skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We just need to recruit and deploy billions of Vampire Spiders!

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/05/m...

>Mosquito-eating vampire spider could be recruited for war on malaria

>Cross says that these arachnids, also known as vampire spiders, “love” feeding on human blood as it gives them an odour that renders them sexually attractive to potential mates.

>But the spiders pose no danger to humans, the researchers say. Even though they like human blood, they lack specialised mouth parts to pierce people’s skin. Instead, to get the nutritious blood meal, the spiders feed on the female mosquitoes that carry blood sucked from humans. “Their compound eyes give them clear eyesight. And just like a cat, they stalk their prey and pounce on them at the right moment,” she says. The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Arachnology, says that the spiders identify female Anopheles mosquitoes through their up-tilted abdomens — a resting posture they adopt after feeding on human blood.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/to-study-...

>To study vampire spiders, build Frankenstein mosquitoes

>They confronted captive spiders with lures built from body parts of dead mosquitoes, which had been glued together in different combinations like miniature Frankenstein’s monsters. The spiders saw two lures at a time, and Nelson noted which they pounced upon. “They are easy-to-handle, patient spiders,” she says. “Being so picky, it means we can ask them questions and get answers regarding their preferences that makes it seem like they answered in English.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evarcha_culicivora

>Evarcha culicivora is a species of jumping spider (family Salticidae) found only around Lake Victoria in Kenya and Uganda.[1] At maturity, E. culicivora spiders have an average size of 5 mm for both males and females. The range in size for either sex is quite small, with females being only slightly larger on average (4-7 mm compared to 3-6 mm).[2]

>It is commonly known as the vampire spider because it indirectly desires the blood of vertebrates. It does this by predating on blood-sucking female mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles, the mosquito responsible for transmitting malaria in the region, as well as other vector-borne diseases in humans.[1] Experimentally, these spiders are considered Anopheles specialists.[3] E. culicivora has an association with the native plants Lantana camara and Ricinus communis. They consume the nectar for food and preferentially use these plants as a location for courtship.[4]
It is not cool
If you lose your house keys, you get a lock smith to break into your house for you - your house doesn't become unusable forever more.

If you ever need to have this done, you'll realise how much house keys and door locks for many cases really only stop the opportunistic "pull the handle and see if it opens" attack. If your door has above average security they'll need to drill the lock, but the time I had to call one they could just push a tool through the letter box and break/move the bolt by applying leverage from the "indoor" side.
Yes, and by asking people to get vaccinated more than 50% of the population did it.

Lets not start pretending that fascism is the only viable path simply because they are the only ones who achieve 100% compliance through killing everyone who steps out of line.
Cartelization is nothing unexpected. Just like governments cut all sorts of deals to form geopolitical blocks, so do leading companies in any industry. It's win-win for them. As for "regulators", they tend to drag their feet for a long time, take even longer to build a case, and after all that time, their action tends to be more show than substance. I wonder why that is.

True decentralization is impossible without drastic change in human nature. We can only replace global powers with smaller, regional powers, or a single power with multiple ones. Despite cartelization it is better than absolute control wielded by one entity.

Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.
Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2 (2008)
Of the problems the advice-seeker’s company has, odds are that simply being a non-profit is the root cause. My wife has worked for several (large and small), and it is distressing how many of them are run as almost anti-profits, resistant to common good business practices out of some weird misunderstanding of what “non-profit” means. It’s been depressing watching so much money and good intentions wasted at these places on boondoggles; I’m not saying that all for-profit businesses are perfect by any means but they at least understand that obviously losing money is generally bad, whereas she’s seen even some quite well-known non-profits be actively resistant to things like trying analyze and optimize the impact of the money they spend. This atmosphere has then given rise to all kinds of weird second-order effects. Unfortunately, that may be the only place they feel they can work on their passion issue, but if not, getting out entirely is their best bet.
The ancient symbol that was hijacked by evil
Thank you for your experience!

And I totally agree. I have had to quit job interviews simply because both sides agreed that while we could work together, we probably would both just have a bad time.

