skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that's what the data says, but I have a really hard time reconciling it with common sense. More information is strictly better than less information, because you can always choose to ignore the extra information.

I would say most medical decisions are made either due to statistics, or due to experience. What treatment has the highest chance of making the patient better, extending their life, or giving the best quality of life? You'd "just" have to adjust the tables for the new test.

I mean in a contrived example, you could have the lab technician themself look up the numerical result (xyz > 100, abc < 10 whatever) in some table, and then there would be the rule to throw the result in the bin and report "don't treat" because this results in the best outcomes. I don't want to have all that extra diagnostic information, but I want my doctors to use it conditionally to improve my treatment if possible.
Oh my nerves... what a stresstest.
Our great ancestors were not doing gain of function research on viruses. If countries continues to do gain of function research on viruses we might not last the next two or three decades. No labs are 100% failproof. And there have been multiple cases of leaks even from the top security BSL4 labs.
I wonder how effective AI will be at enabling us to navigate chemical space for certain desired compounds. Knowing nothing about the problem, is it something akin to the protein folding challenge that AlphaFold[0] recently did well at?

Side note: I love Derek Lowe's writings. I don't know what it is, but every time I see a chemistry related link bubble up in HN, I have a gut feeling it was written by him. And I'm usually impressed. His Things I Won't Work With[1] series is amazingly well written.

[0] https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-...

[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/search/Things+I+Wont+W...
us good, them bad
I have Perl Traumatic Stress Disorder from too much Perl in the 90s. Just looking at Perl code makes me break out in a cold sweat. I wish I were kidding.

Otherwise, just noted that it was written in Perl.
need to be Password1234
Well...I did it...somehow...I did...

00:06:57

That seems too fast...apparently i've experienced these things far too much. It actually was filling me with rage. I came close to saying fuck it...I really did...

Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites.

That bow thing though...gotta admit, was worth it just for the chuckle I got as I realized...
The problem with everyone having moved from forums over to subreddits is that in order to interact with the community/ask qiuestions/whatever, you need to have a Reddit account and deal with Reddit's dark patterns, data collection and general disrespect for their users.
I haven’t had a LinkedIn account for the last ~5 years. In that time I’ve changed jobs about twice. I didn’t need it for the search nor did the companies require me too. My CV and other online profiles (aka GitHub) were enough. Possibly anecdotal but it appears to be very possible to ditch LinkedIn and thrive.
I laughed out loud at the expansion control in place of the "close" X in the corner of the T&C modal.
As someone who uses XMPP nearly daily for actual chat purposes: The value sources seem all over the place.

The XMPP column counts Google and Apple totals to reach 2 billion users, but that's just push notification use (and might not even be current information), not chat use. One could point at the 1 billion total from the XMPP instant messaging page that is also linked, but that is based entirely on Zoom and Whatsapp, neither of which interoperate. The one source further down detailing a large interoperable server has the population of that server approaching 900k accounts, and an order of magnitude active users.

Later, XMPP is dinged for having poor iOS support and poor video support, but Whatsapp and Zoom are on iOS. Do they count or not?

My present theory is the page is oriented towards getting people to put money towards supporting XMPP, rather than being purely pro-XMPP.
It's not too different than what I used to do before. I'm mostly a project manager for technical projects.

Bit it's a different business so it feels fresh enough.
I tried briefly to replicate some of Hey's features with gmail but with limited success. I think the key workflows are:

1. Unknown senders go to a bucket for categorization

2. Easily categorize which senders are "important"/"unimportant"/"ignore,spam"
That's a little ad hominem to diagnose them from one paragraph.

There's actually a well known term for what they're describing.

It's called pop science and is a very real thing.
I have been waiting for doctors and other medical staff, especially in ERs, to stand up about the insane over-charging that takes place. Everyone seems to have a story, but in mine before I agreed to anything I asked how much it would be. I was given an estimate of around $1,200 for a scan, decided to proceed because I knew I had $1,800 in my HSA. Turned out they charged me almost $4,000 and I ended up in collections. I would have never, ever agreed to the scan if they had been honest.
How to add dark mode to any website – easy
It seems to be working on my iPhone/iPad however I’ll do some more tests, that’s for the feedback!
The “defund" people mostly don’t tend to deny that the “abolish” camp exists, they mostly just tend get upset when people mistake (honestly, or even moreso when it is clearly for rhetorical convenience) them for us. Both camps recognize that, in terms of persuasion, the “abolish” camp has a harder task.
Pavel Durov is a billionaire and this is his (and his brother's) pet project. He made his money starting VK (Russia's Facebook)
> The ACCESS Act mandates that big tech firms have to make their systems open to competitors and business rivals, in the same way that AT&T customers can talk to T-Mobile customers, or users of different email systems can communicate with one another.

