skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>the breakthrough of RNA based vaccins

My understanding is that we were at that breakthrough anyhow. This was just the first chance to test it. The emergency sped up that testing, but it didn't create the breakthrough.

The rest I agree with though. There's a ton of information we learned from this experience, and we're still learning.
Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price
Here's a summary of the situation up until about 8 hours ago

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...

8 hours ago, around 700+ single-hash channels were assigned to a placeholder account, redirected to double-hash "offtopic" channels, and their topics locked. Ops were removed too. The trigger for this seems to have been the string "libera" in their topics.
> complete misunderstanding

So admit it, say sorry, pay reparations.
I'm trusting neither Libera nor Freenode at this point. Libera I won't trust because it was launched and Freenode because they are currently actively silencing discussions. That's what I meant with "I'm trusting nothing I read right now". I'm currently at the stage of reaching some semi-informed decision but I haven't yet, so your additional piece of information is very welcome, thanks :)
Good question - not at the moment, but we're evaluating the idea. Perhaps the answer would be to just make the build pipeline tools free for developers to a certain limit.
True as it can be...
From that link:

"freenode has been the home for the entire FOSS community for over 20 years. Fracturing the community only hurts users and FOSS. Your users don’t wish to migrate. Stop forcing them."

Does he mean "fracturing" the community as in people using multiple IRC servers? Isn't that sort of distributed nature an _advantage_ of FOSS? Why does everything need to be on one server?
You’re saying exactly the same thing as I am, I think? It’s a risk / reward calculation.

A 90% chance of death would make the vaccine very attractive.
> He can tell elected (or not elected) leaders of countries exactly how they should be able to run their countries.

how else would you read that?
Sheer evil? It wasn’t personal or aimed at one specific group of people. It’s just the cost of doing business. Like other siblings said: that’s happening today all over the world. From Amazon warehouse workers to miners.
I need to start facing the fact that I am going to be homeless for the rest of my life.
> …Be-verb Fallacy, a cultish linguistic theory and the bane of many a first-year composition student's life, alleging that an extraordinary degree of "clarity," "sanity," or textual "liveliness" can be reached by strictly eliminating all passive verb forms and all forms of the verb "to be" from English-language writing. This odd but unproven contention, dating back to Alfred Korzybski's "General Semantics" self-improvement movement of the 1920's and '30's via S. I. Hayakawa, blithely ignores the fact that although numerous major world languages lack a ubiquitous "be-verb," e.g., Russian, Hindi and Arabic, speakers of these languages, like English-speaking General Semantics devotees themselves, have never been proven to enjoy any particular cognitive advantage over ordinary everyday users of the passive voice and the verb "to be." Nor have writers of the curiously stilted English that results from applying this fallacy achieved any special success in academia, professional or technical writing, or in the popular domain.

This isn’t a fallacy and I’m not sure the complaint other than this author doesn’t like it.

It’s particularly hilarious that somehow the author thinks there should be research for an author to choose a writing style. And doesn’t cite any research showing supporting their own style decisions or rationale for clarity, tone, etc.

I’m not familiar with whatever field would study success based on writing style, but E-Prime [0] has arguments for its use and someone choosing to follow it shouldn’t be criticized for choosing this method.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
There are a few hot subjects that the HN crowd loves to talk about: UBI, FAANG salaries, interviewing/leetcode, opinions on Agile, house prices in the US etc. Eventually, someone makes some remark that is touching on one of these and it triggers a tangential subthread that can generate more posts than the OP, in which (usually) few people were originally interested.
> I will do unto others as I would like done to myself.

Too bad he didn't follow through on this statement.
Wait, why not optipng [1], pngcrush [2] or any other of the handful of locally running lossless PNG optimizers [3]?

[1] https://packages.debian.org/unstable/optipng
[2] https://packages.debian.org/unstable/pngcrush
[3] http://www.olegkikin.com/png_optimizers/
The huge difference is that keeping humans alive on earth is really cheap and easy. Air and water is basically free, and with some tiny scraps of land you can basically make your slaves feed themselves via subsistence farming. They don't have to generate much value to be profitable.

Keeping humans alive in space on the other hand is stupidly expensive.
But it must still be relevant to junior engineers? Or is it considered bad practice?
I'd say post WW2 Scandinavia+Iceland has been rather exemplar. Bhutan comes to mind too.
I actually support this as an Audacity user. While there is the possibility of abuse — see RedHat cutting CentOS short (last night, I converted my final CentOS virtual machine in to a Ubuntu 20.04 VM) and see https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1643 (or https://freenode.net/news/for-foss for the other side of this soap opera) — there are benefits to this.

