skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There’s a zero percent chance this can be validated but a 100% chance it will be used to increase government control.

What’s being done to address the 100 corporations that cause 70% of the world’s emissions?

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/just-100-firms-attributable-...
Kinda like Windows 10 LTSC/LTSB, but without the $300 ransom.
Creator from Open-Meteo here, I build a small, but very fast and precise weather forecast API for non-commercial use. I am a private individual working on it in my spare time.

Open-Meteo started as an exercise to process weather model data from the German weather service with up to 2 km resolution. Their forecasts are great, but hard to use for non-data-scientists who regularly work with NetCDF and GRIB-files. Using this data in simple apps, websites, your home-automation software, or robot lawn mower is complex.

The Open-Meteo API makes using this data easier. APIs accept standard WGS84 coordinates and return a weather forecast for 7 days in hourly resolution.

The forecast quality is surprisingly good. Open-Meteo includes global and regional weather models. Global models use 11 km resolution with up to 180 hours of forecast. Local models vary between 2 and 7 km resolution and 48 to 72 hours. Updates every 3 hours. The best model is automatically selected and combined to produce a single 7-day hourly forecast. Currently the best forecast model coverage is in Europe. Models for North America will be integrated next.

Under the hood, all data is stored in binary files using Float16 and updated in-place after a new weather model arrives. The API is very efficient. Returning weather forecasts takes usually less than 5 milliseconds. Internet latency is usually much higher.

All data is offered for non-commercial use. With speedy APIs, all data can be served by just a couple of virtual machines for less than a coffee a day.

What’s next? Some important features are still missing like daily aggregations, additional weather models, ocean, and air quality forecasts. Additionally, I would like to deploy some servers in North America and Asia to improve latency.

The project went live 2 weeks ago and is slowly being used. I would be grateful for feedback, suggestions, ideas, and questions.

All documentation can be found at https://open-meteo.com/en/docs
I think of restrictions as falling into three buckets—
- restrictions we could put up with ~forever,
- restrictions we could put up with temporarily while waiting for something (e.g., vaccines),
- restrictions we could put up with temporarily to mitigate some disaster by delay tactics (e.g. March lockdown.)

Now the question is what further restrictions now would do.

I think there are some things we should definitely encourage as not very intrusive (especially when it’s encouragement not law)—e.g., using FFP stuff rather than surgical/cloth masks in crowded spaces when possible, ventilation, &c.

I don’t think that we’re really waiting for anything though. We are not throwing everything at getting better vaccines. Nor are we going to massively boost vaccine uptake. (Maybe we should wait for the 12-15 category I suppose, since then we’d be closer to herd immunity.)

Finally, the NHS is not imminently going to be inundated. This might change in a few weeks. But delay right now isn’t necessary to avoid a March 2020/December 2020 apocalypse.

So in my view restrictions now would merely delay the inevitable since nothing would actually change. This is in contrast to last year when we were waiting for the enormous breakthrough of vaccines, or in February/March as we vaccinated the vast majority of adults. I do think it would be a plausible strategy to dampen things for a month whilst vaccinating those aged 12-15 though—I suspect vaccination would do nearly all the work there though. (On a tangent, I don’t see why we don’t just administer the first dose to them anyway—even if the second is too risky the first is much safer.)
it will never be eliminated at this point, animals can also carry it
Would you consider it a good thing if air pollution kills you?
Same impression. I was wondering when those Rustamans will descend ;)
From my own experience writing transformation tools on top of libtooling: you can make it work but the sweet spot between the time it takes to write the transformation code and just manually doing it makes it uneconomical for most use cases unless you have a gigantic code base and an error prone transformation that you have a better chance of getting correct when a computer can process the whole syntax tree.

For 99% of cases, regex-replace is the better choice (as much fun as writing syntax tree transformations is).
My experience is that this works fine as long as you 1) have a very well functioning HR team, and 2) nothing inter-personal goes wrong, 3) you have others taking on de facto leadership even if they're not formally in charge (you hint at this when you say you could trust your team to execute and stay on top of things).

But what I've repeatedly seen is that the moment you have conflict, if you don't have a manager per ~4-10 people, you're screwed unless there's a lot of organisational support pulverising the people management over extra people. Because suddenly a manager is spending half their time untangling some conflict and still need to have bandwidth to do all the other things they were doing.