Okay, this is plausible, but it can turn into all kinds of mess as federated systems aren't simpler to design, build, or operate. For example, how would Signal inter-communicate with e2ee intact with say, Facebook Messenger? They'd have to do a matrix.org style bridges, which is going to be super tricky to maintain, at their scale. Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects...

> The merger bill makes it harder for big tech firms to buy rivals.

Well, the race to $2T market cap just got harder. Can get behind this. I can do without Zuck in my WhatsApp, or Satya in my GitHub. Such a restriction may, instead, result in a marked increase in venture investments from BigTech, which may not be as bad a thing, after all?

> The nondiscrimination bill is intended to ban the ability to big tech firms to preference their own products, the way Google substitutes its own reviews for Yelp reviews, even if Yelp’s reviews are better.

Much needed. Looking at you "Amazon's choice".

> The break-up bill is supposed to split apart big tech firms by prohibiting platforms from owning any line of business that uses that platform.

Affects tech companies ranging from AWS and Stripe to platforms like Android and iOS? This bill can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, imo, if they get the details right. Either the incumbents remain entrenched because of the loopholes, or they no longer wield undue advantage, leaving some breathing room for upstarts. Unsure if this is good or bad for software engineers. They've enjoyed higher salaries for a while on the back of some of the most ridiculous growth ever seen, driven in no part by unabated monopolistic practices.

> And that is truly stunning.

Indeed.
Also jellyfin, and I guess Emby which it was forked from

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
>Should it though?

Yes of course it will. The mainstream narrative is that the virus came from a wet market. Wet markets are still open and there is no discussion about what to do about it. The most basic lessons and precautions are forbidden topics.
Signal is moving away from phone numbers, developing the components needed to securely provide service via user IDs.

My understanding is that their intended audience is the general public, not crypto-security geeks, and as part of that they wanted integration with existing address books. With a small team, developing all the security and usability was more important than eliminating the phone number piece.

They apparently don't retain any data but the phone number, and I think the registration date and last logon date.
Everything about this seems like a sketch out of The Office (if they were a software company).
We provide deeper analysis and can surface things like thread safety issues and resource leaks. We also focus very closely on ensuring our tools have low false positive rates and so we tend to have less noisy output. This is especially important when you're using the pull request integration (you don't want a bunch of noise in code review).
It took me an afternoon to get a Matrix server running. There's a PPA for it, it's in the Arch community repo... I don't know how much easier it could get.
These Fonts Are Puzzles. Can You Solve Them?
The worst was the initial scroll offset. I was wondering why the last row had no checkboxes below the images, and was unable select those images. After three or four times submitting that damn dialog I noticed that I can scroll up.

I also had to scroll down the terms and conditions dialog twice because I thought I could just click the text in order to toggle the checkbox.

8 minutes and something. Very painful.
On the Energetics of Large-Scale Computation Using Astronomical Resources
Kids infect eachother -> Kids infect teachers and their parents -> Hospitals overwhelmed

When hospitals are overcrowded any injury has a higher mortality rate. Teachers not wanting to die is a totally fine reason to close schools, too.
Took 8 mins to complete...
Is it easier to write an xmpp client which supports E2EE?
Ask HN: How do you handle IT / user's computers at a small startup?
I'm am trying to figure out how to manage IT and users laptops at a small startup without having the engineering team take care of it. What solutions have you guys used?
Congratulations to you!

I'm up 17x on my BTC investment since 2019.

Great to see that we are all WINNING!

Downvoters: What is exactly wrong with winning? Don't you want to see others win?

