skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Am no super smart virologist but my brain immediately pinged when I started hearing the news from AZ quoting ... 100% effective against Xxxxx...

This is an illustration of why lay people applying "common sense" to data sets and statistics can be a problem.

The efficacy stats are based on small numbers, but with sound stats behind them. For example, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/03/science/vacci...:

> What’s more, all the vaccines look as if they have a high efficacy against more serious outcomes like hospitalization and death. For example, no one who got Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine had to go to the hospital for a Covid-19 infection 28 days or more after getting an injection. Sixteen people who got the placebo did. That translates to 100 percent efficacy, with a confidence interval of 74.3 percent to 100 percent.

Expanding from the trials (with tens of thousands of people) to billions of people will mean that number can't stay at 100% forever in real-world use. It's still a great number to see.
Don't worry I'm not going to harm anyone just like Spanish flu ended in 2 years this pandemic will also end soon. I discussed months ago here on HN that looking legally causing someone's death without intent is not criminal because you had no intent of killing. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

"A person commits an offense if he: intentionally or knowingly causes the death of an individual."

I have no intent or knowledge that I'm going to harm anyone.

Another guy said in that discussion something like "How is this virus any different from other viruses?"

Should I blame people for spreading STDs for example? Of course not they spread it unintentionally and without knowledge in most cases.
> doesn't explain the complete suppression of influenza

Influenza isn’t infective enough to spread during the summer months anyway (i.e. it is completely suppressed), unlike rhinoviruses, so it’s easily most plausible that a few additional hygiene measures have suppressed influenza further.
> By definition, "the measurement is a statistical coincidence" means the same thing as "the null hypothesis is true".

OK, now I see what you're saying. I'm not sure that's how people interpret it in plain English though. I feel like people would interpret "is a coincidence" to mean "occurred coincidentally", aka "occurred naturally [by chance]". It might be kind of like arguing that "ladies and gentlemen" refers to their intersection rather than union. Mathematically it does, but English is another matter...

Maybe the only way to settle this is to actually go do an experiment on people. I could be wrong, but I feel like if you go up to people and say "I think these 2 dice are fair, and I got two 6's when I tossed them; what are the chances this is a coincidence?" you'd get back "1/36" from most people. (Assuming they remember basic probability at all. You can filter against that by first asking them something more obvious, like maybe "what are the chances of getting 2 heads in a row with a fair coin" and making sure they tell you 1/4 before you proceed.)
Will the Silicon Valley Mindset Help America Beat China in Space?
> relying on vaccination and sterilisation too much, causes the immune system to be weak

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the mechanism of vaccination.
> The article isn’t clear about it but the 5 minute production app is an ambition, not a reality.

Not clear? The sub title to the article is "The 5 minute production app." and further down it includes timings like "8:43pm CET: Pipeline started with the build job. 2 min 33 sec." and "8:48pm CET: Deployed in 1 min 11 sec.".

> Setting up IAM is indeed hard.

Indeed. It's the iron triangle of devops: Speed, Simple, and Secure (You only get to pick two)

> The most workable idea we have so far is having the user run as CloudFormation script to set it up, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...

That's likely the best approach for initializing an AWS account though it boils down to, "Just trust us and run this". I doubt any new user would take the time to expand that CFN template, find the script that it loads (https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat...), analyze the resources, and see that it grants read only access to everything every created in your AWS account via a cross-account authorization.

Rather than target "Go live in 5-minutes", I think it'd be more worthwhile to target a longer time frame that'd lead to better understanding of the components involved. Yes it's not as sexy as "git push and you're live!", but the selling point is that you end up with a platform that can do anything including running your own resources, not just pushing 12-factor app code.
But if your app is now 200MB instead of 2MB, know that there are a significant number of users that simply won’t install your app (or will remove it) because they don’t have either space or bandwidth. Cheaper Android phones regularly have almost no spare space (like, well under 2GB available to user space when empty, even though the phone may have been advertised as having 8GB, and even that 2GB may well be partitioned stupidly so that you have less than 1GB available to install apps on).
If you're using Glacier, these are not "instant restore" backups, but "my house just burned down" backups.

Glacier storage is $0.010 per gigabyte/month. rsync.net is $0.025 for the same.