One is moving to GPLv3 so that Audacity has VST3 support. Right now, Audacity only has 32-bit VST2 support, which means I currently have to use older versions of my favorite plugins (since the plugins are now 64-bit only) since Audacity is part of my workflow.

The other is making proprietary versions of Audacity for things like the iOS app store, to help fund the development of F/OSS versions of Audacity. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to spend all day making open source for fun and for free, but that’s not the world we live in today.

If Audacity does start to abuse this, we can always fork from the final GPL version of the code base.
Everything we've learned about career planning over ten years, in 3 pages
> Correcting someone in a public venue isn't for the audience of one that is spouting stupid things, it's for the rest of the world that is reading the thread.

Whenever I have seen this happening, the rest of the audience generally viewed the negative feedback as "unnecessarily punishing" the original poster. From their perspective, the original poster was "just human", and the one who corrected was just trying to "show off".
Real state in the UK is increasing in price the fastest since before the 2008 crisis [1]. Lumber is a very specific circumstance to the US, but similar trends are happening in other developed countries.

One specific circumstance of the UK is a tax break introduced last year to incentivise home buying. Beyond that, as others pointed out, some shared causes are more people on the market for a new home due to the pandemic, and historically low interest rates.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/26/value-of-uk...
FYI, there are other IRC networks than freenode. It appears hackint has "hackers" as a focus, including hackerspaces.
Lessons from Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad – Venture Funded to Lifestyle Business
It’s still significant because it’s a huge anomaly to the annual mean difference between the two populations.
I live in Canada and laugh when I get copyright emails for torrents.
1. People want to go into the solar system. They need something to do.

2. We're nowhere near the level of smart, self-repairing automation. Given the distances involved, there's value in having a community of smart, agile, self-replicating flesh-and-blood humans to tackle unknown engineering challenges as they appear.

3. People keep expanding, and settle for good. Years pass. An interplanetary economy forms. People on the further edges focus on resource extraction and building up infrastructure for long-term settlement - but they still need things only Earth can provide, like food (and organics in general). So they trade.

4. Decades pass. On the outer edges of humanity, people are born who've never seen Earth. They start to develop their own culture and identity. Mars is being colonized. The trade arrangements is stable - Earth sells organics and R&D, they buy lots of resources to use for in-orbit manufacturing.

5. Many more decades pass. Mars is full of people who were born there, and never seen Earth in the first place. They trade with Earth and the space dwellers - the Belters, in Expanse - for resources. They develop their own culture too. Over generations, the Belters become adapted to low-gravity conditions, and can no longer survive Earth's gravity - cementing the cultural divide.

6. More decades pass, you arrive at the world of The Expanse. Mars and the Belt both declared independence, as they're their own separate cultures and nations. Trade dependencies, however, remain. Earth and Mars both have the advantage of infrastructure density and crucial resources abundance - they're developing their planets and surrounding orbital space. Stuck in an arms race, they develop superior military. Meanwhile, the Belters are stuck in a disadvantaged position. They own most resources in the Solar System, but can't effectively control them with inferior technology. And none of the resources are actually missing on Earth and Mars - they're just more expensive to get. The Belt has all the riches, but no leverage to turn them into wealth and power.

That's how you arrive at "mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions".
In 100 years we may just as well have run out of resources for robots while (poor and desperate) people are aplenty.

They'd probably be volunteering to go, no one would need to force them.

Just a "fun" fact I discovered recently: it's cheaper to buy new powerbanks and salvage the battery cells than buy the battery cells themselves. It is also cheaper to buy a whole new laptop than replace a laptop processor. That is insane levels of wastefulness.
Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind
Yeah, it's hard not to see it as a COVID-related effect, at least in part. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people renovating and moving, often from an urban apartment to somewhere suburban or rural/small town. One factor is probably that this sort of migration is always going on as people get older and the pandemic has probably pushed up a lot of timetables.
Common Lisp actually doesn't specify a mechanism for this. There are implementations that can compile to e.g. DLL:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/DV/html/delivery...
https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/dll.htm

Unfortunately none of the FOSS implementations have this ability (to my knowledge). There is nothing inherently in Common Lisp that mandates the "core dump" delivery model.
Global Liberation Army will never recover from the Scunthorpe attack.
>And because getting the % deposit is a big factor in whether you can afford a house, it pushes lower income people out of the market.

Median downpayment is 6%, a common low end is 3%, some places and programs go lower. Median house price sold in 2020 was 347k, well over 25% of houses sell for under 250k [1].

So, for a starter home, saving 3% of say 200k is 6k. If someone can pay this mortgage without killing themselves (30%, say 4%, monthly payments ~1K) then they can save a 6K downpayment over a reasonable time. So downpayment should not be keeping many people out of homes that want one that can afford a mortgage.

If their income is so low that they cannot even afford a mortgage, then yes, they are pushed out of the market, but there is no way they could enter anyways.

