skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Useful overview for the UK.[1] This is the Financial Times chart of cases and deaths by state and country, updated daily since early 2020. Things to notice:

* UK cases spike. They go from 3 cases per 100K people in May to 71 cases per 100K in mid-July. That's the increased R0 of the Delta variant in action. Now they're declining rapidly, down to 39 cases per 100K people. Keep watching that graph; that shows herd immunity starting to take effect.

* US cases are way up, too, but started later than in the UK. The US curve is still going up, following the UK curve, but about a month behind. That's why medical authorities are saying the next two months will be really bad in the US.

* The US has about the same case rate as Tunisia, but a far lower death rate. Without good medical care, this is a killer disease.

[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
The continuous aggregates portion of this blog (along with the breakdown of Transition, Combine, and Final Functions) reminded me of "A Theory of Changes for Higher-Order Languages: Incrementalizing Lambda-Calculi by Static Differentiation" (Giarrusso et. al.) [0].

Particularly the part of getting logically-consistent results via different routes of computation. David Kohn says this in the blog post: "But, you have to have in-depth (and sometimes rather arcane) knowledge about each aggregate’s internals to know which ones meet the above criteria – and therefore, which ones you can re-aggregate."

I think Giarrusso addresses the internal requirements in a precise mathematical manner (though I may be wrong). Giarrusso Section 2.1 is the specific area I'm thinking, particularly Definition 2.1 and then later the discussion of the abelian group where certain binary operations must be commutative and associative. Giarrusso Equation 1 in the introducton defines externally what it means to be logically consistent.

Also, Giarrusso talks about "Self-Maintainability" where updating the continuous result only needs to look at the changes to the input. What was obvious to me from reading Giarrusso was that something simple like "AVG" is not self-maintainable unless you keep the intermediate state (sum and count) seperately. Kohn's distinction of Transition Function, Combine Function, and Final Function - together with Giarrusso's abelian group and change structure - is kind of a big deal in making arbitrary functions "continuous"-capable while being "self-maintainable".

I can see designing a [data] structure that adheres to the specific algabraic laws defined by Giarrusso's abelian group along with the 3 functions from Kohn (missing from Giarrusso). You can then feed this structure to a function that spits out two new functions for you: a normal function that can be used to calculate a result, and it's "continuous" version which only needs change to the inputs. For example, "avg()" and "avg_continuous()" can be automatically derived from a data structure of algebraically well-behaved operations.

Plus this would have a really cool Category Theory diagram for it!

David: absolutely love the animated gifs and pictures. Very well written indeed.

[0] Giarrusso et. al. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269126515_A_theory_...
So you've reversed your earlier position and now admit that it is normal and reasonable for most people to delegate this work? You can call it “the community” but it's still delegation.
Here are some draft guidelines for validation that have been translated a lot: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/discussion-of-new-guidelines...

But you are right, the process has some flaws. Maybe we can review the dataset automatically on some common errors, once an STT system is ready for a language?

The only other option I can think about is a validation process that includes more people per sentence. Right now, only two people validate a sentence, and if they disagree a third person decides. We could at least double check sentences with one "no" vote one more time.
Can you sue your employer if you get covid from a colleague and they didn’t mandate vaccinations (but did mandate return to office and your employment would be terminated otherwise)? IANAL.
"Nynorsk" is correct, no non-ASCII shenanigans in that word :)
You may have paid for the phone, but you are not its owner - it answers to a different master.
There's also this distressing hump in the money/happiness curve. More money leads to a greater sense of well being up to a point where you meet your basic sufficiency needs, and then, beyond that, the correlation goes inverse.

My guess is that there is a very strong diminishing returns effect to the utility of money, and that, at some point, other effects start to dominate. Perhaps what's happening with health care workers is a case study for what's going on there.
Way to grow your mobile app
a huge part of it is trying to solve / formulate easier versions of the problem, or problems that are similar or related to the original problem. Or making some stronger assumptions to get rid of the clutter / all of the moving variables and distill it down to the smallest form a human brain can handle! For many of the "huge" unsolved problems, there tends to be a program of "dominos" or "ledges" you hope to work on in some order that will make the original problem fall.

that way you don't just meander idolly from day to day, but instead gain some intuition for the central problem (and of course have publishable work to appease the grant gods / the university).

trying to code up some of the work to experiment is also useful, but that can be a research problem of its own :-)
I’m all for free markets but tired of that “private company” argument.

Most of humanity’s life essences are “stored” on private company clouds.

It’s 2021, we need new laws for a new world.
Yup good catch about the old source, I removed that from my comment.

