skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.

Not true. Death rates aren't a linear scale. The total number of deaths last year was already set up to be significantly higher than in previous years (not accounting for covid). The actual death rates were lower than expected the past 4-5 years, which tells us there were many additional people on the brink of death. Also, there's a significantly higher number of
baby boomers reaching the likelihood-of-death-from-strong-illness age over the past year. These are the types of people who more easily die from the normal flu, so the common sense explanation is that they wouldn't stand a chance with a stronger flu-like illness. That also explains why normal flu deaths were basically non-existent last year. (No, it's not because the normal flu didn't happen last year, or because of masks, it's obviously because covid wiped those susceptible people out)

My guess is we'd be in about the same situation had we done nothing at all (no masks, no vaccines, etc). It's all political theater, cash-grabbing corporations, and there's lots of suckers in the world who believe everything they're told.
> You can write your backend logic in whatever language you wish with Qt or Electron too.

Yeah, but most developers won't in the case of Electron. It's a source of CPU Perfomance abuse. Developers will take the shortest/easiest route, businesses will save costs on development at the expense end-user software performance. See [1].

It's almost always best if your framework protects you from shooting yourself in the foot. That's why some languages support Static Typing, Type Inference, Clear Inheritance rules, among other failsafes. In this case, Sciter protects you from bloat-by-default GUI code.

> You also neglected to mention that Sciter is closed source which is a pretty big turn off.

That's not true. The source code is available for review if you pay for the license. It's not a turn off for businesses that do need continued support and a contract to back it up.

There was an effort to open source it, but it didn't took off in the past year. See [2].

> Qt's API is one of the best designed that I've ever used.

Yes, it's nice and all. I've used it myself in about 5 projects. I didn't try to imply it's hard to use or somewhat cumbersome.

However, sometimes I prefer not to have to deal with Qt's Theming or I really need custom controls I'd rather develop with web technologies rather than with Qt, at the same time not bundling an entire Chromium + Node 300mb+ package.

Sciter does the job for less than 2 Mb, and to me that's unparalleled advantage over Electron.

[1]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/economics-of-software-perf...

[2]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/c-smile/open-source-sci...

EDIT: Typos and clarity.
I’m confused. “Stillwell looked at uranium diantimonide (USb2), a uranium alloy.” Isn’t this a compound rather than an alloy? An alloy is a mixture (of iron and carbon and whatever else to make steel, for example), unless I am very mistaken.
anyone mind explaining how this works?
> There's going to be Amazon S3 buckets filled up with Drivers Licenses JPEG's provided by Stripe Identity, in a few months time.

What makes you think these don't already exist? Have you ever needed provide your identity information to use a service online (e.g. a insurance service, bank, alcohol/weed delivery, crypto market, etc.)? Where do you think the identity information you provided is stored?

If you don't use these type of services, then nothing will change--stripe won't magically have all your identity info. If you do use these services maybe they'll partner with Stripe, maybe not. The only outcome I can see from this news is that it's likely there will be fewer AWS buckets with your identity info moving forward, because Stripe can do that for you now.
It was not easy to see that the market would move incredibly higher over the course of the pandemic. Not in January 2020, nor any time since then. People can't even explain it after it has happened.
I do this after the tent has been out in the desert dust for a few weeks. Debris will accumulate in the zipper and will increase friction and grind down the plastic (tent zippers aren't made out of metal like you jeans zippers, for weight reasons).

Spending a few hours after a long trip to care for my gear is a great way to ensure it won't fail on the next trip. Especially with tent zippers, you don't want a failure in a storm as that could be unpleasant or even life threatening.

Instructions how to do this are in the owners manual in the maintenance section (although they recommend not using any grease, which I ignored).
Eh, let the market place organize in a matter that promotes efficiency, and if you really want to re-distribute, use the tax system.

That way you get a bigger pie to share around.
Basecamp gave it a shake
Because you're paying on top of Walmart's margins. And you're limited to whatever Walmart wants to carry and wants to charge you.
"The old services database (registered nicknames, channels, etc.) is apparently gone. All of your registered nicknames and channels are gone. Anyone who wishes to continue to use Freenode (though at this point I honestly can't imagine why anyone would want to) must re-register their nickname.

[...]

It's literally open season for anyone who wants to impersonate someone else, steal their nickname, or take over someone else's channel."

That's astonishingly short-sighted thinking, even by the already rock-bottom standards of the current Freenode management team.
> Gas is cheaper if you already have a gas installation. However nowadays most gas appliances are long gone and heating installations are increasingly switching to heat pumps. At that point, the cost to install gas just for cooking is hard to justify.

