skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The pro-disinformation comments here on Hacker News are entirely predictable, yet make me despair for humanity. I'd love a site where bad faith arguments are unwelcome, but heterodox opinions are encouraged, especially when supported with evidence and reasoning.

To stir things up, I'll give an example of such an opinion right now. Health organizations around the world are systematically lying to us about the basic reproduction number (R0) of the delta variant being astronomical (the figure of 8 is now commonly cited). Serious virologists[1] remind us that the evidence for such high estimates is thin and not based on biology; changes in human behavior, combined with antigenic drift (as observed regularly in influenza without the inference of constantly climbing R0 values) can explain what we're seeing.

It is likely that the R0 value is somewhat higher than the ancestral strain, but a value of 8 is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. And that we do not have, in spite of preprints that show higher viral load[2].

I use the word "lying" but it's most likely this is as much self-delusion than a conscious choice to mislead. But the motivation is very strong: the "delta variant is scary" narrative is much more compelling than "Covid is still dangerous," and indeed is likely contributing to increased vaccination rates.

I'll also note that what I just said would likely trip the "misinformation" filters at the big Internet providers, as it contradicts "medically reliable sources" [WP:MEDRS]; these high estimates are being published by major medical and scientific organizations. It is interesting to note, though, that the official info from the CDC[3] is less out there than the astronomical estimates being breathlessly published by the press. The CDC page says "50% increased transmission" for delta, based on a paper from the UK[4]. That might well be true, though it's an observational study. So even on that basis, mainstream public science communication is way ahead of (in the sense of pushing higher R0 values) what would count as MEDRS.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-var...

[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.07.21260122v...

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-i...

[4]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248822v...

[WP:MEDRS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...
If a company isn't allowing remote work, they're voluntarily cutting themselves off from a large portion of the available labor pool.

That's their choice, but they can never again complain about a shortage of talent. Which should affect their ability to participate in work visa programs, for example.
This must suck for people who actually use them.

Ah I see it’s more nuanced - and works to detect homographs whilst permitting pure Chinese (for example).
>Today over 230 cases.

And now let's go to the other side of the world where the "lockdowns don't work" propaganda was shat out as an argument for months:

>29692 new cases for the US on July 31st.

Good job people.
I'm sorry you can't make an argument on return for investment when the military is being organised to roll out the needed vaccinations and the economy is being shutdown due to the outbreak in my mind.
Unless the politicians just don't give a dam about educating the population they're trying to save.

In not suggesting we can ever change 100% of opinions 100% of the time, but open clear communication is the only proper tool for contering misinformation.
Alas we seem to be restoring to the old teachers approach of sit down and shut up or you get the cane for speaking out. Which is damaging for public trust in the long run.
Which is why Google's jscompiler requires a stricter subset of JS for "advanced optimizations" including dead code elimination.
Demonstrably not true. In fact you can refill your Sodastream canister with dry ice, google it. 400 grams of it sure as heck doesn't stay solid and I'm pretty sure it can't be gas at that pressure in that amount of space.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide, you can't slosh it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEr3NxsPTOA
I bought a brother laser printer also and have been using the demo cartridge that came with it for the past three years. It's still printing, and I've printed several books with it.
You’re my new best friend! I now have a Wednesday lunch plan, for like forever. ;)
I'd like that to be true, but if your world experience is different than the general US population things wont work out well for you.
So far the incidence of Delta in Sweden is low, there's no big surprise about the observation.

If Denmark is any guide we'll see more cases in the next few weeks, because the Delta variant has just arrived there. Once Delta is in Sweden, cases will go up there, too.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but a few observations:

1) Starting remote seems tougher than going remote. It’s a bit rough on families but maybe an extended in person onboarding trip is a good compromise.

2) Face to face connections have to be renewed every once in a while. Co-location trips are going to become a cost of being remote, I think.

3) Some people come across badly over video. Not sure if there’s some kind a training and/or technological answer but it’s a problem and if it can’t be solved those people are not going to thrive remote even if everything else lines up.

4) All other things being equal the relationship is always going to be more transactional for remote workers. It’s just human nature to feel closer to people you regularly bump into and eat meals with.

