skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are very good points. I'd add that herd immunity isn't a clearly defined threshold, either. It's the point at which the effective R in a population is < 1 -- AKA exponential decay. With a circulating virus, depending on how much below 1 you get, exponential decay might take a few months or even a few years to get down to elimination.

The current dip in the UK is trending toward the former. But it's further complicated by the fact that levels of immunity in the population will continue to oscillate up and down. (Nevermind that once schools open in September, 20% of the population with relatively sparse vaccination will be mixing in large cohorts).

Another factor in herd immunity is vaccine efficacy - which is somewhere between 86% and 95% for the mRNA vaccines (and will continue to change). A herd immunity threshold of 90% presupposes a vaccine with 100% efficacy - when your vaccines are not that effective (not to mention, losing effectiveness over time) it bumps the threshold even higher.

Right now, much of the population has some level of "sterilising immunity" from the first round of vaccines and previous infection (i.e. having enough circulating antibodies to potentially block symptomatic infection and transmission). But everything we know about existing respiratory viruses (and indications so far this year) suggest antibodies will wane.

Of course, indications are most people will come away with robust cell-based immunity. (Those plucky T-cells and B-cells). But eradication for the UK looks *very* close to impossible given the near-total-abandonment of public health measures recently.
I love Trondheim! Gorgeous city
Pithy response: Tell that to the Uyghur Muslims? Are they not Chinese people?

More serious response: I don’t want to live under a dictatorship where a generational change could lead to corruption and suffering on a much bigger scale. I think America as a project might also be lost and we should consider if this crazy idea (democracy, freedom of religion, free speech etc.) is worth fighting for. I think it is and I believe in the values that the US has, despite some very obvious mistakes America isn’t ethnic cleansing Muslims or having a press that can’t criticise the government. I will bet on America not because China won’t win but because I still believe the (relative) peace and prosperity of the post war period isn’t worth throwing away as easily as some want. We need someone focused on this in a clear way and to get Americans stop arguing amongst themselves and look at the bigger picture.
> They dwarf everything put into space exploration

If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.

Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.

What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.

SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.

> a bit of critical thinking

Indeed.
For me, the idea of needing to fill the time is one of the symptoms of the problem. Empty time is perfectly fine.
Hahaha, first of all, thanks for reading <3

To clarify a bit, our original pitch turned out to not be a good idea, and we pivoted, so you got that one right on the money. We learned this from pitching more than a hundred shops. However, there was 1 thing that stood out as useful to the few companies that saw past our non-existent sales experience, which was the API shown here. So we unwrapped our tech stack and opened this API.

We think its really cool, but everyone loves their ugly child, so we're showing it here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If that extra millimeter went to extra battery capacity, it would give an extra day of life to the phone. I would appreciate it more than just a flush back.
I find immutability way more important.

I don't pick Clojure for its dynamic typing, I pick it for other reasons. I've tried Haskell but it really doesn't seem to mesh with the way I tend to develop a program. But I would love to have more static languages with the pervasive immutability of Clojure.
> What qualities does a human have that a pig or dog does not?

But... the quality that the human is human and the pig is a pig? What else? Why does this even need to be asked, I don't understand. Isn't it obvious?
There's a lot of "we only have humans for our definition" or "we only have Earth life" but I think these comments miss a lot. Let's really break down what we would expect to see in intelligent and comparable (or even more advanced) life from extraterrestrials.

We know they have to use tools. You might point to crows, dolphins, or others and note that they use tools. But they don't in the same way that apes do. We're much better equipped to manipulate objects by using hands than using a mouth. Tentacles might be a better comparison but actually fingers allow for a lot of fine manipulation. Though I'm sure octopi could make tools that better work for them there's some mechanical reasons to believe hands are better. I mean there's the fractal nature of an arm helps with fine manipulation.

We know there's things like milk that help impart high nutrient content diets to young and there are correlations between lactate and fat to brain mass. We know this is a more efficient delivery system than say what birds to: eat, per-digest, and regurgitate. We actually expend a lot of energy to create milk.

These are just two (very incomplete and naive) examples, but what I'm trying to say is that not all options are equally likely. Maybe it won't be a hand. Maybe it'll be a tentacle with fractaling appendages (personally I wouldn't expect this because such a system is more complex) but I wouldn't expect something with (non-vestigial) wings, especially like a bat wing. Membranes can be easily punctured when working with objects and makes it hard to reach into confined spaces because of the necessity for large surface area to be able to fly.

