skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Australia Dev in a Weekend Builds Better Covid Booking System Than Entire Gov
Full credit to Fraser Hemphill who built covidqueue.com which makes it way easier to find COVID vaccination appointments than anything the government of Australia has built.

The site: covidqueue.com
Video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm6oA2bNGdA

He built it in a weekend, too.

I love how concisely it shows the leverage of technology in the hands of smart folks who want to build useful things for society.

There's a donate button, but it does make me wonder about incentive alignment. Wouldn't it be awesome if there were prizes or grants given out by a foundation of sorts so that there's some more incentive for programmers to build these weekend projects.

Many do already, of course, because great programmers enjoy the challenge and process.

But it mainly made me think about how you could potentially align incentives to increase these leverage points.

It made me think this could fall into YC's mission.

This guy helped me find an appointment one month sooner than I otherwise would. At scale, he's likely saving lives, and unlocking a lot more economic benefits if this speeds up vaccination and leads Australia out of lockdown sooner.

Also, it's an incredible advertisement for school aged children on the power of technology to make the world better.

So I'm curious HN: do you think there's a good way to incentivize and reward folks who, in a weekend, can create things that make a massive difference to society? Especially for problems that are unlikely to make sense as a business.
Yes. This is nonsense to me.

That said, check out scienceclic. They do good run downs of BOTH the metaphorical stuff AND the math that underpins it. PBS spacetime is a fun place to check out too. Between the two of them, you should have enough of an idea of these things to wax scientific at a cocktail party.
Modern technology? A trillion dollars?
I grew up in the twilight of the Cold War and there was definitely a lot of side eye thrown at socialists, labor agitators and pacifists of all kinds. I did have one teacher who proudly shared Helen Keller’s letter to the students who burned her books in Nazi Germany.
——

To the student body of Germany:

History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.

I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.

Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.

https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/helen-keller-writes-a-le...
> What happens after that?

That's a good question. I don't think anyone knows, even at Uber
> Airborne diseases with wild animal reservoirs cannot be eradicated, and never have been.

Only two diseases have been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest (a viral disease that infects cattle and various wild animals). The latter had both airborne transmission and wild animal reservoirs.
>Although now I see there's a link to a more dedicated article.

Lots of media sites do this where they have the TL;DR versions of their stories for those that have never actually read a newspaper and get their news from "feeds" as they scroll by. It seems like they are trying to reach people with short attention spans, so it's a bullet list of points extracted from a more indepth article. I imagine greybeard editors submitting full articles, and then 20something YOLOs creating the bullet lists.

>Primates are not the only complex societies on Earth. Elephants and whales, for example, have very deep social bonds and complex relationships that we barely understand.

I've read things in the past about the social behaviors of elephants, and we know whales and porpoise have pods for community/social activities.

Post some links to things you think are interesting in this area, and what as fellow HN readers upvote showing common interest as well. Sharing is caring
The sparql endpoint that is typically used with wikidata has some namespaces implicitly predefined, including wdt and wd.

You do not need to declare the wd: prefix if you are using the endpoint at https://query.wikidata.org

I think its safe to assume in context that the newbie sparql user is not setting up their own sparql endpoint but using the official wikidata endpoint.
There's a great little Easter Egg if you view source:

> <!-- Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg -->
China’s new carbon trading market isn’t working
Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions?

People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.
That's the product of American exceptionalism, the dominance of war culture in our media and (perhaps) a poor history curriculum in public schools.
I remember bringing up the racist parts of Gone with the Wind with my parents and having an extremely illuminating conversation on their thoughts and attitudes.
The size of the problem is known, sure. But the framing is bad. Tell us what we can do to help, in realistic timespans, and where that gets us.

If the answer today is 'nothing', then what would ever get people to care?

As for carbon sequestration, I'm not learned enough on the subject to even guess what's possible, or if the idea of doing it faster is feasible from a scientific standpoint.

Is the moral of the story that we must do carbon capture better, or that we're all screwed?
Damn. Off topic but once again I'm reminded of how ridiculously lenient most western countries (aside from the US) are towards violent criminals.
Quite a few of our (sqlitebrowser.org) users weren't able to access our download server, nor nightly build server, until we made it available over IPv6 in addition to just IPv4.