Glacier retrieval is $0.03 per gigabyte. So a one time emergency hit.
Is like the writer had a momentary stroke in places.
The sad thing is that the person who said this actually cared. Being a student at uni makes little sense unless you know that you can afford to not earn any income
There's a whole bunch of his films I'd put squarely in my all-time list. Ikiru, Ran, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, High and Low, Dersu Uzala, Rashomon. It's one masterpiece after another. Try watching Seven Samurai and Ikiru back to back to really appreciate the genius of Takeshi Shimura as an actor.
Matrix has much better bot support than Discord. Discord bots are nerfed users, you can't mention them (well you can mention their role, but that doesn't relate to the names that they are using in chat). Matrix as an open protocol has full bot support. In fact this is what makes bridging work so well, bots have access to everything that a regular user has.
Many languages do.

A Python import will execute anything it imports (most of what's "executed" is "def" and "class"), but if there's code at the top level, it'll run.

C++ will run constructors for global variables before main().

Even C has side-effects from linking in!

void __attribute__ ((constructor)) init() {}

So I don't mean side-effects at compile time (e.g. it's not like C macros), but importing / linking something even if you don't use it is very common that it has side effects.

Why would you do this? Commonly to "register a handler", to not have to both "import foo" and call "foo.init()"
It's amazing though that they literally gave a visa to some other random person without any issue at all (i.e. not even cross-checking some values in your passport).
the 4/5ths is calling...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53119686
the comments are funny
Thanks for sharing. This is really awesome!
> They found the most economical solution that met their needs was to pay $250,000 to have the work done on time.

I'd be inclined to believe that if there were some other providers but as it is told working with OP was the only solution. And OP's first offer was 125 000. Two screams later it's 250 000 ? It has nothing to do with economical theory or free market interpretation.
This is a pretty interesting hypothesis. Maybe there’s nothing really special about SARS type coronaviruses besides their novelty.

Is it possible that all coronaviruses, including the ones that cause a common cold, have a similar morbidity profile to COVID? Very minor infection in the young or those with previous exposure, extremely deadly in the old and naive. Except we all catch a bunch of colds in childhood, so nobody has to worry about a cold wiping out nursing homes.
I find it concerning that Greenwald's most recent article was flagged.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26486997

Flagged with 8 comments. Either a duplicate or dang has some explaining to do.
Imagine if everything they told you about Unix was true. Plan 9 is the operating system Bell Labs made after Unix, to fix many of the problems the designers saw.

That said, it's based around what the designers of Plan 9 thought were problems with Unix. It's a very opinionated operating system. But it has so many ideas that were ahead of their time, and in many ways are still lightyears beyond what we have now.

It's a really cool piece of computing history, and if you haven't tried it, I suggest you look into it, but keep in mind that even though it looks and sometimes feels like Unix, it very much is not. It's not terribly useful as a daily driver OS due to a lack of software, but it's very, very cool.
It hasn’t hit the reserve price, so I imagine that was set to something ludicrous and he never intends for this performance to actually be sold.
This is huge!

Hopefully 1.0 would allow more companies to use it. I've been following the evolution of Crystal for more that 3 years now.

I came from Ruby. Got a JSON/nested structures first program in Crystal working without even reading the docs. Was impressed by Crystal being "a cleaner Ruby" (some of the Ruby quirks removed, some nice things added), compile time NULL checks, type inference and of course it's runtime speed.

Next I've rewritten a small web service from Ruby to Crystal and seen a huge speedup with API requests serving in microseconds. The pre-import CSV data process (took ~ 40s in Ruby) was replaced by just reading CSV on the fly during server boot (~ 2s). Not even tried to optimize anything, just straightforward "make it work".

I would encourage anyone who loves Rube to check Crystal.

I would also suggest not to look at Crystal as just faster (fancier) Ruby. Although on the surface it looks very similar it actually quite different.
Staff Augmentation: 3 Ways Businesses Can Extend Their Team
pandemic and lockdown has changed literally NOTHING for me, except not having to endure the walk to the car to drive to work
KPMG is not an authoritative source on this.
> I cannot even grasp the volume of work that went into this book.

You actually can! The main format is PDF, but the author also has hard-copies for sale.
Interview with Jon “Maddog” Hall
How about IVF and that it becomes almost a necessity for all their children.

Or the increased necessity of glasses at a young age.

It's not the beneficiaries particular brain that gave the competitive edge ;)
How is this different from streamlit?

Curious.
"the tiniest creatures God in his wisdom put upon this earth"

The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.

Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.
I'm sorry but this is just a joke. It takes a while to configure a database, redis and storage on Heroku? This reads as someone who has never used Heroku.
I'm reading this on a Nokia!
I didn't mention it because it's not addressed by this article, which is specifically about competitive inhibition.