The source provided by animats puts the seroprevalence at 21.6% for the U.S. I think that should be a lower bound of the number of individuals who have been infected, given antibody levels wane over time (even though immunity does not necessarily wane).
Not exactly. My advisor, an experienced researcher who already knew what I was writing about, missed an important thing that I said. That meant I failed to communicate something to a very sympathetic reader. That's a big miss. From that, I learned that if something is important, find multiple ways to say it in multiple places.

I only really know academic computer science papers, and even then, papers that tend to have a systems component. Your most important claims, conclusions and results should be stated in your abstract and introduction. Some things are fundamental enough to repeat in your design/analysis and results, and some others will only end up in one of those sections. Don't use the same literal sentence, over-and-over, but reinforce important sentiments. If restating something all over your paper doesn't feel right, then it may not be as important as you think it is.

Academic papers are not novels, and they certainly are not mysteries. Don't hold out on a reveal until the end: say the most important stuff upfront. People often will not read your paper end-to-end, and usually only some of the sections. It's not possible to make your sections truly self-contained, but it's worth repeating fundamental things. If your experimental results are confirming your theoretical analysis, restate that theoretical result in your experimental results as context. If your experimental results demonstrate that a particular design decision you made in your system truly does provide better performance, restate that design decision.
> I don't believe herd immunity is any more possible than herd immunity with the flu or common cold.

This seems to me to be a very strange thing to say.

We know precisely what the pattern is for herd immunity in the case of a coronavirus, because four of them cause what you are calling a "common cold". It's endemic equilibrium. To my knowledge, there is no dispute among experts on this point.

So to say that we can't achieve herd immunity because of its similarity to a virus against which we are indeed herd immune is, at best, begging the question.

If you have six minutes, this is a very acute description of the endemic equilibrium effect of herd immunity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsmDJYhteQs
I’m sorry to say I agree. I was hoping Affinity could offer a real alternative to Adobe, and for a while it seemed like they would. But in the last several years it really seems like they have stagnated. Sure they put our Publisher, but it just feels like they can barely focus on one thing at a time. Photo and Designer were left stagnate in that time, especially on iPad.
It really feels like Affinity does not dog food the iPad apps where UI bugs and awkwardness have persisted for years. E.g. They use a radial slider UI element in a lot of places (e.g. representing 0-100% of some blur effect) that is just awkward as hell to use. The element is circular but you can't move your finger in a circular pattern to change it like you would if it was a knob or slider on a physical circular track. Instead dragging from left to right or bottom to top will increase the value. This leads to the user having to remember to drag from bottom right to top left. Otherwise if you drag from bottom to top, but also move slightly from right to left, the two behaviors fight each other and what happens is undefined.

As you said there also haven’t been many feature improvements over the years. While I don’t expect complete feature parity with Adobe, the gaps between the apps and their Adobe counterparts seems to have only widened over the years and their is no road map for improvement.

I just hope they don’t turn out like the OmniGroup where an initially strong company with strong software stagnates over years.
Sure, I was responding to the factitious comment above.

When I can use Google or Facebook in any of these languages for 10+ years, it's silly of this project to claim some high moral ground when you can't support some of the most widely spoken languages in the world and stick to languages that hipsters in San Francisco think is cool.
I'm giving up, you just keep conflating the social and the political this is getting tiring! And no, you don't need politics to draw up contracts or have money or a legal framework, that's a thoroughly confused point of view. And yes, politics is exclusively about coercion, because if you can convince somebody to do something voluntarily you don't need politics to make them. Ultimately, all political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Then share these concrete ideas with us all instead of going with, "just make local policies that fix everything".
He did not renounce his citizenship, where are you getting this information?
“Aiming to stack ship on booster today”
I have only had a chance to listen to a small portion of Dr Richard Sackler's deposition and I find it very difficult to believe what I'm hearing. For instance, when questioned about opioid addiction in the 19th and 20th centuries he responded with words to the effect that he was not a student of or wasn't knowledgeable about the history thereof.

One doesn't need to be an historian to know that the 'modern' addiction crisis started around the time of the Civil War when a confluence of factors came together. The first being that many soldiers were injured and that they needed the strongest pain relief available, the second being that around this time the hypodermic needle had just been invented and that opioid administration by this method greatly potentiated the drug's effect and thus the much greater likelihood of a patient to suffer addiction—a fact learned the hard way through terrible circumstances.