So while yes, we only have Earth as a reference point we also have a lot of physics, biology, evolutionary pressures, game theory, and an understanding of tools and mechanics to lean on as well. I do think this does provide some restrictions to what is likely. _Not everything is on the table or equally likely._ I don't think it's naive to think that we have some good ideas of some basic characteristics that alien life would look like (we can apply similar ideas to non-highly intelligent life). I think it's naive to believe that anything is possible. These are claims that "sound smart" but are very naive and actually demonstrate a lack of basic knowledge.

So can we stop pretending like astrobiologists are idiots and haven't thought about this stuff? I don't know about you but I trust them more than I trust myself. They've spent significantly more time thinking about these things and have a far better background than us (except the handful of biologists and astrobiologists that are here).
> Could we even recognize them as alive, much less intelligent?

If we focus on recognizable features, we may look for organisms with self-replication skills (a feature of living organisms) and prediction skills (a feature of intelligent organisms).

On the intelligence aspect, the skill to predict the future in general, and imminent threats in particular is useful for structured organisms less resistant than rocks to survive. On that matter I wonder, do unicellular organisms on earth have prediction skills?

What also helped those fragile structures to continue existing along rocks after a long time might be their ability to replicate themselves before being destroyed. Reproductive skills might actually be the first interesting feature to look for in extraterrestrial organized structures.
And how is your example even relevant to a war from a deep pre-Internet era? What about WWII? What about Desert Storm? There is absolutely no guarantee that your adversary does not outplay you in internet cat and mouse games right from the start, like this recent disastrous scenario shows: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl...

And then what? If we think future wars will be won by hackers in hoodies, it's our funeral. An out-of-control hacking war will have to escalate to bare metal war. People will want to see explosions on TV, as they lose power and are unable to gas up their cars.
I agree that the prospect is ludicrous. Hoping for potential of privacy from an ad-tech giant. Nonsense.
This is exactly why I hate the name "Open" Banking.
They added an index to a table getting very active flow of writes. It would be very interesting to see the write performance change too, so the picture would be more balanced.
With free capital markets, the stewards of that capital are ostensibly responsible to the consumers that generate its revenue. Jeff Bezos can afford to dally in space exploration, but if he fails to appoint a capable successor CEO for Amazon, then eventually consumers will go elsewhere, the value of Amazon stock will fall to zero, and he won't be able to afford his pet projects anymore. Hence there's an ultimate check on his ability to "vote with his dollars", even though he has hundreds of billions of them.

A further productive update to your worldview might be "The degree of centralization of power is proportional to how far out of equilibrium a market can get." This doesn't just function at the macro level (i.e. Google/Facebook/Bezos being able to horribly misallocate capital based on their past successes). It also explains things like bad executives within a corporation: because decision-making is centralized and the results of a decision won't be seen for years, a bad executive can waste billions of dollars and thousands of man-years, but ultimately they're going to get kicked out (or the company goes bankrupt) and the organization will return to market norms. This is also one reason for the liquidity premium (and hence high compensation) for executives: since the consequences of a bad hire are so bad and so future-loaded, companies tend to be overcautious in their hiring, which means only people with excellent pedigrees are considered and they can demand a premium for it.

Also very relevant to historical China, which had this habit of centralizing extreme power with the emperor. Things would go great if you had a good emperor. But occasionally they'd make a blunder (like the cessation of the Ming treasure fleets) that profoundly altered the course of human history. The European powers had much more decentralized decision-making. When Columbus was turned down by the kings of England, France, and Portugal, he tried Spain, and the rest is history.
I definitely did, but I'm fairly certain that is not driving large-scale theft of tools from Home Depot.
You might care if you were married and using OKCupid to find a girlfriend.

You may say that getting exposed for trying to have an affair is a good thing, but that's a still a reason why someone may care how secure their OKCupid activity is.
A day later, but I wanted to tell you: this is a really good point, and stuck with me since I read it.
We don't really know how much memory Java needs on this benchmark. The JVM will use as much memory as you give it. Its viewpoint is, if you tell me I can use 300mb then I'll just not do any GC work until I've used 300mb. Why work harder?

