skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting read, but the title here is pretty terrible. It represents one line in a table halfway down the page. The original article title is "Estimation of Total Mortality Due to COVID-19" which is accurate, if dull. I'd perhaps add "worldwide".
Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.
True, only reason I mentioned it was that if it was still in warranty I’d have sent it back for repairs instead
I do contribute locally, and I donate to media sources and causes I believe in.

I should add that I also support local farms and businesses now that I have the funds.
It seems to me that using Power ISA is a definite non-starter. I mean why use something that will make the final product obsolete, after a single iteration? I really don't get it, even after factoring in realities. Seems investor driven.

And that table at the end of chipeleven.com reinforces this, after giving it a bit of consideration it looks like slanted marketing speak. Note how it puts POWER in the best possible light, barely succeeding, while also putting the Open Source competitor in the most negative light.

But hey, I'm helping you out here: a critical comment drawing out replies is a surefire way to the HN front page.
According to The Economist[1] and this preprint[2], the US had about 600k excess deaths. What could cause such a massive discrepancy?

1: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
2: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250604v...
> for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality.

This part is especially doubtful for me, as there are factors moving it in either direction. For one, the pandemic measures also helped a lot for things like the flu, which had less cases and therefore caused less deaths. On the other hand, problems caused by lack of exercise and social interaction have definitely increased. Lastly, I'm quite sure we have a lot of missclassified deaths in either direction.

These are all quite different and I see no reason to assume these factors even out.
While the aliased sample is sharper, I experience an unpleasant artifact in that version based on the halftone dots lining up with pixels, with an effect like grid illusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion?wprov=sfti1The blurry character of the original is also unpleasant, but the aliased version is hard for me to look at. I'm interested to know if anyone else experiences this.
While I agree with the methodology in general, assuming all of us have "lost" a year in a way that is equivalent to being dead is ridiculous.
The worst XY problem is knowing you want to do Y, even if its strange or whatever, asking how to do it, and people asking you "why do Y? Do X instead".

Happens all the time in Stack Overflow.

Just answer the fucking question, and then give the lecture on why you think it should be done that way, or why it shouldn't be done at all...
This book is dated, but it really looks at climate change in a more methodical way. https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_42.shtml
Been using Rufus about 13 times today, it gets the job done. I like it
I am pretty sure most people don't understand the implications of clicking yes or no, but the wording of the popup is scary enough to push the majority towards refusing.

EDIT: misread your comment; I actually agree with you that, when asked, most people don't want to be tracked. Even if they don't consider it really harmful to them, it brings them no tangible benefits.
Number saved due to lockdown

Number died due to lock down

Personally I lost access to badly needed medical care due to lockdown. Was quite scary.

Eventually got Covid. Sucked but nothing compared to what else I’ve been through. So initially was dismissive.

However definitely some lasting changes to my clotting levels.

I have to be perfect with blood thinners these days, we’re before covid I could fudge with them.
My attitude here is that they are welcome to target me based on the data I submitted to facebook directly and my interactions with facebook's website. Are the things I Like and the people I interact with really insufficient to create a profile for me? What I do on websites that are not facebook is none of facebook's concern, which is why I have been taking care to block those 'like' buttons that snoop on you all over the net.
Content aside (good points!), I love the site's simple layout. Though I did have some difficulty reading the code blocks because of the low contrast.
> I use 5* ratings to get an idea of which products to look at, but I mainly look at 1-3* reviews to see if I want to buy it.

Yep, exactly this.

Who cares what people that were happy with it think, generally. Hearing a few use cases is helpful to decide if it's fit for what you're trying to do, but it's generally very useful information. If I buy this I don't care all the ways it will make trees greener and shiny things shinier, I want to know if I give them $100 what is the _worst_ experience I will get.

Look at the negative reviews and see what kinds of issues people were having. Usually after skimming 5 or 10 you can get a pretty good feel for what kind of experience you are going to have.

> "These headphones that say 'for iPhone' and clearly show a lightning connector don't work with my Android! They should really say they don't work with Android! Garbage!"

> "I tried to use this blender to start my own 'will it blend' YouTube channel and when I put rocks in the blade got all chewed up and the company won't replace it! COMPANY DOESN'T STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCTS! AVOID!"

> "These $0.50 pens aren't half as good as my co-worker's $80 pen. Why bother."