I'm sick of constant bad news and negativity from others. It doesn't make anyone feel better.
Of course it is not very rigorous but those results seem to indicate a pattern to the contrary.
You may need to add a cyrillic character...
Yeah hard and fast liberalism. Way to go /s off

Started out legit... Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence.
Simolex APK – Download the Best Free VPN for Android
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118597
MyBook Users Urged to Unplug Devices from Internet
As others have said, this really seems like a hatchet job on Matrix.

- Complains about no "authoritative and independent source" for a count of Matrix servers or clients or users, but I'm not aware of any such thing existing for XMPP either

- Cites WhatsApp and Zoom as XMPP implementations, which may or may not be true, but is pretty much meaningless w/o federation or the ability to use a different client

- As far as I can tell, it's not any harder to test experimental extensions to the Matrix protocol as it is to XMPP - the author makes up several extended forks of Matrix here that as far as I know, do not and have never existed

- Seems to regard corporate sponsorship as inherently suspicious, which seems at odds with citing WhatsApp and Zoom as proponents of XMPP

- They're right that Synapse is much more resource hungry than something like Prosody, but they exaggerate things to quite an extreme degree. I know of several successful Synapse deployments on Raspberry Pi, one hardly needs a "supercomputer"

- Seems to be very confused about how Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt work, there is nothing stopping you from using either or both or neither with both XMPP and Matrix
Unless this changed in the last year, this is incorrect. Everyone was pushed to Chime after it was released.
This is… I don’t know. I lack words to describe it.
That was the start of my career! My first (freelance) job was as the technical editor for Amstrad Action in its closing years. A great magazine, even in its dying days.
There's also https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy which can basically set up an entire matrix "ecosystem" including telephony, bridges and bots with one command and some basic configuration.
To give a sense of Wickr's direction (before the acquisition, at least):

Wickr as of 10/2020 "has created a federal advisory board that includes Matt Olsen, chief trust and security officer, Uber (former director of the National Counterterrorism Center); Vince Stewart, chief innovation and business intelligence officer of Ankura (a former deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director); Jan Tighe, former deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence; and Joanne Isham, former deputy director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency."

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-...
You will have to

1. Inform users what they are missing out
2. Instill a culture of performance first over features in software dev shops.

The financial incentives of doing these are not very compelling.
My lay understanding of the current standard of care is very roughly speaking something like:

Patient exhibits symptom => perform a not-especially-invasive test
Positive test result => invasive test like a biopsy
Positive biopsy result => heavy-duty intervention (although I'm not focusing on this part of the chain in what follows)

Both testing and (certain) symptoms have predictive value, and don't completely overlap. So there's something like this going on:

P(actual problem|no additional information) = really really low, which is why they don't scoop out chunks of every organ to test "just in case" every time you go to the doctor

P(actual problem | [symptom AND positive test result]) = generally high enough in at least some cases to justify the risk of the biopsy, which is why it's the standard of care

P(actual problem | just symptom) = probably not super high, which is why the tests are developed

P(actual problem | just a positive test result) = substantially lower than P(actual problem | [symptom AND positive test result]), so in the general case the balance of risk no longer favors the biopsy

In the broadest of strokes, is there anything I've just said that you substantially disagree with?
Thank you for sharing this Microsoft story. One way to interpret it is that the only people who would hire you and your colleagues and compensate you the most were [insert unpleasant description]. I say that sincerely as someone who many years ago worked in the software industry then left to work in other industries. I was not a developer but was someone who worked with management on a daily basis. I saw a marked difference in character between people working in management in the software industry versus the others. It is worth considering why you could not all quit en masse. Who else would hire you? What would they pay you? To be fair, as far as "dark patterns" go, specifically, making cancelling subscriptions difficult, I think that existed long before software companies. However, it is food for thought to consider what kind of industry is employing and compensating you the most for your "work", and what other industries are not. None of this implies any "blame" targeted at anyone, it just highlights what monetary value society places on programming and the cast of characters who set that value. I worked alongside programmers in other industries besides software and we never asked them to anything unethical. Some of them arguably could have tried to work at Microsoft. They had freedom of choice.
Hey uses Hotwire (which Stimulus is a part of) they do not use Stimulus Reflex.
But it does for the intelligence community.
> This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.

Having recently bought (and returned) the flagship Roomba, I struggle to see the difference between those two.
> This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic.

This culture doesn’t exist in the real world.

