skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

Touch controls for most games suck (I've tried). Replicating somebody's Xbox controller on the second screen sucks. It's unendingly annoying when you die over and over in a game because your thumb or finger wasn't in quite the right place to fire or move in a particular direction.

Not to mention, the Duo is ####ing expensive: top-end iPhone kind of money for the unlocked variant.

If you really, really want a dual screen console with a second screen, buy a used Nintendo 3DS (get the "new" variant if you can). But, since with the Duo you're sacrificing the second screen to the controller anyway, you may as well go the whole hog and get a single screen portable console with decent physical controls. The Nintendo Switch is a great option, as is a used Playstation Vita. Or, an increasingly viable option if you have a decent single screen phone already, is to buy a Bluetooth game controller that you can clip the phone into as a screen.

I don't know what the writers at The Verge were thinking with this because if you really want to game on the move a Surface Duo is so far from being the best option - unless that's the device you already own - it's unfunny. All of the other options are also hugely cheaper, again, unless you already own the Duo.

I'm not saying the Duo is terrible or anything like that but don't buy one for this. If you have one already and do want a decent gaming experience on it, your best bet is to buy a controller. I imagine an actual Xbox controller, which you might already own, would probably work fine.
Yes. Aside from on-call week when I carry a pager 24-7 for the week but I don't work outside business hours unless paged.
This is a regular pattern.. it's worth asking if that's not the sole mean for systems to stay alive.
Your opinion on this is worthless lol. Clearly the vaccines ended Covid in countries like Israel and Malta. Open your eyes.
There will be no apology.

The evidence is beginning to be stacked against them so they need to run with it so it looks like the broke the story.
> ultimately it is irrelevant outside of highlighting a need for additional safety protocols if proven true

Well yeah, and those safety protocols could've prevented the pandemic. You're arguing this isn't important? This could prevent the next black plague, regardless of whether it was released intentionally or not (I do not believe it was released intentionally, my point is that's irrelevant to this discussion of public safety).
I have high-speed node-to-node wireless internet in the Bay Area (~700mbps symmetrical) and cloud gaming is terrible on it, mainly due to jitter and small amounts of packet loss.

Assuming the infrastructure over time can support it, I see cloud gaming succeeding, but it only works well if the circumstances are perfect.
That’s not what happened.

What happened was that a conspiracy theory was generally dismissed because it was being pushed in the right wing media, with literally zero evidence to support it.

There weren’t “experts with no evidence” of the non existence of a lab leak. There were experts claiming that there is no evidence of a lab leak.
The Chinese government you mean? I'm talking about international court, sanctions.. honestly I don't know what tools are available, but seems to me if most of the world agrees on something, they can make it into reality. Besides the real costs of the virus, you can also consider how this is geopolitically very advantageous for allll the countries who would gain from delaying China's economic rise.

Even the developing countries who benefit from Chinese investment could benefit from this, because if the financial pain is high enough, they may have more leverage to renegotiate the terms of repayment.
POA: Promotion oriented architecture is a frustrating form of castle building.
Sure, I understand, it's a relationship that is still quite good, so if you are young, healthy and can manage the stress, it's probably not a problem.

I have another question though that's somewhat unrelated: I use Uber quite often in latin america when I'm travelling, and my main issue is driver cancellations after 10-30 minutes of waiting for the Uber to start coming to my place (outside the city). It's quite frustrating to me to read about all the UI improvements over the year at Uber, and it seems that software engineers at Uber don't care about the real user experience (waiting a lot for nothing). I would happily pay more to the drivers if this behaviour would stop (they cancel because I'm outside the city usually), but nothing has changed in the last 5 years about it. I don't care about the nice icons or dark mode or other UI changes BTW, because that's not what I remember after a ride.
What would you recommend Jacob Calderwood, of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, use? He wrote a letter to the FCC, asking the FCC to approve the modification to Starlink that would allow it use lower orbits.

You can find his letter on the FCC licensing page, here:

https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...

One thing he points out is that while he has broadband, something meeting the minimal definition costs $500 a month.