> "Said it would get here Friday but it got here Monday, and UPS threw it over my fence and broke it!"

> "Ordered this desk chair and parts were missing!"

When the negative reviews are largely stuff like that (bought wrong thing, misuse of product, not understanding that cheap things are cheap for a reason, carrier issues), you know you can basically ignore them. The last one (product issues) kinda depends on whether there's a million of these, but generally if it's one or two and they don't say that they've tried to contact the company to resolve it I'm not too bothered.

When you start seeing reviews that explain (1) an actual issue with the product; (2) attempts to contact the company and/or get a refund; and (3) a poor response from the company... that's when I get worried. A few like:

> "Product arrived, of the ten included, only 4 worked. I contacted the seller and two weeks later they still haven't responded."

> "Product is very cheaply made. The first one worked for a week then the foo broke. The seller sent me a replacement, but then that one broke 2 days later."

And I start to look for something else.
I’d say your last paragraph sums it up best. “Giving X a chance” is not about putting in more hours or effort. There’s no such thing as a game or movie or book or food that can force you to enjoy it. If something doesn’t click (or worse, grinds your gears, as the core gameplay apparently wasn’t your cup of tea) it’s best to quickly write it off as “not for me”, ignore any fans’ continued insistences as inconsequential small talk, and move on with your life.

I find that both the praise from fans and criticism from critics tend towards exaggeration and memes that attempt to “justify” emotions of enjoyment/indifference that one shouldn’t be trying to convince others of in the first place, since it’s so fundamentally personal.
I'm just a casual Blender user, but to me the Blender Foundation (run out of the Netherlands) is obviously a dramatically better model on how to run an open source foundation compared to the Bay area equivalents (e.g. Mozilla and Wikimedia).

There's so little nonsense! So much focus on the essentials. It's incredibly refreshing.

I hope they can keep this focus as they grow. I suspect that not being located in the Bay area may help here.
>which he now appears to be admitting...

Er, I just checked Metabunk and his last post is from Wednesday, when he said, among other things:

"So we simultaneously have a radar that being jammed and giving all kinds of strange numbers, and you can't even get the airspeed, but is also able to hand over the exact position to the ATFLIR? It does not make sense."

So I'm not sure what you're talking about. His blog is just old posts about becoming a citizen.
You can't compare countries like that. People live very differently in Sweden and India; the healthcare system is different, and so is climate, population density and distribution, customs ( e.g. in France people used to kiss on the cheek when meeting, including for the first time), etc.

It would make more sense to compare similar countries, and Sweden is drastically worse than any its neighbours. Not only that, they changed course and added tougher restrictions than originally, so they themselves realised it doesn't work to fo nothing.

Why do people still ignore that?
I think the critique is more that the 'study' is really just a complicated statistical restatement of the assumption, so it doesn't prove or even highlight anything new or interesting.
How many more people have died during the pandemic than we would expect to have died based on past trends? The NYT had a tracker (which they stopped updating) that showed the number of excess deaths was not much higher than than confirmed COVID-19 deaths. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-d...
What precisely of what I said is “false”?
I stand corrected. Still great product, business and team.
I kinda wonder how this would compare to an upscale and sharpen - a good amount of these screentone patterns are solid blacks on a consistent white or gray, which seems like it should work fairly well. Or maybe that'd round too much off - this is doing a pretty good job of keeping line-quality intact.

That said, this is an interesting technique, and looks pretty good in the end... but the minor misalignments / pattern-jitter in some areas would probably bug me more than the blurry image, tbh. Seems like that could be improved somehow though, maybe by modifying the pattern it decides on with something similar but not original-pixel-aligned?

---

edit: after writing the above and looking back at it a third or fourth time: I've changed my mind, the patterns this is producing will very likely look better than a sharpen when they're closer together or more heavily aliased. They're "plausible" and still look like patterns, sharpens have some terrible edge cases on stuff like the remote(?)'s frame. Maybe they just need some more examples / side-by-sides? I imagine more will be in the final paper, whenever that's linked.
The parent comment was specifically about generating HTML, which by definition is not pure. And the templating languages are part of the complexity people are talking about.
Summer isn't flu season.

Multiple medical professions felt it was covid and recommended testing.

Some of our symptoms weren't associated with flu, but were with covid.