But then I've also worked jobs where in 2020, employees still referred to things they thought were bad as "gay", so that's that.
It sounds like if people do not cut back, then they will do the reasonable thing and prioritize sending oxygen to the hospitals, accepting that this means people's tap water will start smelling sulfurous [EDIT: and maybe need boiling before drinking]

> To reduce demand for liquid oxygen, OUC is asking water customers to immediately limit irrigating their lawns and landscapes. If OUC’s liquid oxygen supplies continue to be depleted and water usage isn’t reduced, water quality may be impacted. -- https://www.ouc.com/water-info
GM expands fire risk recall to cover all Chevy Bolts sold worldwide
"Incapable of integrating"???
The biggest constant here is the attitude to Difference in German Society.
A fellow engineer, of Arabic (Tunisian) origin but raised in Germany, told me that when she was little girl, she was a very good student - including in German language - and on the occasion of her test being the best of her class, an angry colleague said: "they shouldn't have given you a better grade: you're not German!".
Having lived in Germany for 8 years, I got stories like this from immigrants raised in Germany, all the time.
At some point I started to consciously choose my words to make sure there wasn't any bias when I heard the telling of this kind of story when I asked something of the sort: "how was it to grow up in Germany?".
Tech interviews at the highest paying companies are very difficult to be sure. It’s not clear to me that they’re elitist in a negative sense of that phrase.
Embedded is a fuzzy category, specs range from <1kb Ram to the low megabytes. Some people even extend it till low end smartphones and things like raspberry pies which are like gaming PCs by mid 2000s standards.

Lua is extremely lightweight and portable. The interpreter doesn't exceed 500 kb in the fattest build, and the used dialect is a strict subset of ANSI C that is equally comfortable running on mainframes as on Nintendo consoles.

In short : If it has a C compiler and can spare 300 kb ram, it can run Lua. So people sometimes use it there.
What good are top-level functions if they’re unreachable from any script interpreter or management RPC server or other languages’ FFI?
Ok fair, "a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID" may be a bit too much like never-never land over a 10 year period.
https://archive.is/fy4Wf
I don't think this is realistic any more. There's just too much noise, too many chatty processes, too much traffic.

A while ago I tried to track the start of a single application, a new install of Firefox. IIRC the first start generated traffic to about a dozen endpoints.

Also, macOS and Windows generate enormous amounts of traffic (others here have noted that).

The amount of background traffic is simply overwhelming. Perhaps security companies can make sense of it all, but it's far too much for most technical people.

I run my own OpenBSD firewall and I've long since given up trying to understand what my Macbooks are doing.

The beauty of OpenBSD itself is that it starts very few daemons, and all source code is available. So it's easy for me to understand what my firewall is doing.

user@catalina ~ % ps aux |wc -l
542

vs

openbsd_user$ ps aux |wc -l
42
it's an enterprise problem and it's up to the enterprises to find a solution for it. they can hire companies to do a security review and take care of all legal questions...

this is an opportunity for businesses to take FOSS software and vet it for enterprise use.
The more 3D renders in a presentation the more skepticism I develop. I noticed there is a direct leading indicator of a stock's price in relation to the quality of the 3D renders in the company's presentations/PR events. This is of course only anecdotal evidence but I'm pretty sure the hypothesis can hold it's ground against 50% of "ML Papers" today.
The Eye of Providence: The symbol with a secret meaning on the $1 bill
I'm on Windows and it throws an HSTS error for me.
> It makes you feel really bad to see them growing up in such an environment without much chance for a better life. But ultimately this is due to their parents decision to have so many kids, even if they can't afford simple food.

Is it ultimately the fault of the parents, though? It's easy to place to blame on individual parents, but more interesting to study the misses/wrongdoings of the educational system. Schools tend to cast immigrants children on the side very early on, and not even try to teach them anything (their future as low-wage workers for the industry has already been decided), at least it is so here in France and your suggestion that 10 years old children can't speak properly the language used by everyone around them seems to indicate the situation is the same in Germany.

If anything, it's a sign of deep social disintegration on a broader scale, probably due to a mix of institutional racism/classism and public policies aiming to dismantle public services.
I have never switched jobs for more money. It always has been for new challenges, fresh opportunities. Yet each time it turned out to be for more money.

In hindsight, it is obvious. The "efficient markets" hypothesis confirms that doing the same work for a different company is not going to yield a big increment in pay.
Thanks for the insight. At this point in my life I'm interested in WLB, sounds like engineers there may be more likely to be on the younger (in their 20s?) side of things.
> if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated,

Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option.

Either way, from my personal anecdotes, aka friends and family- I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine. These are all younger people that were previously in good health. Given my age, health, and natural immunity- it makes zero sense for me to incur additional risk from the vaccine.
> Usually it's that they're refused the opportunity by being recognisably other and easy to discriminate against in various more or less overt ways.

As someone who works as a volunteer at a refugee center and supports a syrian family i can tell you thats not the case. We have two kinds of "refugees" in germany.

1) Real Refugees, that fear for their life
2) Migrants, that use the opportunity and the political climate to come to germany.