That’s not necessarily a horrible thing in an industry that blurs the line between work and life, but it does mean you need to be on the top of your game in terms of being productive and making sure people know it.
I think a lot of people don't do the thing they want to do for many reasons, but I found this helpful. If nothing else it's good advice to be curious about what's going on inside your head, and not to jump to condemnation. Who knows, maybe it is a simple lack of discipline, but I haven't found that such an assumption brings me closer to the goal, which means that even if it's "right" it's not useful.
Microsoft (or any other company) wants to shut down the activation servers/match making servers/<servers on which the product relies> because it's no longer profitable and the app/game/whatever is no longer profitable?
Please! By all means, go ahead.
But on the way to the shutdown command, if you could please release an official patch so I don't need to visit the piratebay to activate software I've already paid for. That would be much appreciated by those who, for whatever reason, are still using that software.
I'd like to think that positive actions taken by developers to be considerate of customers, even if they are 10+ years old, will be of benefit to them in the future.

I highly doubt many people are running 10 year old software because they refuse to upgrade, rather there's usually something specific about it that wasn't included/built for/whatever in newer versions.
As others have said, it is likely the companies themselves owning giant, expensive, heavily-branded campuses that weren't designed with modularity and reselling in mind.

However, making decisions based on this is a pretty classic sunk-cost fallacy. The cost of continuing to use the campus won't be any higher because it's half-empty.
I wonder when XP will get added to the list of non-activatable software.
Government/science communicators spent the first month of the pandemic denying it ("Taiwan doesn't exist", "border closures are racist"), the next month lying ("masks don't work"), and the next year politically bickering ("Trump's vaccine shouldn't be trusted" before election, "Trump's fault that people don't trust the vaccine" now) and downplaying the "lab leak" scenario that is only now acceptable in mainstream media ("acceptable" as in "not cause of banning").

They dug their own hole (and they keep digging).
Isn't that caused by 0 interest rate mostly?
I disagree that the authors return to wastefulness/consumption is a result of systemic forces. I think it’s more likely the case that when you have a higher rate of income you spend money to convenience yourself and save time/energy because you value your time/energy at that higher rate of income.
Yeah, something like those soccer robot games seems fun.
Depends on the specific country. In some areas, they do sell replacement pads (and there are knockoffs if you don't want it), while in other countries you have to call a service technician.
Here is a bit of a critical read of this blog post, from the point of view of alternative Ruby implementations:

> instead of having to ship an entire language runtime to production

Except they ship the CRuby language runtime in production.
Ruby is not a language that can run without a runtime.

> Not only did we not need Java VM-level interoperability

So they almost discard the entire idea because they don't need a specific additional feature?

> choosing either alternative Ruby implementation would have made for a difficult migration path.

So what is it?

> Stripe relies heavily on gems with native extensions

Yes that's a problem on JRuby (when there is no java extension in that gem), but TruffleRuby supports native extensions, as very clearly stated in many places.

> as you can imagine, a multi-million line Ruby codebase over time starts to depend on Ruby-the-implementation, not just Ruby-the-language.

Except all serious Ruby implementations know they need to be compatible with whatever CRuby does, not just an incomplete ISO specification of the language.
In fact alternative Ruby implementations match CRuby behavior as much as possible for compatibility, even when it seems weird or makes little sense (they report it in this case but have to match behavior anyway).

TruffleRuby might not be 100% compatible with CRuby yet, but I would say it is [pretty close](https://eregon.me/blog/2020/06/27/ruby-spec-compatibility-re...).

> To adopt JRuby or TruffleRuby in Stripe’s most important services, we’d have to be able to run all the code or none of the code [of a service].

Well yes, to get significant performance gains, one needs to try new things.
Don't they have a staging environment where they can do experiments?
The author of the article was eventually diagnosed as dyslexic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Corcoran_(author)
I don’t see why those that want to work remotely need to suppress their needs for those that do not. It’s one thing to have the freedom to choose the option you’re comfortable with, but to force it on those unwilling to so doesn’t seem right.

You’re right that it won’t be the same. We’re past the point where everyone being in the office was the unquestioned norm because we never really tried mass remote work on a large scale. But we have now, and it worked just fine.

Companies and employees need to figure out solutions that don’t involve forcing people to do something they don’t like just to “get back to where we were”.
There are a lot of open source tools that more or less automate the removal of certain protections, especially from games. I "audited" a few myself. I'd link them here but some self righteous bootlicker would probably report it.
Something I've heard (no great sourcing) is that at the very least Olympic staffers/participants who are getting COVID are for the most part Japan-based staffers and the like, and not people who came from abroad.