There are some 20 tracked covid variants spreading in the USA right now.

Tracking of variants didn't begin until Dec. But even in the few months since they began tracking variant proportions, the dominant strains have shifted quite dramatically.

T his is not some wacky conspiracy. Given this evidence, my money is on it was a variant of covid not tested for. You might see things differently, and that's fine.
Exactly. It's not like Exposure Notifications are meant to solve every single spreading case out there -- many people aren't even opting into it. But we need all the help we can get, so why not chip away at the problem?
Because the origins are in China, and the lab breakout would be squarely blamed on China, the incentive for them to lie is basically existential. Since the CPP manipulates all data for their gain, it's very well within their objectives and capabilities to make up whatever story they think will work. Literally the future of their Empire is at stake.

As for the Americans, their culpability in helping make the lab I think would be seen as a small thing.

Paradoxically, it may be in everyone's interest for the plebes to never find out the truth. If there was magically some 'hard evidence' to appear, right now, that made China culpable ... we would be heading into another, massive recession. There would be riots around the world, Asians in every continent would face threats of violence and attacks for a decade. Forget America where those things are talked about ... you can forget being Chinese in Poland, it would be painful.

The populism would be intense and ferocious, but not only that, regular institutions, businesses, CEOs etc would also be upset for very good reason. I can see China facing lawsuits for literally Trillions of dollars.

It could feasibly lead to a chain of events sparking a war.

This is completely conspiratorial, but I honestly wonder if the West actively doesn't want to push for the truth because it would do more damage than good. If China knows 'they did it' they're probably going to make the changes necessary so it doesn't happen again, for their own benefit, and it's unlikely they need international pressure or the threat of litigation to improve those pressures. But that's just a fantastical idea.

Basically 'The Truth' is a different thing than 'The Impact of Public Information' and both of those things matter. It's a scary thought but it's the Realpolitik of information.
This has been argued ad nauseam around the time Scala started gaining traction because scala's collections are grouped into immutable and mutable. The consensus at the time is that the GC overhead is well worth the ability to parallelize computation.
If California did underreport Covid-related deaths compared to Florida, that in itself would be interesting because endless column inches were spent on claims that Florida was underreporting its Covid deaths as part of a cover-up by its evil right-wing leaders and we definitely didn't see nearly so many claims that California was doing this.
> The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.

And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...
About time we start asking hard questions on the virus origin.
> I think everyone had the best of intentions

Then why did China silence Taiwan at the WHO? Why did doctors get arrested? Why did China lie about human-to-human transmission? Why are schools still closed in many parts of the US? Why was a travel ban for Chinese travelers called xenophobic while the UK travel ban wasn’t?

Best of intentions, my ass. This was political adrenaline from almost the start.
>I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom.

It depends upon the level of attack. Outright dismissal without consideration compared to critique. Is the intent to destroy the idea so it goes away or to test it for flaws? That's done by the suggestion given to ask questions. Instead of saying "this is stupid", figure out why your think it is stupid and turn it into a question. Such a question is a soft attack, one that may be met with an explanation without needing for direct conflict, or which may be met with a 'I haven't considered that, let me think on it' or a 'That's one of the flaws I'm still working on'.

>However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

While the presentation did present this as an overly binary classification, I don't think the intention (that I perceived) is wrong. Some people have more experience in certain things, and given we are all mortals with limited time, we need to have some way to decide how much attention we give ideas and using relative expertise in domains seems a decent filter. This does not have to be perfect, because the result is not accepting the idea but instead not outright rejecting the idea. In cases where the idea still is mistaken it will still be revealed under critique. It is a test to determine what should be given the chance to be critiqued given limited time and resources.

It would lead to experts overlooking ideas from sources who don't have expertise, but I think that is acceptable for two reasons. First, there are already a flood of ideas so applying a filter that lets more through will still lead to ideas not being considered, but this time due to a lack of time and resources. Second, this is all relative so a good idea from a non-expert would still pass the filter for someone who is slightly more of an expert. If they find it passes their critique it now is able to pass filters of people who are more of experts in their fields. Good ideas can still bubble up (we just need to take care that they are correctly attributed).
what if Apple gave away the hardware for free? It's a crazy business model,

It's been done before. Remember in the 90's when thousands (millions?) of people got free computers in exchange for allowing banner ads at the top of their screens?
This protects you from changes to the internal representation of state in the future. Direct field access totally blows away encapsulation.
> I've seen some users that have been using Windows for decades and still they have no idea what type-ahead is because they never even thought to type into the file manager.