The indisputable facts are that many soldiers became addicted to their narcotic painkillers and that these facts were widely known both then and now by both the medical and pharmaceutical professions and the public at large. The fact that the media has been full of such news about opioid addiction for 150 years, one cannot not be unaware of the issues as if one were some kind of modern-day Rip Van Winkle. And for someone in Dr Richard Sackler's position, multiply that knowledge by just about any number you'd like! Even the notion that Sackler wasn't aware or knowledgeable of the facts is outrageously absurd!

The widespread knowledge of the dangers of opioid addiction led eventually to regulation then worldwide treaties on the distribution and trafficking of narcotics etc. which then led to a further tightening of laws in almost every country in the first half of the 20th Century. (It's worth reading the History section of the Wiki on heroin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin. What Dr Sackler is implying that he knew none of this.)

Again, it is inconceivable that a person in Dr Sackler's position did not have at least a skeletal outline of these facts as they would have been a part of any reputable medical or pharmacology course. Even if he skipped every lecture about the dangers of narcotic opioid addiction—heroin, morphine, etc.—then he wouldn't have been able to skip the highly topical and common worldview (of the population, law enforcement, government, etc.) about opioid addiction as it has been a constant thread throughout the media across his life.

I hope for the sake of all Purdue's victims that there are sufficient forces at work with the will, determination and fortitude to expose this farce of a testimony for what it really is.

Listening to this video is hard going and there's lots of it but I'd hope many of you will listen to at least the first half hour or so of it to get a feel for what's happening—that is, how Purdue is trying to dodge and wheedle its way out of what is a huge crime against many thousands of people many of whom are now dead as the consequence.
This has been happening since 2010, https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalke...

>"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls–for example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective. That said, a limited number of people will always need to access these systems if we are to operate them properly–which is why we take any breach so seriously."

>

>— Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President, Engineering, Google

Clearly the process outlined is not working,

>"We tightly restrict employee access through a number of industry leading safeguards, including: limiting access to user data to necessary individuals, requiring a justification to access such data, multi-stage review before access is granted to sensitive data, and monitoring for access anomalies and violations."
Meanwhile, Android Chrome deliberately introduces a ~300 millisecond audio delay to make web games impossible and force game devs to use the Play Store so that Google gets its pound of flesh. The superpowered[1] database has many measurements showing how bad Android is.

Those of you with Android devices can try this ancient web audio demo to see that the issue remains unfixed all these years later, except on certain select premium devices (certain Samsungs, etc.).

https://webaudiodemos.appspot.com/TouchPad/index.html

You should hear sound the instant a rectangle is touched/clicked and you will with a desktop browser but not with most Androids.

Apple also employs dark patterns on iOS Safari to make web games impossible:

1. No full screen. ("But the user wouldn't know how to exit full-screen - unless they buy from the App Store! We also plan to make full screen PWAs impossible because of, like, Reasons and totally not because of our 30% App Store cut!")

2. Slow WebGL and no WebGL 2.0. ("But we need to run extra shader validation security checks every single frame even though we technically only need to do it once up front! But this extra Privacy and Security[TM] is totally unnecessary if you buy from the App Store!")

3. No device motion tilt control. ("Allowing the user to consent to tilt control would violate the user's Privacy and Security[TM] - unless they buy from the App Store!")

4. No JS debug console unless you register an Apple developer account, download 10+ gig Xcode on a Mac-only computer, and ask Apple for authorization to debug javascript on your own freakin iPhone you paid for with your own damn money.

I was forced to give up using "open" web technologies for games and instead go with native code game engines (Godot, Unreal, Unity, ...).

[1] https://superpowered.com/latency
Bill Gates says his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was a huge mistake
Postgres has always prioritized correctness, and more sophisticated datatype and query features ... mysql/mariadb have had more consistent performance and easier/more-flexible replication. I'm thinking about auto-vacuum and logical replication to upgraded versions... I've had much less trouble with mysql/mariadb around these topics many years ago, than I've had with Postgres relatively recently. But also, I don't care so much about fancy data types and query features, I stick to the basics.
I just found that there is an ongoing discussion on a similar article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28075021
I wonder if this will affect AWS re:Invent - meant to be kicking off end of November in person. I expect it would flop if it was just customers and no engineers.
Which, just to do the math out - means that Apple is guaranteed to be cheaper as long as you make less than 12k. That math, of course, ignores platform hosting fees (i.e. Steam/EGS/GoG will take a chunk of profits as well on PC - and I have no idea what console fees are like).

Assuming you're not doing it as a hobby the flat cost is far more economical unless you release a lemon in which case the scaling cost does minimize the losses at least.
We accept Costco taking pictures of you as a condition of entering the store and securing a membership.