A nice thing about Starlink is that it will be able to cover the US and the rest of the world, and provide an upper limit to the price of broadband. And it's timeframe is not that far off - they will have about 6,000 satellites deployed in 2024, and all 12,000 deployed by 2027.
I believe (though can't swear to it) that we do provide immigration/relocation assistance and money, at least for quant researchers and possibly for all employees. If that would be enough to get you interested, feel free to drop me a line at patrick.stevens@gresearch.co.uk and I can find out actual details rather than half-remembered possibly-false snippets from years ago.
(author of magic-wormhole here)

aww, thanks :)

BTW for anyone reading, https://wormhole.app/ is awesome and serves a very similar purpose, but uses entirely different technology (no PAKE) and has a different security model.

In my (https://magic-wormhole.io) world, we've kicked around ways to make a good browser-based client (and I've tried to prepare the protocols to work well there), but I haven't had time to pursue any of them. The tasks include 1: port everything to JS (or take the core of the Rust port and compile it to WASM, then write an IO layer in JS), 2: glue it to the browser's file/blob upload/download APIs, 3: settle on a trusted-application security model.

To make it work in a vanilla browser with no setup phase, you're pretty much limited to relying upon the webserver from which you get the page, which is the model wormhole.app provides. Other options include using an addon (which shifts the reliance set slightly), or running some sort of Electron thing (making it not really a browser app) that you get from some distribution channel (debian, homebrew, etc) which shifts the reliance set in a better direction.. at least you're probably getting the same application as everybody else using that distribution, vs a webserver that could conceivably serve up a different version each time.
Suppose we now know who to blame. How does that help us address the current situation?
The pressure vessels are arguably safer than either batteries or gas tanks.
What infuriates me the most is the behaviour of the end and home keys.

In IntelliJ they work like they should. In some other applications also - editing some text, home moves to beginning of line, end to the end of line.

But noooo. Some Apple designer thought that when you press End then you really want to get to the end of the current document, whatever that is. For example - writing a bug report/story in the browser in the text area, want to correct something or change the first word on the line, I press Home to get there, like I would do on Linux or Windows, but on Mac it takes me to the beginning of the website. Why on earth would anyone ever want that to be the default behaviour? Same with the End key. This is just beyond stupid. I guess I can get there with cmd-left/right arrow, but why not make the most used functionality the default?
I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned.

I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, and that's probably not something we can resolve in a comment thread. My position is based on data I've read, and I'm sure yours is as well, but it would probably take a lot of time to merge those data sets and come to a consensus opinion.

At this point, I actually think some of the people in the "majority group" are being marginalized, due to the focus on basically anyone else being preferentially hired. When a person from the majority group is being considered for a role, the attitude I've seen expressed during hiring discussions is, "But is there nobody else available? Ugh. Oh well, I guess we need to hire this white guy." And that's not limited to attitude... I've heard very similar words expressed.
This is the first time I have seen a video of one of these cloud services where you can see the physical input and the game screen at the same time, and it's exactly as bad as I thought it would be. Sea of Thieves isn't exactly a latency-sensitive game but that looks almost unbearable with the input lag.
Yes what? I asked "what do you consider sane work hours?" lol.
> too much risk of hooking another rider

If this really was the case they should have made a backwards-steering bike like this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx1V5KT1Lwo

With bikes with straight handlebars, if you graze a fence with the handlebar, the bike will steer INTO the fence, whereas if you have backwards handlebars the bike will auto-steer away from the fence or whatever you bump into.
While this is too simple (even the website admits that a bot could be written in virtually no time to break it), it does make me wonder if you could have a WarioWare CAPCHA. A minigame with extremely vague description that you have to react to quickly to pass.

Thinking about it some more it fails the primary criteria for a CAPCHA: it needs to be harder to write the bot that cracks it than each test case, by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Otherwise bot makers will just create custom bots for each contingency. They have more time and funding than you do.
> They aren't Samsung's phones. They're yours and mine...

In English, the grammatical "possessive" is not only used to mean legal ownership... It can refer to nearly any kind of proprietary relationships:

• "Their husbands all laughed at the joke."
• "Their jobs disappeared when the factory closed."
• "Their comments are disagreeable and combatative."

The previous poster's use of the possessive was entirely appropriate. I believe your correction was unnecessarily combative and shrill.
I suppose we'll have to disagree, considering that you even know about Guantanomo through US court documents is a reason to doubt your line of thinking.
it seems to me that the value is in hard-compressed optimized functions and to this crowd this is the most important factor

software engineering practices don't exist unless you have a gigantic program, programming language theory is either not interesting or too foreign for them

about how they manage.. it's easy, they get used to it
Ohhh, I didn't know that it included China! I thought it was just US, UK, France, and Russia
There are truly great things that can be accomplished in life with crunch time. I'd consider good examples as the early days of SpaceX or some other game changing endeavor.

