated wastewater for another.

The latter depends a lot on how closed cycle your process is. Most of the water I use to shower or wash my clothes ends up in the sewer. Filling a swimming pool, not so much. Watering my lawn, only what overflows into the storm water system.

It's also distinctly possible we may have to build offshore desal plants to keep the thermohaline cycle running, using the brine as geoengineering.
And also saved lives? Perfectionism is also perhaps what's stood in the way of generalized hcq treatment which has since been shown to be harmful, and every other well-intentioned quackery out there... It's hard not to see this as a hindsight 20/20 argument...

That said yes speed does matter and seems not to be valued as much as it could have
Show HN: I Made Cameo for Influencers
"Don't let programmers name things", issue #2,776,972
It turns out that Americans' experiences are their own and not necessarily indicative of a larger trend or phenomenon in civilized countries.

We of course, are endlessly subjected to an artistic representation of it in Holywood films.
> They do, in fact, protect the wearer to some extent.

That may be the case with N95 masks, but there is absolutely no way that a surgical mask protects the wearer to any measurable extent. At best, it helps prevent the wearer from spewing more viral particles into the air (and even that is far from proven).

I was an early advocate for masks (check my HN history) back in February, but it's bizarre how they've become a kind of magic talisman for half the population. Some of my "mask-skeptical" HN critics at that time were worried masks would make wearers overconfident, and go into high-risk situations, and they were right.
My favorite Schwinns to find are the 'Suburban' models.

You can find them with fenders and a rack pretty easily. They're a simple 2x5 drivetrain.

They start out very heavy. The wheels/braking is terrible. -but-. If you swap the wheels out for something modern, perhaps do some minor drivetrain upgrades you'll wind up with a still-kinda-heavy but amazingly capable and cheap city bike. Plus, in some areas it has a bit of a 'sleeper' effect and will get lower attention from thieves.
I saw this argument over on Twitter earlier today too, and I’m not sure where’s its originating... frankly, does it matter? Buy the one that has the form factor you want and cooks the way you want to cook. When I see “counter-top convection ovens” they are large things that take up a ton of counter space, but have limited functionality and capacity. Meanwhile, the “air fryer” I bought is a lid on my Instant Pot, which means I’ve got 6 quarts of space to “fry” things they way I want. It’s been a fantastic addition for us to quickly whip out fish and chips without gallons of oil and mess.

Edit: Suppose I should mention I have an in-wall convection oven in my kitchen as well. It does “fine” but frankly sometimes I’m cooking for a large enough group that I need both the convection oven and the Instant Pot air fryer going at the same time. Plus, my convection oven takes forever to come up to full heat, so often the “Air fryer” is a better choice in terms of capacity and time.
Hm, I haven't found this to be the case. This is probably in part because of my WM/OS setup; I use a tiling window manager and different workspaces for different contexts, so my fan-out factor is never that high in cases where it matters.
That's assuming there aren't other ways to stop the young partier, like restricting their partying options and police enforcement for anyone breaking the rules.

Healthcare workers come into contact with many people, many of those people are at risk and the contact is essential (2019 definition).
I'm going to take a wiiiiild guess here that the author's personal peak was around 1996.

It's just a reaction to 'the kids' coming after him not being up to how good he (mis) remembers the past.

This negativity is a disappointing and growing trend among some grumpy old men in our field as that generation approach retirement. It disrespects people working today and I don't like it.
More charitably. A lot of people really wanted food delivery in the pandemic who had never use it much before. And discovered, to their disappointment, that a lot of food deliveries were pretty bad.
I wonder what could have caused such a behavior? What were this person's motives?
I agree with several points in the article, but suggesting market allocation is completely insane. We have a severely short supply of vaccines. If we use market allocation, who do you think will end up with all existing supply? The highest bidder! Rich people and institutions will buy this supply for months, to use it on people who are already well protected due to their economic status. First responders, especially in poor neighborhoods, will be lacking access and dying for several months. Moreover, if there is no government mandate for mass production and distribution, price-points may end up in a place where the poorest will never be able to afford the vaccine.
> Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about it, just aren't to them.

