skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment)

But what evidence is there that this was the case, that they just had normal flu like symptoms, and it was not more serious? What information at all do we have about their cases, and how trustworthy is this information, and why does this have to come out through leaked intelligence reports if China is so sure they have nothing to hide?
Ok, we know that Math.random() is bad, and they recommend using window.crypto.getRandomValues(). But the docs for getRandomValues() raise concerns too:

- getRandomValues() is not guaranteed to be running in a secure context.

- There is no minimum degree of entropy mandated by the Web Cryptography specification

- User agents are instead urged to provide the best entropy they can when generating random numbers, using a well-defined, efficient pseudorandom number generator built into the user agent itself, but seeded with values taken from an external source of pseudorandom numbers, such as a platform-specific random number function, the Unix /dev/urandom device, or other source of random or pseudorandom data.

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Crypto/getR...

Is there a better solution?
Back in '90 I acquired a laser disc player. The conventional wisdom of the moment was laser discs were on their way out, and people were selling and giving away laser disc collections for cheap. I bought the entire Criterion Collection, what it was at the time. Something like 5 crates of discs, all classic black and white films. I watched most of them, but many do not hold up and feel like experiments today. I don't know where they are now - in a box somewhere in long term storage.
To minimize blowback, you need to show that you respect user's privacy:

- Communicate clearly and discuss openly before writing code, asking for feedback from the community.

- Make very clear from the beginning that this is opt-in (Audacity failed this, IMO)

- Give specific examples of the actual benefits of telemetry in concrete terms (e.g. "leverage with hardware vendors"), not just "make $product better".

- avoid dark patterns (the screenshot Audacity has added now to the pull request has a highlighted "yes" button - that already will make some people hate you, anything worse than that will rightfully make most privacy conscious people hate you)

- Avoid controversial third party providers (this likely amplified the outrage in the Audacity case a lot)

- If you screw up and/or get unlucky and a shitstorm starts, back down. Even if Audacity actually fixes the issues to a point where everyone would consider it reasonable had it been like that from the start, trust has been lost to the point where any telemetry feature will be controversial.

Audacity screwed up in multiple ways:

- poor communication in general

- Still doesn't intend to make the data collection opt-in. (The update check sends OS and version information, and that part is supposed to be opt-out.) The privacy policy also makes clear that it wasn't supposed to be opt-in (uses legitimate interest instead of consent, tells people who are under 13 to not use the app).

- introduced this shortly after other controversial changes (change of ownership, CLA requirement)

- collecting data "For legal enforcement"

- "If you are under 13 years old, please do not use the App." (following from COPPA limitations - it should be "please disable analytics" instead)

- used controversial third party providers
This is a losing proposition that will only lend credence to the inherently violent opt-out approach to data collection.

Instead how about a do-not-hire-or-collaborate-with registry of the individual contributors participating in projects that employ those tactics and see how they like trying to opt out of it.
I'm convinced Chicago is unfixable. The south side has been so poor for so long it's basically a third world country.

The best solution is a planned dismantlement of the irredeemable parts of the city. And relocate those people somewhere they stand a chance of finding a job.

When rust belt manufacturing died Chicago had no jobs for a million people. And in 60 years the situation hasn't changed much
Some people who now are now singing the praises of Rust have been "active" and gotten commit rights in more than 5 major open source projects.

Of course they didn't do much and mostly used the projects to climb the politician's ladder and badmouth productive developers.

I'm very worried about these kinds of people infiltrating the kernel.
Disagree. First of all, the level of detail an atomic level simulation could provide is simply useless in the grand scheme of things. Classical physics is more than enough for the vast majority of use cases and they can be simulated by computers. Eg, you can programmatically measure the load bearing on any part of a structure. And the more important thing, engineers can usually fall back to safety margins that “linearly scale” the provided confidence in a given case. What I mean by that, is that if a given part has to be this stable, as per the calculations, you can trivially make it 3x wider.

While a while loop in a computer program will eat away at any sort of redundancy you may introduce, and the complexity of computability itself simply leaves behind even mathematics. There is no universal way to prove a non-trivial property of an arbitrary program.
I dunno, 15 years ago the doxxing and death threats was reserved to child molesters and animal abusers, and vote flooding done just for fun. But I guess people got too drunk on that power.
I recall this was an issue too for certain RSA tokens.
Just make it illegal to lock down hardware as well. Now they can't cut corners anymore and will have to actually develop good software.