This must be very regional. We get about 3-4 months of hot weather, and 3-4 months of cold, and gas furnaces are still installed in most new homes, because it's much more expensive to heat with electricity. No-one's replacing them with electrical furnaces, when replacing furnaces, certainly—no-one wants the extra expense. Gas stoves are uncommon on lower-end houses, becoming more common as you move up, but gas furnaces are basically standard across the board. Heat pumps are sometimes installed, but I've repeatedly been advised by local HVAC folks that, whatever their claimed efficiency, they're not a great idea in our climate. Certainly it gets too cold here to rely only on them.
The past few years have shown that if you say "Free speech!" and "Cancel culture!" and "Blockchain!" loud enough, you'll get an audience, no need for any substance behind it -
and the more dramatic your actions, the more they'll follow you, with little regard to whether those actions make any sense.
I think the bigger story here is how Mark Karpeles is involved.. If I wanted to be taken seriously then there’s no way I’d involve him in any legitimate venture.

Karpeles Labs??

https://www.shells.com/l/en-US/team
By deep immutability, I meant Foo{Bar*} where Bar has further nested structs. It's tedious to have to manually mark every field in the tree as const to achieve deep immutability, which can easily be stripped off with a cast.

What if some of those structs are from libraries and I can't mark their inner fields as const? Yes, most libraries I've used are well tested so I don't need to worry about them modifying my fields but there's no guarantee that I won't.

> I'd also add even if you thought you could enforce this at runtime

I'm well aware this is a hard problem. It was something I frequently discussed with my lab mate who wrote his thesis on this exact topic. I'm simply saying it would be a nice-to-have construct like assertions.
Yeah. I don't get why all this nonsense... over IRC network?

IRC is mostly dead. It's not like there is huge marketing opportunity or any way to monetize this. We are not in the 90s/early 2000s with random mIRC people joining...

There is no "vendor lock in", and the only "vendor lock in" - the user and channels - were now effectively deleted.

So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?
I have enjoyed the WTB Trailblazers as they are knobby enough to run singletrack but have a solid centerline for touring longevity and better rolling resistance. You just have to adjust the tire pressure according to what you're predominantly doing that day. Commutting I run them at 35-45psi and on the trail I run them at 18-22psi no worries.
If you're interested in doing a deep dive into the Gallipoli landings I found this analysis of the operation by a USMC officer to be great reading:

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a279563.pdf
> You should apologize to trhway. He's proven that his statement was correct with a comment he made here on HN in 2015 where he does indeed take a (very) pro-vax position.

Done.
Kafkaesque? Yes.

https://christine.website/blog/final-chapter-2021-05-20

https://christine.website/blog/epilogue-2021-05-26
> Ty Cobb was famous for shady base running tactics, so this isn't new

I've never heard anything about Cobb being shady or breaking rules. He was known to be hyper-aggressive and have an angry, paranoid personality; he was always five steps ahead of the competition; but I never heard of him cheating.

> Gaylord Perry

There are many unwritten rules and exceptions. Perry wasn't 'cheating' like the steroid users. He toed the line of the unwritten exceptions that everyone, and every serious fan, knew.

> Cheating has a long history in baseball.

So does playing by the rules and enforcement of the rules. Arguably the beginning of modern baseball was when the owners hired a federal judge as Commissioner in ~1920 to clean up the game, and Landis promptly banned several star players. Pete Rose was banned for gambling.

The statement is meaningless: People have cheated in everything, and followed the rules in everything. People have committed crime everywhere, but that saying Palo Alto has a long history of murder isn't meaningful.
Or rather, what they and we know is already incorporated in the prices.

The economy (and wider world) are reasonably predictable, it's just that the prices already incorporate all the predictions.

Today's stock price is more-or-less already the best predictor of tomorrow's stock price.
this sounds a lot like the rationale given for denying security clearances to LGBT people up through the 90s. there were gay spy rings back in the day, but that's precisely because being gay was blackmailable - if we're allowed to serve openly, it's not a security risk.

calling a huge segment of the population "flakes" for matters outside their control, and denying them clearances, isn't just unfair, it's likely contributing to the massive brain drain going on in intelligence. I'm treated a lot better in industry, thank you.
https://winworldpc.com/product/professional-write/30

You will need DOSBox to install the DOS version.

Running the Windows version is a little bit more complicated. You will need winevdm (windows 3.x emulator)[1]. Download the unstable version, stable is extremely outdated. You can use ImDisk Toolkit[2] to mount the floppies. Unfortunately the installer doesn't seem to work on winevdm, so you will have to manually extract all the .zip files to the same directory and run PWPLUS.EXE from there.

[1] - https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

[2] - https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
Having worked with Mendix and Apex (both low-code tools) for over a year: I wasn't convinced.

Anytime you're trying to color outside the tool's predefined lines you'll be hurting and spending ridiculous amounts of time.

But stay within their lines and you'll be fine.

Because of this I don't see any real use-case for it in the B2C market. That in itself makes the 80% mentioned in the article hard to achieve.