To know how much memory you really need, you'd need to keep shrinking the Xmx max heap size setting until performance becomes unacceptably poor. However, that isn't done here.
If the money comes from listeners (and most of it does) then they are beholden to listeners. It's quite different than being beholden to companies.
Yes! It's true wind, and solar especially, have a small carbon footprint associated with production, but our process is carbon negative enough to more than compensate for it
> What I miss more than anything else is having an attention span.

I need to look for more examples of the art of the future. The one paragraph short story (4chan greentexts I guess), the 20 second hit single.
I've been recently thinking about desalinization and what people could do with the excess salt rather than re-releasing it. It makes me wonder if you couldn't bake the salt into cement thereby killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Well, in terms of whatever the current Overton Window is, that's probably true.

But if you view "left", "right" and "center" as having slightly more absolute definitions than the constantly shifting Overton Window, it's not really the same. "pro status quo" in an authoritarian fascist regime would not correspond to "center" on this absolute scale, even if in the context of that society, it might be roughly in the middle of the OW.
If this is actually true (because it has nothing to do with Open Banking), how does this comply with the GDPR?
> its a combination of "It's time to stop with fear, uncertainty and doubt, and deal with facts" followed by unsubstantiated "compelling evidence that children are at greater risk from the vaccines than the virus."

The links I provided -- particularly the last three -- document the points I made regarding relative risk. You just have to read them.
The term "vogon" has also gained some popularity to describe this archetype, in addition to the UK term "jobsworth".
We're currently driving it up in a van from Southampton!
I have no idea if OkCupid still does this, but they used to segment their users based on attractiveness ratings. At first, I think it was solely just literally your attractiveness rating. They had a feature where you could rate people 1-5 stars and if you were in the top 50% of all rated users, you'd only see other people in the top 50% in your search results. If you were lower 50%, you'd only see people in the lower 50%. I think they eventually made this more sophisticated by augmenting the explicit average star rating with other measures of engagement like how often people saved your profile, how many messages you received, and the rate at which your own messages were answered.

Something like this could have been valuable to get you into the upper tier.
> Wasn't the rise of fascism in Germany directly caused by crippling and humiliating terms levied at Versailles

No. That, along with the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Italian fascism, and...was among the indirect causes.
Use a modern bank like Monzo or Starling and they'll allow you to access their API directly without having either an AISP license or using a gatekeeper like TrueLayer.
> type systems are totally unable to express algorithms

You don't know much about types if you think that.

As for dynamic typing "helping" you to find code that you need to write tests for: There are already far more sophisticated static analysis tools to measure code coverage.
Jobsworth.
> Bitcoin is considered anti-fragile for a reason, it gets stronger as it gets attacked.

Please explain how bitcoin gets stronger when the Fed successfully deploys a 51% attack on it and either buys or puts out of business all the honest miners?
Well, no.

China is food-safe in calories. Not in dollars, because China produces less expensive food than they import.

While yes the raw materials are currently imported from Australia, in war-time they would be imported from Russia and Central Asia. Preparations are being made right now to facilitate this.

China is also #4 in iron ore reserves, they just aren't as economical as Australia's. Of course that doesn't matter much in wartime.
How do we not have a way to predict leap seconds?
I just had a phone screen with them last week!
Remote is possible, but unlikely. Their office is next to the Crystal City metro station on the blue line.
Fugue, Inc | Junior and Senior Engineers | Full time | Remote
www.fugue.co/careers

Engineering at Fugue is part of our Product team. We’re a friendly, small, and nimble group of experienced engineers who are having a great time building and scaling the Fugue SaaS. We care about cloud security and helping our customers find and fix security vulnerabilities. We find a lot of satisfaction in working with incredibly considerate, collaborative, and curious teammates.

Preferred:
-Knowledge of web technologies and Linux proficiency
-Familiarity with Python or Go
-Proven track record of problem solving and helping ship software products
-Experience with deploying infrastructure or applications in AWS
-Experience or interest in cloud engineering and cloud security
-Proficiency with automated testing and CI/CD
https://www.diariovasco.com/sociedad/salud/euskadi-vacunados...
Palo Alto Networks - Unit 42 | Principal Security Automation Engineer | Full-Time | Remote | https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/

We are looking for a principal level engineer with experience in React and Python to work on the Unit 42 Engineering organization inside Palo Alto Networks. Day to day, the candidate will help build the tools/services that Palo Alto Networks researchers rely on to better understand threats and help them collaborate across our products. We are looking for someone with strong React skills, who feels at home working with REST APIs.