My gut feeling is that this recent spike is partly the "lockdown rejection" that we saw across the US last year, in particular stuff like trying to ban alcohol sales in restaurants seemed to have really made a lot of people just kind of give up with the state of emergency recommendations.

And like... there aren't any spectators right? The amount of people at the event is maybe comparable to how many people are at a local supermarket in one day.

Not to defend the gov'ts decision to do the olympics, or any of this thing in general. There will probably not be many real consequences to these people, and people are watching it on TV, but it definitely doesn't feel very "state of emergency" and sets the wrong tone for this moment. It's just that this spike doesn't feel single-factor.
Smart Home Dashboard with Home Assistant and Inkplate
Yeah, but you can take the page out of the paper printer safely without gloves.
Good git GUIs (I use SmartGit and love it) do the following:

- use the same terminology as git

- show a log of every command

- default to sane behavior

- ask preferences instead of assuming (ex: rebase or merge?)

- show warnings when doing something destructive or unusual

I've found that I now spend zero time learning and thinking about git anymore, and it also protects our repos from git noobs at the same time.
To be clear, I'm not saying you can't socialize with coworkers; I enjoy that, too. It just shouldn't be someone's only source of nourishment.
Markets and government interact in ways which mix and transcend the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy. Consider freeways.

Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around.

So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power.

Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top.

But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried.

See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.
I made a windows port on github, you can try exploit that.

".//machine:foo/bar/baz" - will it work if the dot is added at the beginning?
Study Finds Surprising Source of Social Influence
It would be an unbelievable scandal if it came out that the U.S. government was forcing all U.S. printer companies to do something like this.
> with everything setup how you want is just a no-brainer.

I had an earlier comment on how those against WFH might change their mind if they had a good chair. It might work in reverse too.

The office might be far less annoying to people if they had a budget for equipment or at least got high quality equipment.
Extracting Objects Recursively with Jq
One step closer to a company town. And makes the prospect of a job change that much more painful.
Why would the real identity requirement be needed?

How would you prove real identity?
What's the term used for tree shaking outside JS?
Do Java or Python or Ruby or PHP do something as advanced as tree shaking?
Having migrated a whole company from Java to JS I know that the JS ecosystem is very large and birthed incredible tools that are lacking in other languages/playgrounds.
webpack is an incredible builder compared to what's available for Java/Kotlin on Android and Swift on iOS.
And webpack just got blown out of the water from esbuild.
So my hypothesis (until proven wrong with links) is that the other languages never really reached the awesomeness in tooling when tree shaking is done.
I think the best open-source graphdb, also used for Amazon Neptune, is blazegraph [1]

For true data interoperability, as opposed to the silo data models required for property graph databases, the RDF w3c standard with SPARQL [2] is the industry standard. The new global API made possible with the Solid project [3] by Tim Berners-lee uses RDF

[1] https://blazegraph.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL and https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/
[3] https://solidproject.org/
The state could already force people under their control to sell commodities to their soldiers for clay tokens. Why switch to gold, a much more difficult resource to obtain and produce coinage with? Was clay suddenly no longer convenient for some handwavey reason because we're now in the Axial Age, despite being used for centuries before? That's the gap in Graebers book that I don't think he covered adequately.

The reason was because now the various city states needed a way to convince people outside their jurisdiction to also provide goods and services for their wars, and those people could not be cowed into using clay. Clay only works within a states jurisdiction because they could punish counterfeits and ensure it's value among subjects as a tax credit to the state. Outside a state's jurisdiction, foreign soldiers have no guarantee that those clay tokens will continue to be a secure store of value. What if the state you were fighting for collapsed tomorrow? Now their tax credits are worthless. Gold, on the other hand, holds it's value because people like shiny things regardless of which king is stamped on it. But because the gold is issued by a state with their tendency for standardization, now your gold trinkets come in nice standardized units instead of a random assortment of jewelry, what gold would have been used for previously.
Alex Salmond trial blogger hands himself in to police
Personally, I don’t consider an employer if remote is not an option.
It gives you a view into how their management thinks about work and that’s important for not just getting things done but long term development.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
I do. Many others too. Or do you see books written on phones, programing being done on phones? Being able to install any program you like? No? Not first class then.