That said, if you're going to claim that all of these things we have done have eliminated the flu, you should take at least a few moments to reflect on the fact that they have done ~nothing to rhinovirus.
I've been using my macbook every day, all day, for two years. How hard are you hitting the keys? Or were you trying to pop the keys off? Because that will break them easily.
Researchers at NIST Put Cloth Face Masks Under a Microscope
Not saying this is the case in your example, but take the Mariah Carey post: it wouldn't be hard for someone to buy up legit-looking accounts and make a bunch of posts about Mariah Carey (or whatever person/thing) to refresh everyone's memory about the topic in advance of some new concert or movie in a few months.

Again, it's not necessarily the case in your screenshot, but at the same time, how do we tell for sure?
I didn't get enough tactile feedback while touch typing. It felt hard to tell whether the "click" feeling I got was from the key clicking or just from my finger hitting the key and bouncing off.

Fwiw, I don't like any of the key systems that have a force threshold they just give up after. I had a Razer gaming keyboard that I didn't like for the same reason. It had good travel, but the keys don't move until you hit a certain force and then they totally cave and there's no resistance. They're also not really designed for typing though.
We Implemented Distributed Multi-Document Acid Transactions in Couchbase
Twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/plan9foundation/status/13743504723168174...

Plan 9 Foundation: https://p9f.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

There's still a pretty active community around Plan 9, too.

9Front, a popular fork of Plan 9: http://9front.org/

Interviews with some Plan 9 community members: https://0intro.dev/

Some videos: [A Tour of Acme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M), [Peertube channel of sigrid's](https://diode.zone/video-channels/necrocheesecake/videos)
Google Pushes Bad System WebView Update Crashing Android Apps
I definitely agree about Graham Linehan based on what I saw in that article but not at all about Jesse Singal and he isn't even mentioning they are trans.

Singal isn't anti-trans but due to researching and writing about topics like de-transitioning, a lot of people tried to paint him as one, perhaps because actual anti-trans people talk about de-transitioning, too.
Furthermore, I firmly believe court records should not be public en masse but rather only individually. It should not be trivial to just check a name and see if they've been convicted of something. Sentence served should mean you don't have lingering repercussions.
Only in your belief system. Not mine and others.
My SEO ranks are always the best when I use WordPress, and I'm in eCommerce so it's important to me. Haven't been able to get the same results with Shopify, but I am actually currently moving a $1m/year site from WooCommerce to Shopify, and 50%+ of traffic comes from organic search, so hoping there isn't too much long-term damage from google with the transition. The founder really wants to move to Shopify being the reason.
What are the chances that these aircrafts are not really traveling at the speed of light instead creating their own small holes and traveling through them?
I almost feel like that's too commonplace to be noteworthy anymore? There are lots of annoying programs I try to kill only for them to be restarted.
What do you think "error budget" means?
(Hint, it doesn't mean "amount of intentionally deployed errors we allow".)

Do you believe WebView should never update because it's never OK to spend error budget?
How I made my first website using an API
FAANG typically has 3-6 30-50 minute back to back interviews, the style of interview where they ask open ended questions is almost always included too...the leet code stuff is in addition to that. I can agree it's not ideal but these big companies do it for a reason and apparently it works for them.
Yes that is true too.

But I don't project that unto others.
Yeah, a basic rule is don't bad mouth competition, it will always reflect on you and not your competition.
Revamin Stretch Mark Stretch Marks
Regardless of moving goal posts, I don't buy this argument.

If we went back in the last century, they'd throw me in an asylum for being bipolar. Heck, I'd probably be forcibly sterilized due to the US being the first country to support and implement eugenics.

Violations of civil liberties in the US have always existed to great extremes.
inadvertently is the operative word here - I.e. their position is that this was just an accident.
Allright, but isn't it like 20 year late? And does this contain any interesting parts which are not already in 9fans/9front build?
Nothing stop you to run test before run install when push to heroku :) CI/CD right from heroku.
...would be like bringing mathematics to Mesopotamia.

Can you expound on this? What sort of breakthroughs are bottlenecked by developments in quantum computing?
I always like to think of the TARDIS' perception filter as a type of SEP Field :)

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Perception_filter

Adams also wrote for Doctor Who:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams#Doctor_Who
You have visited the wrong places, then.