The second ones are the ones causing problems. A lot of them are aggressive, dealing drugs, using multiple identities to get more money. They miss their (provided) german classes and in one center they ripped out all ceramic toilets and sinks MULTIPLE TIMES.
The amount of times i had to call the cops because one of them was drunk and drew a knife is just crazy.

So maybe they are refused integration because they are "recognisably other and easy to discriminate against" ... maybe its just because they behave like assholes.
The libraries are better because they're designed with generics in mind.

Most C# libraries in use today were built after generics were added, and there never was a large ecosystem already developed at the time

Java has had lots of libraries thrown away due to initial lack of generics and a lot of painful migration e.g. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/extra/generics/conve...

A good parallel would be async-await in JS and nodejs. The entire core library and a huge percentage of the ecosystem ended up being really awkward to use after the introduction of async await. The whole ecosystem is now one big giant mess.
I don't see anything wrong with this. GET request should be idempotent, and it protects me from bad actors abusing it to detect when I open an email.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/PWHgd

https://archive.is/QuBpG
It's a complex topic. To really grasp it, you have to follow a long line of effects and consequences. When I try to follow it to search for an ultimate single reason, I end up at "the Euro is to weak for Germany".

Historically there has been a circle of world-leading quality of exports rising the value of the Deutschmark, making it harder for Germany to compete, pushing the need for innovation and investments, creating higher payed jobs, producing world-leading exports again.

Germany had a highly educated labor-force directly integrated into corporate boards and organized in powerful unions. Germany's oldest party SPD was the political arm of those unions, a labor party. Governments where either right-wing (CDU, Angela Merkel's party) or left-wing (SPD) with a third, liberal party (FDP) switching between the two.

In the early 2000s, SPD started a program called "Agenda 2010", liberating the labor market and shattering itself in the process, because it affected its own clientele. They did it as a consequence of Germany being called "the sick man of Europe" in the 90s, because of its economic problems following the unification.

The reforms worked in the sense, that the German economy has been running for years without significant recessions. Unemployment has been steadily declining (pre Corona). But the quality of the economy has been changed. Germany is successfully competing in low-paid areas of the economy (e.g. meat-processing), a country like Germany should not be able to compete within an open European market.

I think in the end, while having some reasonable liberations in it, Agenda 2010 just accomodated for the fact that Germans (and Northern Europe) are now being paid in a currency, that has not enough value for it's economic output.
I'm traveling, so can't properly expand on what I said, but without generics the choice was:

- repeat unnecessary bolierplate code for every single return type

- skip types completely and use a function that accepts interface{} as a parameter and assigns whatever to that variable

Neither are really acceptable in my opinion. And both will be greatly simplified and improved by generics.
You've just explained it yourself: there may not be enough code and/or working features.
Tell that to my friend BASIC
Did you try to click the link to continue reading the thread?

That’s what fails for me.
I've been in a similar situation.

I can tell you that many people left, and after years small groups of former co-workers formed at various other companies.
The Brain/Mind Distinction
This looks vaguely interesting, but it's not quite clear how exactly how it works and what exactly it does. The website is a bit better than the readme, but even I didn't get a good sense of how exactly it is used, couldn't find documentation, how it's specific to bots, ...

I suggest adding a clear link to code docs (Sorry if I missed it!) and a more specific example of "do X", "look here", "that's what it looks like" flow.
"What's the da Vinci version of steampunk called?"

Clockpunk.
I guess it also depends on who and how, some people don't have a strong immune system, but it might be good as always to fix issues at the source with different lifestyles, regular contact with nature, with better organic local and not tranformed food, that we are naturally adapted to assimilate. That definitely boost your immune system, that's something you can experiment yourself. Surely a good time to start these changes at scale with climate changes issues. Currently I don't think many people have a good health https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/p7lhwq/prooportion_...
If you look back at just HN anecdotes from past threads. The majority of people talk about never paying anything. On any platform. Since again, I was only talking about iOS in my post. But Android “charged” after a year too. So pointing out Android doesn’t change anything
Why would "assimilation" be a goal? Of course giving children opportunity to learn (including the local language) is good, but pretending a single culture and way of life needs to be shared among everyone is an imperialist construct.

Not everyone born to a land shares the same culture. There are huge cultural shifts between faiths and political sides, for example, and it's not a problem. A society that is not multicultural has a settler's mentality which is profoundly racist.

For example here in France, at the same time the colonial process aimed to destroy local cultures in the colonies in Algeria/Indochine/etc, public schools were used as a weapon to destroy the local cultures and languages in Bretagne, Alsace, Occitanie, etc... A few generations of beating children who spoke their native tongue, suggesting that french was a somehow superior language (and assimulation was a requirement), was enough to annihilate most local cultures.