Just keep making their "clever" workarounds illegal every single time until the desired outcome is achieved. They should have literally no choice other than to make a good product.
Chicken and egg problem, naturally.

I'd love it to gain more traction. It was an idea and I thought it would be better an idea and a website than just an idea.

It was strange to see it get labeled as a marketing attempt during my attempts to gain some
traction, considering I'm not selling a damn thing.

I have severe focus issues, so it had to be a one-day project unfortunately, which is why a couple of the patches weren't tested very well. Treasure your flow state when you get it.

Ultimately I didn't invest any more time into it as developers who put default-on spyware in their apps don't actually want more people opting out. It's a doomed concept.
I sold a company, bought an Alienware, a proper desk and chair, wrote up a bunch of Java templates, learned Kotlin, found that templates were not worth the effort. I bought an expensive ergonomic keyboard, realized that my typing style was all wrong and spent a month correcting it. I took on freelance jobs that were well paid and impossible, then returned the money when it was clear why nobody else took the jobs. I tried to learn JS and Node but didn't. I tried to start a startup with an accelerator buddy salvaging old tech from the startup I sold, but it became clear why they "survived" for 4 years instead of growing exponentially. I tried to help the acquiring company of my startup get into it, but they were busy touring the world, and it became clear it was more of a prestige acquisition rather than a strategic one. The remaining time was spent playing XCOM 2 while my wife was at work, on the fancy new computer I intended to use for work.

A friend needed someone to tour the country teaching programming to educational institutions, so that's how I got back into tech. I picked up JS and Node by teaching it, somehow.

I'm not sure if the break helped my career but I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I also used Kotlin for Android before Google officially adopted it. It didn't change anything but it looks good on the resume.
What about users who don't download it via their distribution package managers (for example because their distributions ship very old versions of Audacity)?

And what about Windows users?
There is certainly lots going on inside, loads of areas of study at the monment look at gut-brain axis (GBA) and stuff like 'Gut bacterial taxonomic abundances vary with cognition, personality, and mood in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study' https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266635462...

'Highlights
•
Multiple families, genera, and species were associated with psycho-cognitive traits.

•
Megamonas is associated with cognition, mood, and personality.

•
Pseuroramibacter_Eubacterium is associated with mood and personality.

•
Fusobacterium is associated with personality and cognition.

•
Butyrivibrio is associated with cognition.'

Edit: just to add I'm a layperson so not able to asses the quality of this study, if someone is more able to do that I would welcome the input.
Interesting comparison. Blender uses full on path tracing so it does in fact simulate the optical paths, however. What POVray does I'm not sure, but it seems like it uses a more direct calculation rather than monte carlo sampling like blender. I did like fig 6 better than fig 5, the latter seemed overbright. It also looks like the refractive indices were not the same for the two images.
One more question: what's your take on reproducible builds? I'm personally interested in systems like GNU/guix and NixOS which are functional package managers.

It seems like a good fit to get started to build binary builds in a reliable manner. Are you familiar with such tech? (or someone from your team)
IME "thou shalt not introduce a new violation" tests are an even better way to do that if you can set it up. The article mentions this as a strategy and links to a tool called betterer that tries to do so generically.
This is simply the result of natural selection, there are tons of viruses that are less infectious, but they simply die out.
actually I recall seeing that as well
Chiraq isn't an insult, that's what people living there call it.
The LGPL does impose restrictions that can make things inconvenient. Even for (or, dare I say, especially for) free software under other licenses.
Out here in the real world, Homebrew is spyware by default.

Sometimes you gotta play the hand you're dealt.
Blender is such a fantastic tool and is becoming more and more accessible with every update. It's genuinely becoming an industry standard, and it's fascinating to see its capabilities.
Another bad thing about cars these days is that many people think they can talk on the phone and/or text while driving. I was in a pretty bad wreck last week - slammed into at an intersection. Because I had a 2003 Accord in excellent condition with 90K miles that I planned to drive for another 10 years, I get totally screwed on insurance and will be lucky to get $6K for it. Buying a used 2018 replacement with 30K miles was $30K, so compared to leaving $24K invested, I'll end up being out around $48K because of someone else's bad driving. (And no, you can't drive well while using a phone "hands free"; it's the lack of mental focus that is the problem, not using your hands.)