A rewrite of a mobile app doesn't seem to fit the bill. I'm also reminded of the time that during an Uber ride the app took me into this secret screen where it attempted to get me to do some kind of coding assessment for recruiting. The engineering on this feature was absolutely nuts. But also completely over the top and laughably irrelevant for me and my geographic location.
I'm so confused. The reporting on this sucks.

Did they stand at the front door knocking for an hour waiting for someone to come out? Did they physically break into the office? Does "closed" mean the office was physically closed/locked? Does "no Twitter employees" mean there were no humans physically present at the office, or does it mean there were no people directly employed by Twitter at the office? E.g., are they not counting security and other 24/7 staff that would normally be at an office building?
yes that's the most suspect part of this narrative. that lab workers working in an environment and educated about virus and communicative diseases would get sick and then go to a public emergency room against all common sense.
>Those EU countries didn’t allow the plane into their airspace, encouraging it to land in a third country to refuel.

Seems like a trivial difference. Denying access to your airspace comes with the implicit threat of fighter interception.
IMO, I would not put Uber engineering in the "highly regarded" bucket.
Good luck being a large US corporation without giving money to politicians. They'll shake you down with threats of regulation and other tactics.
If I'm reading this right, vaccination was also found to produce the long lived plasma cells in the control group that reported no Covid symptoms.
Anki seems to be the gold standard. It has desktop, web and native mobile versions and it synchronizes across devices. The interface isn't anything fancy... but it doesn't really need to be for the app to be effective.
A hundred engineers to rebuild the Uber app....

That is insane! To me it seams like something that could be done with 2-3 guys over 6 months with room to spare.

But yeah I get it they have the money and everyone wants to work with their friends.
My understanding is currently they just grind up the old batteries into a kind of slurry that then goes through a uniform series of processes to recover the various components.
Natural emergence of a disease obviously has far stronger priors. Two possibilities are not equally likely just because there are two of them.
> Very high standards = Slow shipping = Boring

I don't think this is quite right.

Slow shipping is tied to coordination more than standards (although if the standards are enforced by testing from another team, there's your coordination). If the standards are self enforced, you can still ship frequently, but maybe not a lot of big releases. Small teams and decoupled work where possible helps.

I can only quibble about boring though. The code changes may not be exciting, but the environment can be. Some external event that spikes traffic can test your high standards, and may need remediations (in which case, I hope you can ship fast). Of course, boring is actually nice.
R got a simplicity boost with the "tidyverse", R studio and ggplot, all driven by Hadley Wickham. at its core, R is a very straightforward language. however it never had a benevolent dictator who gave it consistency, elegance and style. Hadley is compensating that a bit.
> The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere

Citation needed. If the are enough satellites any decay rate can become irrelevant.

> Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e.

It's slow right now but the expected growth behavior is worse than exponential (dx/dt ~ x^2 vs dx/dt ~ x) and internationally we have fully failed to stop an (dx/dt ~ x) process in the last year.

> Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris.

Space junk by definition is unassisted and uncontrolled. So it's not like you aim to present it that any Kessler syndrome will be over in the same time.

> The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires CubeSats and other picosatellites to be designed to re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years of the end of their useful lifetimes. Without an assistance, it is estimated that a CubeSat may take over 150 years to de-orbit from an 800 km altitude.

800km is well within low earth orbit.

> Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink.

It doesn't help if those thrusters are not used by Starlink as they failed to do here: http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_lar...

Starlink (or OneWeb pick one) might be living in an alternative reality with regards to collision risks as this situation shows https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/space... (read the update for more details). As there can be no disagreement with in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics whether or not there was a risk of collision.
Thanks! Yeah I think there is space for a simpler alternative without features that many people don't really need. :)
It makes sense for me using CapRover for my side projects (with multiple envs) all in one cheap server.
Haven’t used it in years, but Heroku was really great in this respect. It was very easy to just focus on making a good app instead of trying to configure everything myself.

I guess there’s probably not much demand for this kind of thing at large scales.
A few staffers fell ill with a pretty bad case of the flu.