EDIT: I also don't understand why "reliance on safety net" would be a bad thing. There's a reason such mechanisms are in place, and one's contribution to society can hardly be measured in purely economic terms.
> I find that admirable ... also very naive.

That's quite harsh. Empathy and social bonding is normal and healthy.

Yes, there are a lot of hypercompetitive working environments that train workers to see each other as contenders and encourage cynicism. It also depends on country you are it.

But please don't assume it's the norm across all organizations (companies, no-profits, academia...).
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/yqPEe

https://archive.is/InAr0
Can’t believe BBC has sunk this low. Goes to show even public broadcasters have to chase eyeballs today
In most places other than California, the problem of greedy politicians who raise taxes and spend the money on corruption and crap is to vote out the politicians. If you feel unsafe at tax time, your elected leaders should feel unsafe on election day.

It's really telling that Californians instead passed a terrible market-distorting ballot measure (which incentives hedge funds to buy properties to avoid the tax being readjusted again and pushes up prices so that nobody other than a hedge fund could afford them). If you're worried about affordability of houses, prop 13 (combined with NIMBYism and restrictive zoning laws in cities) is one of the main reasons why they are unaffordable.

It sounds like it didn't even register to Californians that maybe they should have voted for the other guy for a little while.
Attila Vrabecz and the k group of programming languages
DNS alias mode (2020)
It is highly unusual for a show HN to be full of nothing but positive comments from new accounts, all not only saying it is great but knowing the competitive landscape. I'm not saying that you 100% are filling this post with your own marketing - it could be coincidence, but it doesn't look like honest conversation.
I kind of understand what this article is getting at, but the drama over masks isn't because it's the only thing schools and medical professionals are pushing for, the drama is because of the push back. That push back is focused on masks, but is also representative of taking any aspect of Covid seriously. There is back-and-forth over even informing parents if there's a positive case in their school, or having any sort of contact tracing or quarantine, or testing or sending symptomatic kids home. The article seems to assume there aren't strong efforts to vaccinate all the adults in schools.

They point out that a study showed unvaccinated teachers wearing masks was significantly more effective than children. They posit that is because we shouldn't treat children and adults the same, but the prevailing theory is because teachers stand in front of the class and talk while kids generally listen and work (during the school period). Talking, singing, and eating is already known to spread more virus than just breathing.
Well, they are not allowed to work, which pushes them into "jobs" like drug-dealing.
That's an interest point! I'm going to find and read that.

It reminded me of the guy from Thailand (TED Talk - linked below) who didn't understand why we make our lives so complicated when he can work for 2-3 months of the year and spend the rest of it wondering which of his six houses, which he built, he's going to live in - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21j_OCNLuYg&list=PLf_dOHZ768...
This is a nice tool. What is the purpose of it? I know what it does, but why might one use this?
The article is from the perspective of the UK, where the population is largely already fully vaccinated.

It's asking whether regular booster shots (potentially indefinitely) is preferable to immunity from catching the virus and not getting too sick because people have already received their first two vaccine doses.
This is basically the same in NL.
What an utterly redundant point.

If you catch and do not die from the virus then yay for you I suppose, but you'll still spread it around while you have it, you still might die from the virus, and there is literally no downside to having a better immune response when you inevitably do catch COVID-19 as we're all going to eventually.

Like everything else, the goal of every single public health measure at the moment is to avoid having a huge portion of the population all need hospital services at the same time though.

This article is asking a stupid question, and the answer is predictably stupid.

EDIT: Pile on anti-vaxxer downvotes, the speed with which you're dumping these in makes it apparent you're not reading the article.
Honestly, I don't think that's going far enough. That "our vision is that we work as if we are one company" line couldn't be a better basis for an antitrust case if they were literally trying to incriminate themselves.
> Out of the hundreds of colleagues I had, I would voluntarily choose to talk to maybe 3 of them.

That... also describes my extended family.
But then conclude it's the testosterone levels, not the obestiy 'itself' or something more closely related to body fat? I think that's the point.

(But maybe testosterone levels are way more tightly correlated than I realise, IANA anything relevant!)
Actually, they do dictate how language is used amongst themselves. It’s pretty much tautological.
> There is a whole different suite of antibodies (known as immunoglobulin As) in the nose and lungs, compared with those (immunoglobulin Gs) that we measure in the blood.
The former is more important as a barrier to infection. Natural infection, because it is in the nose rather than a jab in the arm, may be a better route to those antibodies, and nasal vaccines are being investigated too.

Thread on intramuscular (arm injection) vs intranasal (inhaled) vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28165287