Seems to be mainly people located in South East Asian countries, though I'd have to go trawling back through log history to get the exact details.
> This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never state

Ironically, that is precisely what I see you doing. You need to reread this full thread because your comment is entirely off base. The person I was discussing with was expressly arguing against encouraging people to be vacinated to help protect other people. This was justified by referencing how we accept (or in my case don't) the risks of cars in our society. There was no mention of my or anyone supporting indefinite lockdowns.

> We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.

Of course not. I support encouraging vaccines and mandating masks precisely because we need to end lockdowns and still need to keep our hospitals running.

That doesn't mean I will sit by while people make ridiculous arguments to against very good reasons for getting vacinated.
Yes, I made blurweb.app(https://blurweb.app) so far impacted more than 2200+ Professionals/business

Then i launched sendsimple.app(https://www.sendsimple.app) so far impacted few 100 but with sendsimple I want to make cold email marketing as simple as using google sheets.

I am also working on other apps you can find the list here https://twitter.com/indianappguy/status/1429157263353126912
"Properly speaking it's not very user and eye friendly to read for long white text on a dark background. "
I would beg to differ, white text on a dark background is easier to read, easier on the eyes, and less tiring.
I'm also not sure what you mean by separating the ui from the context. The whole point of dark mode is to see the content in dark mode, not the ui.
As far as following the theme of the browser, that is the whole point. If you don't want sites in dark theme, then don't set your browser to the dark theme. Don't make me have to switch to a dark theme on every site.
Off topic, but that page makes me dizzy.
I didn't say that cops should be able to fly dangerously 'because drugs'.

I said 'we don't really know' - and objected to arbitrary arguments about cops complicity, and narrow arguments about 'because drugs' as some kind of justification of lack of credibility in policing.

So you're 'pretty sure'? Well maybe there is some doubt.

From my limited understanding but referencing government sources - 500AG exactly the lower threshold for pilots, don't you think it's odd that they reported that they were 'just' at the threshold? Because if they were at 499AG they would breaking the law. So can we hate on civilians for 'always being so reckless?' if it were true. Or rather, even if that was true, we might want to assume it was probably a mistake? And those happen?

The other key detail is that they reported '1 nautical mile' from Buttonville, funny, because that's the exact distance from the airport for which 'Advanced Operations' drone flight is allowed, and it's highly probably the Police wold have this authority.

It seems slightly odd that the report was 'just within altitude' and 'just within' safety range for advanced op. drone flight.

Because if the drone reported those numbers, they would be just barely out of legal bounds.

If the drone reported 1NM and a slightly lower altitude, then they'd be totally legal, and the airplane would be doing the 'unsafe flying'.

1 NM seems a little arbitrary. Maybe it was 0.5, or maybe it's 1.5, in which case it wouldn't take much 'stretching of the envelope' of either party for an accident to happen.

'We'll know' about the specifics of the issue when Transport Canada has done the investigation - was it a civilian contractor? A poorly designed flight path? Was there tacit knowledge that someone was breaking the rules? Was something wrong, was the Pilot actually in error by flying too low? Was the drone just barely above ceiling and this happened?

I don't think we do know yet, and there's a lot of ways accidents can happen in any discipline.

I don't think it's reasonable to jump to arbitrary malicious conclusions and then pile on with low grade 'I don't like cops 'cause they stop me from doing things!' rhetoric.

So we wait for Transport Canada's report for more details, and 'war on drugs' just isn't part of the equation.
Costa Ricans Live Longer. What’s the Secret?
This is the go-to response on HN now when it comes to articles related to the environment. It’s general form is: “it’s not what they say, it’s how they say it.”

IOW: nonsensical replies that steer the conversation away from the point being made, intentionally or not.
In current_year people use cryptographically secure tumbler-like services like Tornado Cash. Everyone will just assume you're a criminal if your funds come from Tornado Cash and you don't prove the origin before then though.
I assume you need to do this right away after the bite? Does it work days later?
Lyrics from Canadian rock band Rush's The Trees [1] (circa 1978):

So the Maples formed a Union
And demanded equal rights
‘The Oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light’
Now there’s no more Oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw…

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc
>breakthrough infections are very rare in vaccinated individuals.

This is simply not true. In countries with accurate tracing like Singapore and Israel, it's apparent that the vaccinated aren't significantly less likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. Check figure 10 on https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc... ; the unvaccinated only make up around 10-20% of cases. They also only make up 10-20% of the population; if the unvaccinated were more likely to be infected, we'd expect them to constitute a larger proportion of infections.
Note that i used the phrase "better considered decisions" which is not the same as making a "quick decision". Decision making is improved during Walking while you need some variable time after Strenuous Exercise when your Arousal state has calmed down to make better decisions.