The same does not go for random creeps wanting to take close up pictures of a child.
> If I was Unity, I would setup 2 internal game teams. One team building PC & console games, another team building mobile games. Build real games, release them on the app stores, and keep them updated for 2 years. Who cares if they don't make any money, that isn't the point. This is a realistic usage of the engine and it would expose problems that Unity doesn't seem to know about.

The reason Unity doesn't do this is pretty simple, and it's the same reason people get really angry when Amazon begins to manufacture high margin products themselves and pushing other sellers out of the game.

Epic has no qualms with such things, and it seems like there's no end to what they can get away with, so why wouldn't they?
I'm talking from the perspective of a service-owner who handles user-generated content. You typically set up PhotoDNA on two parts of your infrastructure. You scan client-side and refuse uploads to prevent the images from getting on your servers in the first place and then you scan on the backend to catch anything that slipped through. You do the first part so you don't have to call the FBI.

I really don't care about the semantics of data ownership. If Apple wants to scan photos you upload to iCloud so they don't run into a scandal years down the road that "iCloud is being used to distribute CP" then that's their call.

And to the letter of the law you can't just delete the data if you found CP that one of your customers uploaded without running afoul of mandatory reporting laws.
The real answer is that schools probably should not open at all. They are basically ideal breeding grounds for the virus - kids are gross and spread everything to begin with, plus you have 30 kids sitting in close proximity, communal lunch-halls, crowded hallways, overcrowded bus transportation... and in higher grades you shuffle the contact groups an additional 7x per day as people change classes. It is literally the absolute ideal environment that you would design if you wanted to breed the disease - big groups, shuffled frequently, with no social distancing and kids who probably couldn't execute social distancing anyway.

The short answer is that schools probably should not be open at all. Even with the vaccine, you are talking about a disease that (even in mild cases) is known to cause subtle long-term damage to organs, it's really not a good idea to tempt fate in a growing kid, particularly with the potential for multiple recurring infections over time from different strains.

If you did want to re-open schools safely, you would have to require vaccinations, you would also have to restructure significant parts of the school "experience" - like having classes and bus transportation be significantly smaller and more spaced out, having class groups stay fixed and having teachers move between class groups rather than vice versa, etc. And all of that would be far more expensive - we would need more teachers, more classrooms, more busses, etc.

The reality is we're just throwing kids under the bus to die, because it would be expensive and inconvenient to do it right, and we can't not reopen schools because a lot of people depend on it as daycare and because a lot of people have decided we're "back to normal" regardless of what happens with future variants. Just like people have decided that we're done with masks and they're not putting them back on ever again, regardless of what the CDC says.

Open for business baby.
Sudosysgen, while a number of your assertions would be interesting to debate, they have been very broad and without supporting evidence, which makes any meaningful discussion beyond trading opinions impossible.

Edit- added "meaningful"
Yes! They do fit together very well.

There are plans to do that, I'm not sure the exact timeline, I think it's in the design phase now.

We do already support partitionwise aggregation, and this meshes very well with that, so that you're sending much, much less data back over the network between the data node and access node when you're trying to do things like percentiles. But I agree that continuous aggregate support will be an even bigger win!
You have places like ADX Florence, worst place on Earth, you have the highest absolute numbers of prisoners, you used to execute children,you still execute people, you have long sentences, there are laws like above where even if you are exonerated of a crime, you still kept in prison, you are cruel and your country home to a literal gulag. Your society is merciless, your empathy gone. Please, learn some empathy. Please, turn away from your cruelty.
Doesn't apple upload all your photos to icloud by default?
How are you measuring it? What metric would you like to compare?

My comment does not conflate the two. You’re reaching. Every winter (flu season) exerts extra pressure. It doesn’t take much to push hospitals over the edge.
Thinking Subtractively
> half the products representing it adding some sort of SQL dialect support, which if you think about it is hilarious admission of defeat.

I don't see that as an admission of defeat. I see that as an attempt to provide some of the things that are good about SQL without dragging in the entire hairball of the language. Along the way, by choosing which subset of SQL to emulate the designers get to incorporate programming concepts that have come along since SQL. Things like user-defined ADTs, lambda expressions, and extensibility. Oh wait, LISP had all those before relational algebra was a gleam in the eyes of Date & Codd.
If your hobby becomes successful can’t you then upgrade to pro and port to consoles?
Are you getting the results automatically or manually?
The common use for bitwise I have seen is to represent multiple boolean states in a single variable. It's not required for most people at all. A more descriptive multi-value hash/struct with each state explicitly listed as a boolean will create a more readable code. Unless there's a strong need for memory management or a binary protocol implementation, I don't see a need for it.