[1] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/quarterly_sales....
> evolutionary biology is inevitably racist

In the current historical context, yes, it is. If you could somehow neutrally float outside context (you can't), or we lived in a different world, then maybe it wouldn't be.
Afaik, this changed already years ago.
On thing that really surprised me watching his channel is just how empty all these periphery russian republics appear to be.

I understand that there is economic struggle as in many other parts of the world. But I was really surprised by the general lack of actual people against the large swaths of land.
My point is not that you need the number to be exactly accurate, my claim is that for the number 2 you don't even condider the student body as a quantity, but for 20000 it very much becomes a quantity.

Also, if 20000 students need training, as a teacher you can still provide training, you just need to do so in other ways. Either, you can recruit more teachers to help you (and then it matters if the number is 10000 students or 20000 students), or you can switch to another medium (a book, a video, on-line training).

Treating a student body as a number will make it more managable for you to provide/organize training to them than just hireing more teachers at random until each student gets enough attention.

Likewise, 2 trees may keep you warm for a week, 20000 may keep you and half your (small) village warm for a year, with enough trees left over for the forest to replenish.
I always find it interesting that people expect Human existence, and therefore the environment for its emergence, is somehow atypical. I don't know the math, but I would have thought by definition, one would wager on it being typical.
If only the site explained wtf a PID controller was ...
Sci-fi is full of thinly veiled social commentary. The sci-fi aspect distracts you from the fact that messages and themes are shallow and don't really stand on their own. I loved Star Trek as a kid, it inspired my imagination and I didn't really pick up on the social messages, watching it now it's sort of comical or just boring. But I do get a nostalgic feeling from it and it's entertaining enough to be second screen distraction material when doing boring tasks.
Low interest rates do make the monthly payment much much lower so people can pay more and still have a low payment. Someone might just compare against monthly rent vs mortgage.
Do they do what the article is recommending? Genuine question, I don't know the answer.
COVID added two factors, both positive for housing prices: additional time in the home, making its faults more apparent and spending money to address them more sensible.

It also added trillions of dollars of government borrowing without creating offsetting trillions of dollars of production in the economy, leading many to worry about an uptick in inflation. As inflation fears increase, borrowing money and buying productive or hard assets makes an increasing amount of sense.
You don't need house to raise kids. I found that what I need with kids the most is proximity of infrastructure and other families with kids of similar age.
USB-c Power Delivery does not require an intel CPU, so I don't see a problem.
It isn't sheer evil in the novels, the corp wants to assess what's happening to people on a large scale if they become infected by the protomolecule. It's a study in a contained space.

Not unlikely, I'd say.
The noteworthy (IMO, obviously) communities/projects that I have seen jump ship (either voluntarily or by force) are wikimedia & wikimedia, ubuntu, gentoo, centos, kde, postgres, sourcehut, wesnoth, mutt, vim, emacs, lisp, scheme, clojure, haskell. Any other ones that I haven't seen yet?
I agree with your comment. It grinds the gears of many Americans when people conflate the USA with America as well though.
> I feel the inconsistency in your (circular) argument is not getting through.

I guess it's not, since I'm not convinced that mine is a circular argument.

My argument - to put is simply - is that we are all part of the same system and that there are no divisions. Without divisions, no numbers. I don't need any distinction between 'real' and 'arbitrary' for this to hold, that's a dichotomy you assume on your part.
Pass on the cicada, but ya I'll take a park.
> but the general population hasn't needed constant vaccination before.

Uh, mass vaccination is 100% a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#

I would say that we "Need" it. You could say that we don't, but it's vaccines or Polio outbreaks, so IMHO there's only one rational choice and it's not Polio.

Yes, there are "vaccinate everyone" vaccines cited above. There are also "seasonal" vaccines for the flu.

There has never been a need for a vaccine that is both of those. And once the disease is under control, it doesn't seem like covid-19 will be one.
Lenovo is a Chinese company.
Click on the white dot in the top right corner...
Of course, this is a massive arranged crime akin to and having it's roots in the sub-prime mortgage crash.
Rates are low. corporations can borrow unlimited cash and buy a residence, then rent it out to get 4-5% interest and pay 1.5 to 2.5 = risk free make the spread with no limits.
I would like to borrow 10 billion and buy a zillion homes and make the spread ~~3%.
They hire property managers and that costs .5% to .75%.

And we pay = we MUST HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE.