Of course, if I had been walking instead, this bad driver would have likely taken me out.
I use org-mode every day for organization and documentation in org-roam. I barely touch the text markup features though. Most of the time I don't mess with exporting either. (org-mode exports to LaTeX, HTML, or practically anything via pandoc)

Have you written much using org-mode as a replacement for asciidoc/markdown etc? I should probably try to find some examples of longer-form org-mode docs and see if I can use those features.
Maybe they would need to cut that specific line but apart from that? As far as I recall, everything else should be fine.
I doubt that as an interpretation that Github wants people to make since that means that tons of major projects need to be remove from Github. Basically all that are older than Github.
Mirrors my experience. It is almost painful to watch some of these washed-up OG engineers. I worked at a company that followed a similar trajectory to Google (scaled down quite a bit, of course) and there was a special team reserved for those people where they were working on strange and irrelevant problems of their own devising. Presumably to avoid irking any of the hard-driving execs, they reported directly to the CEO. At one point I sat next to them in the office and couldn't help but notice that on any given day there barely was half of them present. I remember thinking that despite them all being filthy rich it was a very unappealing position to end up in.

Another guy I worked directly with. He had at some point a couple hundred reports, but downshifted to an ordinary engineer. I was struck by how profoundly chill and unambitious he was, how indifferent to flaws in his code (entirely lacking any kind of engineer's pride). But at least he was doing honest and useful work.

The stories they tell are golden though.

As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?
Interesting. I feel Fury Road is a shining example of zero storyline shite, and George Miller to be an over rated hack.
Since this is conspicuously lacking among other threads here, allow me to thank the creators and maintainers for a service invaluable to those of us who are grateful for the ability to share files without installing new software, and who mightn't need e2e protection for it (though as the examples show, this is possible, again without installing additional software).

Thank you! :)

https://github.com/dutchcoders/transfer.sh/#creators
That is another website on my to-do list: one that names and shames spyware developers who create these commits. Git blame writ large.
I think it's worth looking at purely for the interesting type system and other language features. These tend to help you when using other languages.
(in 2 patients, one of which was given multiple treatments at the same time)

Very optimistic headline.
Any UNIX clone that decides to have other languages alongside C on their internals is welcomed news,

Ada, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift and yes Rust.
That’s simply false. I really love open-source but to even imply that it is not a ticking bomb of security is just naive.
Swede here. I have a fairly standard Swedish industry vacation. 5 weeks plus ~1.5 week of hours I can take part of days. In addition to that there are also other holidays which I'm not working and doesn't count towards my vacation days.

I usually take 4 weeks in July. Then vacation/time off just before Christmas until a week after New Year.

I have friends who instead of increased salary have asked for more vacation weeks, and have now 7 weeks of vacation. And they use it every year.
Politics is inherent to any system comprised of human beings. There is no avoiding it and it always plays a big role.
People to want to have some measurable impact on the world. Some of those same people also feel powerless to effect change, through socially acceptable means. Couple that desperation with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, and you have someone who just wants to be noticed by the world, regardless of any negative consequences. People also love to be part of a group - and for the same reasons, they don't care if that group is a harassment campaign.

They will read this thread and think "hey, I helped do that!", and get a small buzz - just like most of us feel if one of our own projects is featured on HN.

They know it's "not okay", but they just don't care.

This is a massive oversimplification, but I think it goes some way to explain why these sorts of things happen.
If that's the case, why would anyone bother with an opt out?

Anyway, out here in the real world, there's legislation that forbids opt-out tracking.
It's not tyranny, and nobody is having their life threatened. It's harmless (though very annoying, of course) fun by bored internet strangers.

It's very difficult for me to understand how someone could read this situation so seriously - have you never been/observed teenage boys in their natural habitat?

These are not the people destroying lives by having people fired, ostracised, banned and depersoned over social or political facts and opinions.
This is true for some jobs, but not for 'specialised' roles like game dev, systems dev, robotics, etc. There is an escape!
See the docs here for a better description than I can write: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/cli-wrangler/comma...