There. That may be the whole thing. This is non news.
Being "difficult to understand" is a perspective of an individual observer, not some fundamental property of the thing itself. Japanese is "difficult to understand" if you only know English, but not if you grew up speaking Japanese.

The various conventions around "accepted" programming paradigms like OO, inheritance, scoping, etc are natural if you use them every day for years, but if you're more interested in optimizing some finances or solving a physics problem, something "primitive" or "messy" like a spreadsheet formula or fortran might actually be more understandable.
I wish it wasn't even possible to own software in the first place.
My first job was working for Sendmail, Inc. Their entire business model was based on helping people configure open source Sendmail, via consulting and/or a commercial web UI for configuring the software. And of course selling support for the open source software.

And it wasn't even intentional. The software existed for almost two decades before the commercial company. The commercial company sprang up because the open source authors needed paychecks for all the support they were doing. And also a bunch of companies were selling Sendmail consulting. So they figured people would rather buy consulting from the people who actually make the software.

Sadly, it didn't work out. The company was acquired for a loss to the investors.
That'd be no (for natural immunity). Even SARS-1 survivors have immunity to COVID, all these years later.

Maybe for the synthetic immunity (who knows).

But in any case, SARS-1 and covid are about 80% similar. The "variants" of different covids are about 99.7% similar. Draw your own conclusions.
True, the only way to make a "Cold" start in Win10 is a reboot, Shutdown is a "simulated" hibernation.
I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh.

The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy.

Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.
The expression “shit hot” is a superlatively good thing. I don’t ever recall hearing “hot shit”, although perhaps it is a US term or a modern usage. Urban dictionary defines both.
What does China's mining 'ban' mean for Bitcoin?
Imagine if MS would have launched Windows Phone as Xbox Phone and focused on making a kickass gaming phone.
Another data point: I've never felt pressured to work more than 40 hours a week, and have probably averaged quite close to that over my FAANG career. Recently, with pandemic/WFH/less-to-do-outside-work, I started working some on evenings/weekends, and my manager asked me to stop because he doesn't want to have that kind of team culture.
Until the entire team quits at the same time which has happened to many companies that do this stuff.

However, if this update failed nothing significant would have happened to Uber. So, they might not have actually cared.
Article sans tracking URL params: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4
For (my) magic-wormhole, yep, entirely, source is on the github link above.

It uses a pair of helper servers (that I run), for which the source is also on github. But the protocol (implemented in the client, not the server) is carefully designed to be resistant against server misbehavior.

So you can either study the client and convince yourself the protocol is indeed secure, or rely upon my claims that my code is working as advertised. But you don't need to rely upon my claims that my servers are not snooping or interfering: that's protected by the protocol.
I would agree that, yes, many of the things you raised are things we'd look at regardless, but in any "5 Why's"-type investigation, you have to get to the root cause. Whether this came from a lab will probably have a huge influence on the future of Gain of Function research, both how it is conducted and whether we as a global society think it is a good idea. If on the other hand COVID was a natural occurring disease, but we have been unable to figure out the path from its origin in animals to eventually infecting humans, then we will probably need better techniques for tracking such transmissions. I think everyone knows that bats carry diseases, but most of what I read has indicated that in the natural scenario there was probably an intermediary animal, and knowing what animal that is surely would change how we approach that animal and its habitat in the wild.
There is info that shows phone Li-Po batteries last much longer if they are always kept at 20-80% charge at least, and that both the default charging settings and the marketing materials advertising battery capacity are biased towards bigger numbers.
I'm not sure what is the issue here, then, beyond bad communication, especially if only the older battery packs are affected. It is to be expected that if the customer wants to keep using the pack for a while longer, they need to limit how much they cycle the battery every charge.
A better solution would be to advertise the average longevity of the Tesla battery packs along with their mileage, but I'm not sure if their target audience really cares about that.
my question is, what was the business value of doing a full write rather than incremental shift? same question on the specific date - was their any business value delivered by specifically launching the new app on New Year's?

If not, this rewrite basically cost huge amounts of burnout across the mobile and server teams for no business value. At best it seems like an intense learning experience that didn't actually unlock $$.
Sorry, I had tried changing it immediately after posting the link, but HN allows only changing the title.
Ehm, nope: ivmmeta.com
I'm glad I stocked up on it. I don't use it for the purposes mentioned, but it's handy to keep around. It's actually pretty easy to make so not a problem if the FDA puts it in the RX categories.