And it can take almost half a lifetime to realize this

That other people can have so vastly different brains.
In such situations:
a) HR provides the appearance of some orderly process to settle such situations
b) HR provides partial witnesses for settlement talks
c) HR produces documentation about the situation to be used to the company's advantage in later lawsuits
d) HR creates (beforehand) a net of regulations that a "troublemaker" can easily be found to have violated
e) HR shields more important employees (i.e. bosses), because they represent more value to the company
f) HR shields larger numbers of employees (i.e. the mob of abusers) against smaller numbers (i.e. the single victim), because larger numbers represent more value and higher risk of complications

Nowhere in the above list I did mention anything about workplace happiness or positive energy or anything. That is not up to HR, and if a "situation" arises it's too late anyways. Good interpersonal conditions are up to all persons and especially management. HR is just there as an executive, to sweep up the broken cutlery and make things look nice and tidy.

It isn't that an HR department doesn't want good working conditions. They are just in no position to impose them, only management is.
My friend and I made Collabstr, an open marketplace for TikTok & Instagram influencers. We wanted to remove the friction of influencer marketing, so we implemented the following things:

- Easily search & filter through hundreds of influencers (more filters will be added soon)

- Instant message influencers directly through the site, all commication is centralized vs having to do it over DM's & email

- Pay influencers through Collabstr, we hold the money until the work is complete, removes uncertainty about getting paid for both parties

Would love to hear thoughts & feedback!
The App Store is already a walled garden, so complaining that it's not the open web is hardly a relevant objection. The maker of “Amphetamine” was gappy enough to get that half-million downloads on the App Store, so now that the other side of the coin rolls around he gets to accept that too.
Yes, there were lawsuits and the courts forced Apple to stop their ridiculous behavior. That is why you can do this right now. Not because of Apple's goodwill, quite the contrary.
The implied false dichotomy by not actually discussing what a properly directed deployment under some non financial minmax. Much of the failure in public health here is caused by price centric thinking, and so this guy thinks to the limit in a price centric way, rather than actually discuss the alternatives.
AFAICT at the beginning of the pandemic, we were very much in "not proven" territory with masks. There was a lively debate ablut whether they provided much protection (and there still is, we mostly wear them to protect others from us, not for ourselves, again AFAICT).

Is it possible they were just wrong?
> Until about 5 years ago there was no safe, GC-free, practical systems programming language, and furthermore it was unknown how to build such a thing. Now we know.

It was known [1], but only by theorists, and theorists aren't the ones building compilers and implementing real programming languages.

Obviously the Rust community has achieved an impressive feat of engineering, and I'm extremely grateful for that. But using a substructural type system to avoid needing a garbage collector is not a new idea, just one that Rust has successfully popularized.

It takes a long time for ideas from the programming languages theory community to reach the mainstream.

[1] http://www.cs.ioc.ee/ewscs/2010/mycroft/linear-2up.pdf
This just convinced me to look for another job ASAP.
Then you can say the exact same shit about American dollars.

The rarity of owning some paper with ink on it!
Nothing about motives. I wonder if it was just carelessness/negligence.

If that happens to be the case, I wonder if it's habitual and if something like this is somewhat common among other medicines. This occurrence might only have reached the headlines because of the newsworthiness of the COVID-19 vaccine.
While I agree with the author's arguments, I feel he is totally missing the point.

We are not going to fix society in time to stop this pandemic.

Problems that will not be solved:
- our politicians will not become competent. Our selection process for politicians is driven by how good they are at attracting votes, not how good they are at handling problems. Politicians are aware of this and just exploit it constantly.

- our people will not become reasonable. A sizable percentage of the population don't believe covid19 is different from flu, another does not want to take vaccines.

- corporations want to get the most out of it. A full blown pandemic is in their best interest. All those covid tests and vaccines pile up. Even better if they can convince us the vaccine only lasts one season!