In B2B there are more opportunities for low-code tools, but there too I don't see it working everywhere. Simply put; if you build something from scratch it's going to be a lot better than anything built with a low-code tool and you can easily grab market share by providing a better offering than your competitors. Low-code tools are not the means to out-compete the market.

If you do succeed in the B2B market with a low-code tool offering; likely you'll be building some very customized setup that required a huge investment to get to that point. I'd not be surprised it'll be just as unwieldy and difficult to change as most other software is. And for fixing big issues with your app (performance, complex bugs) you'll be requiring devs who worked and understand all those abstraction layers. Those devs will be extremely rare and hard to come by. I was one; but I am not anymore. It's just not fun to develop in them compared to normal coding; you feel constrained and fixing issues all the time that shouldn't exist in the first place.

However if you consider the huge set of internal tools lots of companies develop and use; yes there indeed is a big market for low-code. Basically use cases that were run in excel are generally great candidates for these tools. And that's a lot of use cases. Not the big money-makers though.

There's a reason Frontpage and Dreamweaver never made it; this won't happen to low-code tools. They have their place, but know their limitations.
Actually it reinforces that the idea actually is the easiest part of the equation. Execution is the key and the winners are the ones who executed the best. You can't compare Webvan to Amazon.
is this related to today's (also caused by weather prediction failure) massive chain of delays for Southwest Airlines? Been stuck in Denver for 2 extra hours so far because they said the entire Southwest weather system went down...
You need to build 300 square miles of wind farms or two nuke plants every three days to get to net zero by 2050. Won't happen. There's a forbes article that breaks it all down.
Super nice that trillion dollar companies are being extremely competitive with compensation now

Wages have stagnated for 30 years and, to me, progress is not achieved until a house in the same area as the economic center can be owned outright in 5 years or less just like the baby boomers experienced

This seems to accomplish that, but lets throw in paying off all other encumbrances like student debt as well
JDK 17 to optionally use macOS Metal API as rendering pipeline
I also own a Canyon Grail (the alloy one, so no weird handlebar) and it's pretty capable for fire roads and some singletrack. When it gets really rocky and rooty though I find myself having less fun simply because the riding experience becomes so jarring and rattly. It's also way more fun to climb on (as in you actually enjoy the climbs as opposed to just doing them to get to the downhills) compared to a mountain bike. Where I live I have to ride ~7 miles each way to get to the trails so it makes a lot of sense as my one off-road bike.
Even the bitcoin people and the FSF people moved to Libera.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/IRC_channels

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-and-gnu-move-official-irc-chann...
This all would make an awesome South Park episode
Beyond To-Dos
Or, you know, IRC.

irc.libera.chat is the new Freenode.
Whoops. We invited a repost of the OP but either didn't realize that it was a dupe, or we sent it before that one got traction. Sorry valand!
You'll be repainting your ceiling every few years.
Why just go out? If you have a sure-fire system, you short!
I'm actually not sure about alpha blockers. I don't know if they're necessarily associated with long-term brain issues like anti-cholinergics are. According to Google, some alpha blockers may be associated with other long-term issues, though.
I was going to mention this--I'm in County IT and we support it in the Public Defender's office routinely.
I don't trust this person. But there is nothing in this post that I need to take on faith, as you kinda need to do with the news.

And even then, yeah I kinda trust random bloggers more at this point. Why? Because 90% of the "news" is just blogspam anyway, where one news org will write something "original" (frequently just an editorialized summary of a primary source you as the reader could consume directly) and tweet about it, at which point all the other journos will see it on twitter and write their own "coverage" of the story, which is usually just creatively re-wording the original story without doing much digging themselves as if they're still in high school copying each other's assignments with just enough changes so they don't get flagged by Turnitin.
Universities are making plenty of money. At this point, they're hedge funds with schools attached to them. Harvard has a $38 billion endowment, Yale $29 billion, Princeton $26 billion.
Yeah. I have been meaning to reconnect with IRC for a while. This seems like a good time.
It seems clear enough that the money came from the sale of Private Internet Access.

(It wouldn't surprise me if some other portion of that money had a causal role in causing 'rasengan to get the blessing of one of the pretenders to the throne, though.)
> How many times in the last few years have their "independently confirmed" anonymous sources been proven false?

I don't know - not a lot, IMHO, at least not in the publications I read. I'd say 99% are accurate.

But why is this blogger likely to be any better?
Eh. Were many users affected at all by the shakeup? Seems like a vocal minority of employees left and that was that.
The Spanish Flu killed lots more people than Covid, but it did not cause a recession.

The relation between economic impact and how serious some condition is ain't trivial.
> When reputable and trusted journalists are leaving their industry and sounding the alarm while becoming bloggers on Substack, it is not so easy to maintain faith in the process.