There are many things that can't be done on a phone that are possible on a PC. The reverse case is much harder.
React Native responsive scaling on the web
It's easy to become a periodic newcomer with service tools like Git, especially after an extensive dive into some complex new contexts. Simply speaking, I may forget the exact wording of Git (or other VCS) commands or switches.

However, what really sticks in my memory are the concepts Git implemented. This helps to refresh the operational knowledge rather quickly, well, notes help too.

In my view, 'check-out' as a concept is very much central to VCS as such. So, having a dedicated 'checkout' command which works on both commits/branches and files is quite reasonable - it keeps you in the same conceptual context.

I don't mind the specialized commands, such as 'switch' and 'restore'. But sure enough, I'll forget these wordings or maybe even mix them up with 'reset' or 'revert', ??'undo', yet the 'checkout' command would likely present itself on my command line as it's directly tied to the concept.
Sure, but there also haven't yet been any major collisions in orbit. The risk will increase greatly if the huge number of satellites they proposed ever happens.
Anecdotally no. I'm not sure if it's the ink formulation, or just that when the ink is so cheap you print much more often so the ink doesn't dry up.
"randomly assigned long virtual coffee breaks every week"

Really? As in you and someone else are each assigned a meeting with each other on Zoom (or whatever) at a given time? Would your co-workers not socialize, otherwise? It sounds like it was a positive experience for you, which is great.
As with most posts of this type, it assumes you are neurotypical and not dealing with other issues that compromise executive function.

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just important to point out there is a prerequisite condition that must be met before this advice becomes useful.
I’ve written about this extensively https://www.toptal.com/insights/future-of-work/remote-not-re...

The problem is they built campuses and feel stupid about devaluing them. Combine that with a backwards mindset and, for most companies, the situation becomes clear.

It’s really that simple.
> properly

Or maybe just don't shame people for not working the way you do.
If you are using the git plugin with oh-my-zsh you can type "gsw" and "grs" for "git switch" and "git restore" respectively.
This cuts both ways: people from wealthy countries with high cost of living can never complain about competition from people who will be happy to take 1/4 of their salary to do the same job.
Exactly - different strokes for different folks. Therefore, there is no one size fits all approach. The same was true before the pandemic - 100% in office was not ideal for everyone.

Mature in-office companies - generally larger companies with established business models and median employee tenures of 5+ years - have it the most difficult. Some may have rapidly adjusted during the pandemic. But other in-office companies will not adapt so quickly - people were hired into a certain culture, got used to it, build core processes, systems, workstyles etc. Even if in-office wasn't ideal for them, and it wouldn't have been for all of them, it is ingrained. For those companies, if they choose to go hybrid or remote now because they feel it makes more sense long term, they still may have a multi-year adjustment, and that may include losing some people and gaining others. So, if you are one of those companies, this may represent a massive refactoring type decision and the complex systems between people and processes can be difficult to refactor.

Would love to hear from folks at these types of companies (we have always been remote-first so can't really put ourselves in their shoes) who are successfully pulling off that refactoring.
> wanting to go back to the office to reinvigorate their sense of social participation. But I'm not sure that's something we should be encouraging. (It actually runs counter to the work/life balance problem you mentioned.)

I have seen this multiple times already - overtime and long hours that are largely composed of socialization in disguise or very ineffective work. Mostly serving as a way to fill in void or have someone to talk to.
I think my career overall has been pretty high impact - I ran a team that built new systems from the ground up that were used by a team of 2k store employees to run daily operational tasks, optimizing their performance and ux tremendously, as well as building e-commerce into a website used by half a million people a month.

I still feel the most proud of a little library I made one weekend a few years ago [0], that’s now used all over the place. I get issues and contributions from Latin America, China, Japan, across the US and Europe, and Australia. I’ve done consulting work based on this library. It’s a great feeling to know I built something that others find useful directly and isn’t a tangential thing that was built as part of different business.

[0] https://github.com/lukevp/ESC-POS-.NET — check it out if you have a need to print to receipt printers from C#, and give it a star!
Some more (if less impartial) background: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-07-30/craig-murrays-...
Just because it's called a crypto currency doesn't mean it's seeking to be a currency.
I was actually saying the same thing. I too read that study and was not trying to knock it. My point though was that if we study any of the other conditions this closely, we might see the same things - so it doesn’t make me believe that we’ll see too much novelty in the fallout from COVID because people succumb to then recover from the cold and flu all the time, they’re just not as heavily scrutinized.