Easy to fix = make an income property subject to business taxes in addition to the usual real estate taxes. All the small retail shops pay business taxes as well as realty taxes. Make it a law that increased business taxes can not be passed to the people who live there. Exempt people who rent rooms in their own residence.
This would kill the spread and make houses affordable again.
Of course powerful corporates vesteds would whine away = WGAS for them, the people need this racket to be broken NOW.
> but not to some event in 2017 that resulted in extra deaths vs. any surrounding years

But that's exactly what the paper shows. It's reasonable to ask the question why was the difference in deaths far greater in 2017 than in the surrounding years and why was the mean age of the persons excessively dying so relatively young? There most likely are structural differences causing excess US deaths, but the claim that those structural differences caused a huge relative spike in one year for no particular reason isn't very satisfying.
They are driving away an active and vocal part of the community. Perhaps they're hoping to capture a more general audience reaching for support, and somehow monetize it?
In theory I agree, but imagine if you were running a large community and your number 2 just took it all away from you. I would pretty upset, even if in theory I should support all FOSS projects.

Not to say this is the same situation here as from what I understand, the guys who did the most work are moving to LC.

I just hope the same thing doesn’t happen to LC down the track, if it ever does, it will be an interesting case study of how they react.

But yes, looks like LC is now the home of IRC and for the foreseeable future should be drama free.
With a romantic noir space detective and dastardly space pirates! What more could you ask for?
Two things:

Citation needed (sorry).

It should be noted that the NHS is one of the largest, longest, most standardised medical record sets in the world. This is because it's for the whole (67m person) country, and because the NHS is so old records are old and centralised to a degree you don't see in private-healthcare, federal or smaller countries. That makes this of interest imho.

The NHS DBs have been used for really good medical research in the past (exactly because of the reasons above). That's fine. Buts it's different to just sharing the data with anyone...
The minimum wage in some countries is 10+ times higher than in others, yet the poorest citizens still spend everything on rented rooms (not even flats), food and transportation, no savings.

From what I've seen, cost of living will increase to the maximum level the poorest can afford it (which is why I don't see how UBI can work without massive changes in other areas).
Perhaps to vacate community of old members? Lots of F2P/P2W games do this kind of community destroying changes, probably to restart growth, with a letter of sincere apology to follow without reverts for changes.
I think he was referring to the absurd amount of power some Intel CPUs require.
> If someone can pay this mortgage […] then they can save a 6K downpayment

Not if they are paying rent - there would be no surplus every month to save.
oh how I wish I could... I agree there is an asymetry in influence of "the wealthy" to "legislation", compared to the influence of "the many", especially in the US.

yet it's not as simple as Bill calls Angie and then Angie makes a bill for bill.

some things that help "the many" are proportional representation (in contrast to fptp based systems) and popular vote, see Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands...

I wonder what it takes short of a war to get such dramatic improvements into an established democracy?
The worst part of this debacle is now I have to abandon PIA. I had no idea this was that guy.
There is something very wrong with the attitude towards health-related personal data in the UK lately. If you talk to real clinical professionals like doctors and nurses, they tend to be very aware of privacy as a matter of professional ethics. But the people making a lot of the policies and setting up a lot of the services that handle this sensitive data aren't generally the clinical professionals, they're more likely administrative staff and managers, whose priorities are not necessarily so constrained and who may not have the technical knowledge to understand the implications of what they are doing.

A case in point: some dentists in our area are now asking for a comprehensive medical questionnaire (far more than just dental history or medical conditions that might affect appropriate dental treatment) to be completed for any new patient, and then emailed to them. There's not even a pretence of acceptable security and privacy protections. With some other dentists, they ask you to use an online system to send them similar information, and that system is run by a commercial entity not based in this country.

Given how badly the figures right at the top of the health service and the members of the Government who are responsible for it dropped the ball when it came to privacy and COVID apps, it's hard to have much faith in them to properly operate centralised systems that hold substantial information about everyone for very generic-sounding purposes like "planning" and "research".

The fact that this particular opt-out can be completed easily online by adults yet requires a parent or guardian to jump through hoops involving filling in PDF forms in order to opt out of sharing sensitive data about a child says a lot about the level of ethics involved here, and none of it is good.

As a final observation, nothing about opting out of this kind of generic, large-scale system precludes participating in legitimate research conducted with appropriate safeguards and ethical standards. Doctors in a certain field may be working with a research group to investigate a particular condition in their field and its treatment, and can forward an invitation to any of their patients who might have that condition explaining the research and asking if the patient would be willing to participate in the research. I've seen one of these, and the information provided was very clear about exactly what data would be shared, what it would be used for, who would have access to it and with what safeguards to prevent unauthorised access, arrangements for destroying it after the research had been completed -- basically everything you'd hope a responsible organisation doing legitimate medical research would be careful about. So the kind of useful research where someone privacy-conscious might still choose to participate for the greater good isn't necessarily undermined by opting out of generic data-sharing consents.
Above the fold (and in the first five words of text) is a link to describe what a PID controller is.