They aren't saying news is unreliable, they are saying they can make more money on Substack.
Business Formation Stats For 2020-21: Highest Rate On Record
I thought ducted central heat pump with zones was the most efficient. Also, it filters the air centrally (and better, higher MERV possibilities), allows you to more easily manage humidity, and allows you to mix and bring in outside air.

Not cheap though.
You can directly subscribe to get Money Stuff for free via email.

(Getting it in my inbox also lessens temptation to keep browsing eg Bloomberg or the wider net afterwards.)
I agree with everything you've said, BUT, I find small tank (10gal or less) electric hot water heaters surprisingly cost-effective options if you are using very low-flow aerators and shower heads (0.5-1.0 GPM). And particularly so if you have a small household where everyone can be taught to hit the button* on the wall to turn-on the hot water 30 min before they want to take a shower.

The installation cost is vastly lower than heat-pump based units, they fit in a cabinet under a sink much better, are easier to wire up to an on-demand on/off button, is even cheaper to operate during summer months, etc. Would work even better with a solar thermal panel for preheating the cold water.

The button in question being a 30-minute auto-shut-off switch, actually.
Is hiQ a competitor to LinkedIn? They scrape people’s profiles so they can snitch to employers about employees whom they think are job hunting. AFAIK, that’s not a service LinkedIn provides.

Moreover, I would like it both ways. Access control would be great, but it sidesteps the underlying issue. I’m fine with my profile being public — in fact, I want it to be — but I don’t want my data to be vacuumed up and weaponized against me.

I agree that anti-hacking laws are not appropriate here. But what hiQ is doing is sleazy as heck, and we should absolutely try to throw out as much bathwater as possible without throwing out the baby too.
I actually am not joking; I don't think access to information should be discriminated upon.

If you have better access to information, because of a leak, you are better fit, better networked, and should be rewarded for it.

At the same time, those high up managers would probably be trading millions of dollars worth of shares -- their trades should go through slowly, and that is a mechanism that would prevent them from benefitting from it.

The person who benefits the most, percentage-wise, will be the dude who sweeps the floors at Amazon and sniffed the bad news based on, say, the times that people were coming in and out of work. Or the intern who found a huge security vulnerability and shorted the stock before disclosing it. These people should be rewarded. These people will get a few months' worth of rent while the millionaire just gets an additional Michelin one-star dinner, at best. And the billionaire CEO who owns a shitton of shares will lose money because he has enough shares that his trades will be delayed by an entire quarter.
I sure hope so! Anonynimity is not a fundamental human right, it is a tool that should be used sparingly and only when the situation is appropriate (whistleblower, for example). The internet would be a better place if there were more identity requirements SO LONG AS companies are not legally allowed to sell or transmit that information to advertisers or other third parties without explicit opt-in consent ideally on a per-use basis. Or simply at all. If easier access to online identity systems means we as a society turn focus on legal ground rules governing how that data is treated and used, then we'll be in a really good position (: I'm excited.
TIL analysis paralysis goes by centrism
Sad to see something implode that has been taken for granted for literally decades. Shows that we should never forget someone is paying for the electricity in the background and finding ways to provide open infrastructure to our projects is an important endeavour. I find [1] similarly odd and it does not fill me with hope for the future.

I would encourage anyone to get involved in real open infrastructure through efforts such as https://opendev.org. Yes, resources are donated, but by a range of providers who have a vested in interest in what the community is producing. ARM64 has been a great example; Linaro providing hardware resources, which has enabled services to perform functional testing and build ARM64 Python wheels for publishing for a number of projects. This is a rising tide that floats all boats. No need to send a resume [2] and you can start contributing immediately [3,4].

It has been good run with IRC but I forsee moving to Matrix as the medium-term future and there's plenty of opportunity for others to get involved with that (building home servers, admining, writing bots that provide the services we current provide on IRC, doc updates, community building).

[1] https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq

[2] https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities

[3] https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/

[4] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-conf...
That's what actually happened, though. The guy's VPN company acquired Freenode in 2017: https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn

He only attempted to take operational control last month.
Many decent journalists have worked for USA news media firms. It is nearly certain that some of them would hear the directive "you work for the military-industrial complex now" and respond by burning the whole thing to the ground. Unfortunately those decent and visionary journalists seem to have overestimated the attention span and reasoning ability of the American public. Also they forgot that they have always worked for the military-industrial complex. "Remember the Maine!"
Give minimal.app a try - independent + top-quality.

If it’s not available in your country, try minimal.app/#beta.

This is my app, I use it extensively, and it is a delight to design, build, and share with other people obsessed with thoughtful design.
By "not that much" I mean orders of magnitude. 20% is reasonable, especially for C++ that needs a lot of inlining.

But a more modern language would benefit from defining some optimizations like inlining as mandatory, the same way tail calls are (and of course GCC has this.) Then there isn't a chance of deploying a build with extra-slow behavior.