Some of our technology stack:

- Python (API/backend/clients)

- JS (React)

- Kubernetes

- GCP

- GitLab CI

Some no BS reasons you would want to work on the Unit42 Engineering org:

1) We are an internal team helping researchers across Palo Alto Networks find and squish threats to our customers and the internet as a whole

2) If you are interested in security work, there is an incredible diversity of talent on the team and a deep rooted culture of sharing knowledge

3) You get to work with really interesting data and there are always interesting engineering challenges to be solved

More information about the job:

Principal Security Automation Engineer - https://jobs.paloaltonetworks.com/job/13435047/principal-sec...
Joke's on you. When you eat a mushroom, you eat the fruiting body of the fungus. The mycellium is the real organism, and lives on just fine.
All intiatives worth doing. Can't tackle this problem from too many angles at this stage. Alternative reinforcement would be compatibel with our solution in any case
It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of exploration actually.

We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage.

I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
> Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing.

Indeed.

> The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves

This sounds like an excuse that would work for almost any kind of dehumanization.
I don’t understand if this is an actual bug.

I have heard that the timing on gps is somehow delivered as weeks and that the bitsize of the variable keeping track of the weeks is to small. So every now and then the weeks reset and this is managed through overrides in the clients. Is this bug not just referencing that thing, the override of the week rollover?
I don’t think a new state can ethically be created without a democratic choice to do so by the existing population of a region.

I think a humanitarian route would be to lobby for open immigration in existing democracies. For instance, I think we all would have been a lot better off if instead of creating the state of Israel, we offered US citizenship to anyone who needed it after WWII. I’m also a proponent of a modern day open border policy for the US (where I’m a citizen).
Do you have a more effective system in mind?
This is absolutely true but if you pay attention you can save money. Make a cheap lunch for work, gift bag for a birthday, quick emergency repair but just as much you see people spending 30 bucks on a bucket load of crap. Its really on the consumers shoulders to maximize the utility of their retail options. But that takes time and effort and all of us only have so much if any effort to give. I mean is it better to spend ten minutes to save a dollar or save ten minutes and spend an extra dollar?
Thanks, will keep you in mind! Watch out for posts on Work at a Start-up for when we expand our team in the next few months
I think we have to consider the possibility (most likely), that the advanced versions of these lifeforms are much further along the evolutionary tree than we are. They might have evolved like us, but continued evolving and now look nothing like us.
The news that is pushed to you nowadays is already increasingly donor funded. The last 10 years, the tech elite have purchased many sense making media. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. The New Republic is owned by Chris Hughes. The Intercept is owned by Pierre Omidyar.

The narrowing and shifting of the Overton window is precisely due to donor funded journalism. It is just a reflection of the underlying shift in power in the society and economy as a whole.

Public news being dull is actually really bad. It means that there is no real debate. You are being fed what to think.
That's true most of the time. Where it falls down is in cases where it's not "we".

There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration.

There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing.

You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.
Vue.js is Wikimedia Foundation's future JavaScript framework
China is never going to attempt to do such a stupid thing as invade Australia thousands of kilometers away for resources.

It's much simpler, cheaper and faster to simply import the ores via land from Asia. Which is one of the core reasons for the BRI.
I'm using quad9 as the dns resolver and it's blocking you---tube domain as malicious :(
a dozen out of millions of species is not "pretty common"
Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.
He wrote this around the same time that he kindly reviewed and gave me comments on the first edition of my Java AI book. A year later we had lunch: I was using Common Lisp and Java for my work and I think that Peter was mostly using Python by then.

Which programming language you choose really doesn't matter very much. Since 1982 Common Lisp has been my favorite language, but I have recently learned to also love Swift.
Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure?

The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.

When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
How to Cheat in an Argument
> Earth lifetime is nothing on the grand scale of things.

Nit: Isn't the estimated age of the universe 14 billion and earth 4.5 billion? I wouldn't call that nothing.