So the bottom line for me is: if I am convinced the vaccine is safe and effective, just be careful and dodge the disease as long as I can get a vaccine.

There is not much more to it, and I focus my energies somewhere else.

Of course if everyone was like me, the pandemic would be over by now. But that's not the case and hoping in something that will not happen, like the author does in this piece, is fruitless.
This is a really bad idea on every level.

First, targeting spread instead of severity. This is not good. The amount of people that would fit the profile from any available variables of a spreader are probably around 100 million in the US. If you're going to vaccinate most of them, you're going to need so many doses that you can vaccinate literally everyone that has over 0.2% fatality risk, and a month or two later you can reach herd immunity. There is clearly very little advantage there.

And for selling them on the free market, it's insane to expect that vaccine sellers with limited capacity will sell the vaccine for anywhere near an affordable price. You don't have nearly enough demand elasticity to justify the manufacturers - two of them, by the way, to drop their prices at all, because even if they sold them for 5000$ they would sell every dose they could produce for months. By the time they would be affordable for the average person, we could again have vaccinated all vulnerable people and a few months later essentially everyone.

In the two or three months between full vaccination of privileged classes and herd immunities, there will not be new mutations that will be able to spread despite full vaccination.
If you can get that government plan, great.

The point that the author is making, is that in the absence of any such plan, market mechanisms would have allowed many of the people with regards to whom it is a collective benefit for us all if they have received the vaccine -- first responders, people who have jobs that require them to travel or be in public, and people who want to party -- to actually be able to get it. The free market doesn't always optimize to what is best, but the author makes a reasonable argument that in this case it would. You don't seem to disagree with their analysis, just markets in general -- and that's a politicized, unhelpful approach.
I think the nerds here confuse righteous prick with just being an idiot and asshole.
At least when I was there, google seemed like an island with melancholic, but smart and kind pandas who never had to compete for food, for the food was brought to them by a ferry, and never had to do any work, unless they had a spark of curiosity that made them explore an interesting rock or mess with sand on the beach. All pandas were consistently exceeding expectations, even if they slept on a tree most of the day.
Great post, but even he underestimates how obvious an approval decision it was. Vaccines have a strong safety and efficacy history.

I think if you replace the words "not approved" with "banned", the insanity of the vaccine ban is clear. Even though Congress has multiple times given.the FDA commissioner broad powers to approve during a pandemic, they opted to not do it. There needs to be legislation to ensure the next one goes better. Effectively, they need to remove the discretion part from the FDA. My favorite ideas are: (1) automatic EUAs for any vaccine candidates when a disease has over 1 in 1,000 chance of killing a group and the vaccine candidate is from a company who has had a drug approved in the last 10 years. (2) allowing people during pandemic to pay to be in a vaccine trial. I know many people who would have loved to be in a trial, but were not able. (This was the FDA doesn't have to say something is "authorized" so it seems more organizationally feasible.) (3) allowing human challenge studies to happen. (4) 1 gradual rolling study instead of separate studies. Gradually increase the number of people who can be tested, and stop of the safety profile looks bad, but watch all for efficacy outcomes. So vaccinate 10 in week 1, 100 in week 2, 1,000 in week 3, 10,000 in week 4, etc. There has only been 1 ever long term side effect reported (from a polio love virus vaccination of an immunocompromised person), so you really want to see short term effects. (5) also just increase the level of ambition. Trump should have proposed bills in congress to lift the vaccine ban. Biden's goal in his first 100 days is to vaccinate 100M (given that we are supposed to have about 240M doses delivered by then with already approved vaccines. This is a low bar, sort of like saying "I hope we don't just accidentally throw away most of the vaccine". His goal should be 50% vaccinated in the first 30 days or something.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_m...

> Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, software signed with a new Developer ID certificate and all new or updated kernel extensions must be notarized to run. Beginning in macOS 10.15, all software built after June 1, 2019, and distributed with Developer ID must be notarized