The Inverted U Hypothesis (aka Yerkes-Dodson law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law) and https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/inverted-u.htm was the first to posit the relationship between Arousal and Performance. However there are lots of nuances to this. The important one is Cue Utilization Theory (https://www.elitetrack.com/blogs-details-7362/ and https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/sports-psychology/percep...) which is relevant for decision making.

Coming to Exercise Intensity and Decision Making you may find the following papers helpful for some empirical data.

* Influence of exercise intensity on the decision-making performance of experienced and inexperienced soccer players - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19454768/ and Fontana's thesis at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/12206332.pdf

* Effect of Exercise Intensity Level on Choice Reaction Time - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2466/11.03.CP.4.3

PS: I have linked to two relevant books in another post of mine in this thread which you may find useful.
If they don't actually increase prices for consumers, because they all collectively save money not paying amazon fees it is unlikely to be an antitrust violation
How do you tolerate side movements when clicking side buttons and accidental side clicks when “rebasing” a mouse? How do you grip?

Every mouse I tried (suggested by reviews) does oops clicks sometimes, so I always turn off side buttons and live with the fact that they are just there discomforting my thumb.
At this point, in the US any adult who wants to be vaccinated, is. But we still have to mask up due to Delta getting past the vaccines, and children not being vaccinated.
Then charge a transfer fee based on company size. Which they do currently have different fees based on size of company but I'm pretty sure it's negligible. The other problem is patent trolls. So, you might want to tie fees every year to lack of sales. That would also force companies to let the patents go faster.
While they might be linked, I find it difficult to believe modern males have lower testosterone than pre-80’s females (which I’d expect if simply “Low-T” was causing the current surge in obesity in both genders).

It’s possible the threshold (where Testosterone is converted to Estrogen) is lowering, and both fat deposition and other things are all downstream effects of phthalates.

However it’s just as likely that this is due to antibiotic-contamination in food changing our gut flora, or Pesticides/Lithium/PFAS/High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup/EM-Radiation/Elevation are messing with our homeostatic equilibrium in other ways…

It would be interesting to find a study that controlled for each of these factors to find the strongest correlates.
Conversely the phalanx was practically a superweapon of hand to hand combat against the enemies of the time. As a soldier in Alexander's army's you were in relatively little danger provided the phalanx held - this is also true of the Roman legions.

Battles for a soldier were a few minutes of danger, followed by being pulled to the back of the line to rest and recover in relative safety: which makes sense of course. Anyone who's ever tried boxing knows how exhausting it becomes very quickly.
It sure is a great way to discriminate against those from working class families though - the kind of people who won't have had much access to private tutoring.
Has actually getting Covid changed her mind at all?
> solve the discovery problem

That would make it pretty killer. I'll have to look into that…
"The Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations."

–Exodus
UV-A is generally non-ionizing, but that doesn’t mean it can’t cause electronic transitions that lead to chemical reactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_electronic_transitio...

UV-A can create Thymine diners in your DNA, for example. No ionization required.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrimidine_dimer
This, yes.

As a broader concept, this is also an excellent lesson in recognising a missing message. If something is talked about and praised, but always left confusingly vague ... either the speaker is hiding something, or they're aware that they cannot directly mention the subject or events. Either way, it's an invitation to do some digging.

Sometimes you find a Helen Keller. Sometimes you find a Samuel F. B. Morse.
Not entirely in jest... my favorite "fun language" is actually Forth. It changes your programming style in other languages in mostly good ways.
The article is reporting upon a scientific study. It is up to you to decide what that means, not them. If you choose to act on it by complaining about tone then that is your problem, not theirs. Perhaps instead you yourself should do something, something more productive than complaining about word choices and/or tone, neither of which are helpful in the slightest.
I’ve never had a sunburn from a cloudy day in Australia.
Netbox is awesome and I have just started to plan some automations to use its data (I currently just use the GUI).

However, if I use it as a source of truth for what is essentially config management, it would be replacing something that's currently running on top of git and GitHub.

I'm not sure I'm willing to lose version history, easy reverts, the pull request mechanism etc for this critical data. How have you dealt with this?
> The link is for the second sentence.