Plenty of truly "unexplored" territory in e.g. the Amazon. You can go off the beaten path if you choose.
I share your skepticism. Vaccines are a relatively new technology, with various buggy vaccines coming out that were actually more harmful than helpful. Time will tell if the mRNA "Vaccine" will be a net positive. I am totally okay with other people injecting whatever they want in their bodies, as long as they don't try to make me do it, too. I would rather die of natural causes than a rushed-to-market product.
You seem to imply it's AZ's fault, when in fact it's clearly a systemic FDA issue here.

AZ's vaccine has been proven safe and effective multiple times in multiple studies.

The FDA has banned banned everyone from choosing to voluntarily get it if they wish. It's not based on ANY bona-fide scientific concern, it's ban is solely based on red tape. This event proves it. If the FDA was in the business of helping people, they would find a way to lift this ban.
Agree with all of this. It is just such an easy environment to work in. Pipelines, team management, etc are a breeze.

When it gets too expensive, Cloud66 is a great migration path and offers the best of both worlds. It's a fairly simply transition too.
> I'm not sure how a blog post like this made it past any kind of review/quality control/PR in a 1000+ employee company

That's what the Unfiltered tag is for. To resolve the company of any responsibility for this kind of thing.
Firefox 87 introduces SmartBlock for Private Browsing
Looks like they have a Raspberry Pi version. Might try to see what it can do this weekend.

I've always wanted to see more OSes , there has to be a different way of doing things then the Unix/Linux / BSD OSX or Windows operating systems
>the efficient-market hypothesis, the meaning of which can be grasped by an oft-repeated saying on Wall Street: for every person who believes a stock will rise—the buyer—there will be some other equal and opposite person who believes the stock will fall—the seller

is quite wrong really. The efficient market hypothesis implies market prices correctly discount the future and so you can't make money by figuring they are too high or too low. You still have a buyer and seller even if the prices are stupid.
GitLab product manager here. Would any of the cache best practices (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/caching/#good-caching-practice...) be helpful for your use case? I'm interested to learn more about what's not working for your workloads; why cache is not improving the speed of your builds.
The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience
And other people don't want their club to be political as such, but they feel personally threatened by people with certain political views. They feel uncomfortable with even the suggestion that someone in their club might hold such views.

This is true regardless of one's personal political affiliation.

I know at least a few people who think (not without justification) that American political conservatives generally want them and everyone like them dead and/or in some state of second-class citizenship.

On the flipside, I know a handful of conservatives who believe fervently that left-leaning political policy is going to destroy their and their families' livelihoods, leaving their children without the future that they've worked hard to build.

I don't see how anyone could be comfortable in a knitting club alongside someone who they see as a literal existential threat.
> are colds.

What constitutes a "cold"? Is there some kind of definition for it?
"Websites should be using Apple Pay and similar stored payment info APIs"

I think the problem is precisely that very last character, the "s". How many such APIs should "websites" be using?
For EU citizens, The Netherlands is totally a country where 32 hours per week is possible. The pay is also a lot lower ;-) Though, compared to a 40 hour work week, you only take a 20% pay cut (and probably get passed up on promotions, so there is an opportunity cost).
My phone rebooted a few times during the last week.

At first I thought it was just planned obsolescence killing a three year old device, but fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
I can definitely agree, IT industry sucks in the sense that you're sort of expected to always be learning to stay relevant in the job market, and on your own time at that. We don't expect dentists or lawyers to have their job be their hobby but in IT... Here we are.
Show HN: A Model of the Great Seal Bug
why is the video quality of UFO sightings always so terrible, in a world increasingly filled with high quality cameras?
Doesn't conservation of energy preclude this? If all particles start with finite energy, and only finite energy is added to the system, won't the total energy stay finite? Or are you assuming an infinite potential somewhere, e.g. gravity from a point "planet"?
Came here looking for SkyNet reference - was not disappointed.
Whether good or bad, it wasn't a trade-off - it was an ideological decision. There's always a struggle between those that treat infrastructure as a national interest and those that want to privatise it
Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.

As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.
Replace player by character and you're basically there. Typical about MOBA's (and now also in e.g. Valorant these days) is that each character you choose comes with a certain 'kit' of skills and stats that give it different strength and weaknesses. A character might have powerful spells early on, others are very weak early but dominate towards the end because scale really well with extra resoures. The former will typically act in a more sacrificial role to enable the latter.
The OpenAI favored a strategy where you snowball an early advantage into an early to midgame win, before the 'carry' characters start to dominate. That in itself is not new though, it just executed it in a weird but consistent way. One of the weird ways was indeed that 'egalitarian' way of having the 'support' characters be more greedy, enabling them to have a higher impact on the early/mid game timing, when the deathball starts rolling.
Vaccine is the practice