Basically your dev environment runs in the cloud on Cloudflare, then opens a mini browser - within your browser - (with it's own dev tools) for you to send HTTP requests to the dev environment.
It is a little bit bogus, I did not say that I stand by it or that I think that this is the WAY. I'm not even a Linux developer or a kernel dev, though I've done embedded programming at the beginning of my career. Just that if we won't take risks, we will never know whether the approach of Rust or Zig or just plain-old C would prove to be THE approach to systems programming. Besides fragmentation, how else can you harm what we already have? I believe the ecosystems fix themselves, if you offer to the developer three choices (in our case C, Zig, Rust), we will see how things pan out and we will have a clearer picture. Java did not become the language of Fortune 500 companies out of sheer luck, people simply chose it more often than its counterparts because the feedback was positive. I expect the same in systems programming.
I do wonder what the environmental impact of doing it like this is. The embodied energy and materials used for all these structures and robots, as well as the energy to keep them running.

My immediate guess is that it adds a significant overhead to the products, but I really don't know.
I have a lot of anecdotes. The thing that tricked my brain was a project I /really/ enjoyed. I could hit flow state working on it pretty often, even as a heavily distracted teenager. This led to me prioritizing a lot of things about software dev in my 20s. Not “follow your passion” but find something really engrossing. It can be hard. But seriously start buying and reading well reviewed book on ADHD, there is so much better knowledge about managing it these days than when I was a kid. Just understanding the problem at a neurological level can help you build strategies to deal with it. You won’t ever find a magical cure, other than medication, but that’s another discussion. You probably will find ways to win, even if it’s a ugly fight.
Dont hold back...
I think Mercedes is still Mercedes of cars?
I merely pointed out how often the word Rust was mentioned
Ask HN: Webapp with tiny rotating colorful shapes, able to detect scotoma
I recently (possibly via HN?) came across a random webpage (mostly informal/ personal-blog-like in nature, as I recall), which was demonstrating a nice pattern made up of tiny colourful rotating shapes. I think this was a javascript-d3 applet (I think --- I remember it was not just an image or video, it had to load the 'applet' ... but I'm not sure. It may also have been python code that one would have to download and run ...)

I don't remember if the page specifically mentioned the word 'scotoma' per se, but I remember the author hinted that this pattern was really good for detecting it, and it really was! I could see my own scotoma boundaries extremely clearly. First time it was so clear.

I have seen other things that enable me to visualise it (e.g. the black-white-squares test mentioned here: https://forum.mssociety.org.uk/t/how-to-see-a-scotoma/1980), but these are nowhere near as clear as that page was.

I was wondering if anybody knows the page I'm talking about and could link to it here?
Nordic countries endure heatwave as Lapland records hottest day since 1914
How does OSSU compare to https://teachyourselfcs.com/ ? I just started the latter.
The answer should be to educate the people. Judging the progress in the ML research, it is a lost battle trying to "protect" people from propaganda/misinformation. And i don't trust the indian authorities to do it right seeing how opaque the whole system is.
Of course, developers could say "Actually it's crash reporting, not tracking" or "Actually it's version checking, not tracking", so idk.
I was interested in Elixir and Phoenix, but as I am working as a PHP dev (with JS for the frontend), I decided to only learn technologies that I might one day use in my workplace.

So I'm learning Dart and Flutter. Flutter (which uses Dart), now has some full support for web in its latest version, so it's a real possibility I might get to propose we create some front end parts of our app in Flutter web, and even suggest we adopt it for the mobile version of our product.

We are going to do some kind of mobile version, but are currently thinking about a PWA using either React or Vue.

Apart from that, I really need to improve my knowledge of PHP design patterns.
Calling anything and everything “just anecdotes” is HN’s favorite way of dismissing your arguments.
Some variant on this seems likely. I know someone who is something of an industry name and he got hired at Google. His working remotely was tolerated--until it wasn't and he ended up leaving.

It certainly sounds as if OP moving to Portland was the proximate issue which he either couldn't resolve or he just decided that he couldn't be bothered to seriously try to resolve it. There are times when you're half ready to move on and a bump in the road can be all it takes.
Huh, the second sentence of the article made me doubt how good it is...

> Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus [...]

To be pedantic: No, lady, Covid is the disease, and the virus is SARS-CoV-2. Like AIDS and HIV (disease and virus respectively).

It's a little thing, but accuracy in journalism is still important (or is it just me?).