Gotcha, that was not at all clear from your comment. Thanks for providing a citation for the other claims, I'll take a look at it.
Alternate framing: we can return Earths oceans to their natural state within 25 generations, and in a much shorter time if we stop emissions now.
Please stop saying that 1 or 2 years life expectancy does not matter. It matter a LOT for their families and for them it is almost the same as loosing someone with 20 years life expectancy.

I wish this narrative will go away.
The Soviet-era one was an Afghan saying, “you have watched but we have time”
Yes, my point exactly, and in the places where people use OCaml, the overhead from not monomorphising generics isn't a performance bottleneck.
This is neat, but I think it's better to use your work provided device(s)/laptop for work, and your personal devices for personal things.

Obviously check your contract, and IANAL but people should be cognizant of the fact that your employer _may_ be able to retain copyright on personal projects if you use a work device (then again some contracts may even try to claim that they retain copyright for work done in personal time on personal devices)
Here[1] is Dr. Fauci talking about how masks are mostly ineffective. Only at the end of the video, he agrees with the host that if everyone wears masks, it can lead to shortages for healthcare workers.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
I like your proof of concept. I guess, next step would be to take google result, and crawl all their result and convert it into scores, rejecting in the process those that are going outside defined limits. Additionally, a weekly list of most infamous sites would be interesting to see, in the sense what people visit the most (probably social ad driven) but has bad UX...
Fair point. I think I've maybe changed my tune on this a little bit since writing that comment.
I'd love to see an analysis of the real-world numbers, though I suspect you may be right. Note also it's a function of time (ie if you run the maker side yourself you will participate in others' joins and slowly work up your anonymity set). Over several weeks/months it may be viable to obfuscate even significant amounts.
Perhaps I’m misreading the first link you’ve provided, but doesn’t it say the benefit is only for women?
Exception error handling is implicit because we don't know which line inside a try block can throw an exception.

However, Go's `if err != nil` is not more explicit than, for example, Rust's question mark operator. The former is more verbose than the latter, yes. But both are explicit in that we can know which line can return an error.

The `if err != nil` is probably okay if there are only a few lines that can return an error, but if most lines in a function can return an error, it will result in too much noise. A real world example where panic is abused as an exception-like approach because the "proper" error handling using `if err != nil` is way too verbose: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/apple/foundationdb/bindings/go... (Actually Go's stdlib too sometimes abuses panic in a similar way.)
You are right, $100 have value because people have an agreement that it does. This is not the case for Bitcoin… there are folks who wish it were. It’s like saying “from today on, I can buy stuff with emojis”. Even Monopoly money go back in the box at the end of the day.
It doesn’t show that it’s a net plus vs not applying. It shows that winning the lottery that you choose to enter is better than not winning.
>Would you rather Apple actually directly look at your images?

No. Why would that be necessary?

I would expect to be reported if I willingly uploaded images matching exact hashes of CSAM to Apple servers. I don't understand why Apple employees would ever be able to, or need to, view my images, and I would expect Apple if it were really a privacy-focused company to never let that happen.

>Except they don’t actually do that, phones don’t get the hashes to do any comparisons. Sever side comparisons only flags images which causes Apple employees to look at down samples images. Critically they don’t have the authority or incentives to prosecute you.

It's client side, that's why we're having this discussion.

This is all a secret process. As I said, Apple employees look at an unspecified number of "derivatives" of people's images in a secret process, and if they tick a box, the authorities get all your data. There's nothing saying how close a "derivative" needs to be to actual CSAM to trigger this process, just "trust us, because children".

No audits, no due process, no mandatory notifying customers that are affected, no notifying of how many total customers were reported every month, just a secret illegal search and snitching mechanism with some crypto mumbo jumbo and "trust us, because children" sprinkled on top.

>And not something their actually doing.

*they're. Yes they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219278

From a comment: > ... “With their left hand, they make jail-breaking difficult and sue companies like Corellium to prevent them from existing. Now with their right hand, they say, ‘Oh, we built this really complicated system and it turns out that some people don’t trust that Apple has done it honestly—but it’s okay because any security researcher can go ahead and prove it to themselves.’”

>people have been looking at the algorithm used.

Who? How? Are you talking about the ones that are gagged by Apple NDA? Link to papers?

As another commenter posted, no amount of spin will make on-device scanning a good idea.
Because they were not disposing of dangerous waste according to protocol.

Also the CDC limited information about the shutdown due to "national security concerns".

Archived NYT article from August 6 2019:

https://archive.ph/oosEz
Let's Re-Engine Concorde [pdf]