A bigger problem is people like who who soak themselves in hyper-partisan media and ideas, lose the ability to engage in critical thought and analysis, and whose brains turn to mush.

So let me be clear: you’re a moronic idiot who is completely and totally fucking wrong both on the facts and your (dull-headed) interpretation of your invented reality.
The point is that if the success of America was due to mainly “shady dealings” and not a successful culture, then Yew copying aspects of the American system to implement in Singapore wouldn’t have worked.
00:03:53

Much easier on mobile than desktop
I also feel bad abandoning my wife and vice versa but I realized recently its still important to find space for that. After some mutual encouragement we've begun taking turns here and there watching the kids, purely for the other person to make plans and go out. Of course, it doesn't help making friends necessarily, but having that habbit does provide the space for it when the opportunities arise.
No I'm @larsiusprime. @tocelot is the a16z partner I quote at the beginning, but I'm not associated with that or any other VC firm. I'm an independent game developer and consultant with a blog.
> GOPATH and modules mean that the tooling has to handle two different cases...

No, the main thing, that GOPATH meant, is that Google (and everyone else) had to make their Go libraries open-source — since entire logic of GOPATH revolves around building stuff, downloaded from Github.

Once Google management decided to be serious about pushing Go to masses, they hurriedly rushed to erase GOPATH from history (just like they erased "Don't be evil" slogan from Internet after getting serious about doing business).
great, thank you. I forwarded him your contact info.
I haven't used the original title because it's impressively awful: "Is This Some Kind of Code? You Can Solve the …"
Ok. It came across as a value judgement. Personally I don't much care what its written in, executable line noise or anything else as long as practitioners of that particular language do not find anything wrong with it.

Scientists typically don't particularly care about the latest and greatest software development environments and practices, they simply need answers. The best way to deal with that is to help out, I personally think they should be applauded for putting their code out there, which is better than the vast majority. Including CS, for that matter.
I nearly quit when it said "your age and birthdate don't match". Glad I got through because the bow and check also gave me a laugh.
I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of that.
I don't trust Wickr solely because it is closed source and a US team

The government contracts don’t give me confidence in their technology, it gives me the impression they sell snake oil to “security conscious” organizations just like that article says. Its like worded specifically to avoid any liability in the eventual lawsuit where people complain that it didn't offer what they expected.

The AWS acquisition gives me even less confidence.

The standard for less skepticism for me is distributed end to end encryption where handshakes are done between the specific parties communicating

This is common (but often ignored) knowledge on darknet forums and markets, where Wickr also doesnt have a good client for darknet operating systems - further pointing to it having an intended purpose of not offering privacy by not prioritizing it for Whonix and Tails

Most of the literature about this trepidation and solutions are not on clearnet but you can get a glimpse of sentiment in comment replies here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wi...

The rest of the literature would be on Tor onion services like Dread, or forums in existing or defunct darknet marketplaces
Can you cite that UnHerd was founded by and funded by “extremist Christian-right propaganda” forces? Considering that its executive editor has frequently featured commentators who are downright anti-religion (e.g. Richard Dawkins), and various commentators who subscribe to old-school 20th-century leftism including its antipathy to religion, that is a claim hard to believe.
This comment only works with a very narrow definition of "duties of an employee".
> the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia

Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference?

I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently.

> As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level

Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later.

"When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."
that means its fine (not unsafe is safe)
John Carmack once said that launching a rocket is actually easier than modern game development.
There's plenty of shared workspaces in many cities. WeWork just leveraged some workspaces into an absolutely comical valuation.
That's interesting if true, because my gym in France (Neoness) just made me turn up in person to cancel my rolling monthly subscription, despite the fact that I signed up on line.
(Obviously I will never, ever be giving them my money again regardless)
Three reasons I can think of:

- Postgres is a row store optimized for transactional workloads, whereas Parquet is a column-oriented format optimized for analytical workloads.

- Database storage is typically very expensive SSD storage optimized for fast IO and high availability. Parquet files, on the other hand, can be stored in inexpensive object storage such as S3.

- Loading is an additional and possibly unnecessary step
I think that it is important to create a precedent of mass data collection that reveals to the users what is collected and gives tools to manage it. The legislators can use it as a blueprint to require a similar level of disclosure from other companies that do online surveillance. However, I do not see what value Rally offers to the enrolled users.