Haven't thought of typing into the file manager, like most non-programmers probably. And how does that support your argument that re-instroducing Type Ahead would de-prioritize search for them?

> I would think search would actually be faster, because that only has to show a few relevant search results, whereas type-ahead has to keep scrolling the view around and reflowing the whole folder.

Search could be faster if reading the directory was the FAST operation and displaying was the SLOW operation.

You can cook up situations where that is the case, like when the application has the directory cached in memory and / or the directory has (recursively) very few entries AND the display is actually on the other end of a remote desktop connection in the Siberian Sea so that it might matter whether you display 1 or 3 folder icons.

In more realistic cases, like where you have 10GB/s of memory access performance and a fast link to the GPU/display, but file systems that are still comparatively slow (especially with regards to filepath lookup, especially for directory trees that are routinely gigabytes in size / routinely have 1000s of entries in 100s of subdirectories), that will never be the case, not by a factor of 10s of 1000s.
It's wonderful to explore the cadence of the English language. Don't relegate yourself to rules, prescriptively.
Imagine a country where most employers would agree that a black developer should be paid only 30% of what a white developer in the same position with the same skills would make. The black developers would have to accept such deal... because it would be the best option they would have.

Now somehow when you replace "black" with "Polish", it suddenly becomes ethically okay.
> or the entire population losing 1 year

Except we didn't lose a year. A lot of us actually kind of liked the last year. Many got to work from home and discovered it was a lot less stressful than commuting into an office every day, for example. I have a feeling that some of us are going to recall the last year with a bit of nostalgia in the future.
I hate to say it but we should kill online shopping.
Yes. Because China controls the lab, it’s security, it’s personnel, everything about it. It doesn’t matter who pays for the bomb, it matters who actually uses it.
Flu seasons before vaccines were much worse than now though, it was like having covid every single year. The Spanish flu was about an order of magnitude worse than the normal flu seasons which is why it was so devastating.

> 900,000 death * 15 yll/death [0] = 13.5 million YLL

Right, so an average American lost 0.03 years of their life due to covid. I guess some thinks everything they did last year to save that 0.02 or so years was worth it. Basically you save a week by social distancing and locking down for a year.
I mean 80 billion in 2007 dollars would be $100 trillion today. So 4.5 billion today is obviously a lot less money using your example.

you need to adjust for inflation if you're going to use a valuation that is 14 years old.
Set ulimit for maximum concurrent connections
in practice, this all means: to be able to apply, you have to have worked 3+ times as non union. Which is usually unpaid or paid extremely low.

This is even worse on the side-unions, such as costume, etc.
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Counterpoint: Java programs with memory consumption graphs that have decided sharktooth patterns, which is extremely common.
How to Develop a Text Recommendation Engine
Hi, so I recently build cortazar.ml using a text recommendation engine that works with the native TensorflowJS word embeddings, reduce them to 2D and then perform a geoquery with MongoDB.

As I reflect about the algorithm, I find it has plenty of applications and would like to share them with you. The full story includes 5 startup ideas where the technology could be applied:

https://medium.com/geekculture/how-to-develop-a-text-recommendation-engine-99d3b46effdb?sk=508c65e2139bfdfbd8043b2090ee1bd7
Only argument I heard, not that I agree but, is future proofing by abstraction. What if a simple getter evolves into something more complex. Then You'd have to refactor all the places where it was using the fields.

I personally never had to do this so I'm not sure if this is a real benefit.
Per the project grant:

> 3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice. [emphasis mine]

I'm just asking as someone with not even a modicum of knowledge in this field, but this experimental testing on emergence potential, does that imply gain-of-function?
isn't the XY problem that you don't really know you want to do Y? and if you did know, wouldn't you know?
Not going to keep arguing about this, but there are a huge number of different ways we can confirm that our counts are roughly accurate.

There are obvious signals in total excess death counts indicating the number of deaths due to covid, we can do retrospective random testing of early classified covid deaths.

There is no evidence of some systematic conspiracy or anything of the sort. I encourage you to consider that you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.