As such I always look on teams with more direct reports than ~5-8 or so with deep suspicion. They may work well now, but they're often one crisis away from total meltdown. They're also often an indication of dysfunctional organisational leadership, who fails at promoting people to distribute responsibility.
Because democracy is much better than some kind of authoritarian system where the common people are considered stupid and ignorant and undeserving of having a say in how their society is ran.

The big problem here is that many people don’t think democracy is worth preserving, and they’re fine being lied to as long as they’re comfortable and have competent leaders. Except…. when the democratic checks and balances that keep the powers that be in check fail everything goes to shit. First slowly, then quickly.

I don’t want to turn this into an overly political rant, but if you look at recent history it’s not hard to see how bad things happen when politicians and other authority figures can lie with impunity.
I would go with a transpiler approach first (eg https://c2rust.com/) and then gradually transition pieces to use the Rust standard library and to safe code instead of the adhoc custom containers.

Still, that all would be predicated on having good Rust experience or using it as a learning experience and that may not be the motivation of the authors.
Hey, I've written those before. It's an interesting SIMD exercise if you've got that opportunity in the processor. The DSP versions can become a little odd looking.
Not all cloth masks function the same way. If you read the studies, it depends on the weaving and the material. Cotton vs. denim, for example, is studied.

None are as effective as a non-woven material. But they are still more effective than no mask.

Edit:
> asbestos dust or second hand smoke

You have to know what size of particulate matter that you're looking to filter is in order to determine whether that mask material works for the given application. What you're saying is too broad to be useful and isn't very insightful.
Improving our air will probably improve COVID survival rate.

One of the four main comorbidities contributing to covid death are cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, and chronic respiratory disease.
Simple and easy and, given the miniscule risks to all but the unvaccinated, completely unreasonable to impose on others.
It is unfortunate that Visual Studio requires Docker Desktop to allow the nice integration that is there.
I love this one:

Why do some people write if(0 == x) instead of if(x == 0)?

http://c-faq.com/style/revtest.html
Is there a better name for the "playing dumb" style of argument?
> And two people outside shut the doors simultaneously

No, they don't. I'd phrase it differently, e.g. “each door is shut for an instant when the end of the pole is just inside the door”. (Also, make it clear that the barn is long enough to fit a 10m pole between the two shut doors.)

When you put it as “shut the doors simultaneously”, it's more troll physics than a paradox.

Meta-puzzle: figure out how to still imply that the runner is completely enclosed for an instant, without incorrectly insinuating that it is so from her perspective.
Not sure that's especially true. Eich has admitted he had trouble hiring for Brave when he started the company, in large part because of the culture war nonsense.

There's actively woke techies (of which there are quite a few), but then there are also techies who just have a huge distaste for cultural conservatism, and of those there are many.
Even a hybrid is probably sufficient in this context.
> Does it fix the Bluetooth audio mess

Yes, one of the biggest features of Pipewire is proper Bluetooth headset support. It's the reason I switched to it.
I feel bad for the population of New Zealand.

The amount of lockdowns and Covid restrictions was one of most restrictive in the world.

And after all of that, you all recently had one of the highest rates of infection since the pandemic started.

What a tough situation there.

It like all being locked down for years and having the borders closed for years didn't change a thing.
Children aren’t at risk of covid. Flu and pool drowning is greater risks…

In my opinion these public health “experts” have a moral obligation to tell people to stop worrying about kids. I honestly don’t understand why they haven’t cheered the fact kids aren’t at risk. It’s good news!

The cynical side of me thinks they want to let people remain scared so they gobble up kids vaccines when released. Which is pretty ethically challenged but par for course with these “experts”.
> It's much better to have a high rate of false positives than to have any rate of false negatives, so they pumped up the cycle count to accomplish this. They later toned it down.

I not aware of any evidence that increased cycle counts have a significant effect on false positives. To the best of my knowledge, the false positive rates of of PCR tests are extremely low. My understanding is that cycle counts were changed to balance false negatives against testing time/lab loads. If you have evidence that contradicts this, I would love to see it.

> These aren't "breakthrough" cases, because it's not truly a vaccine in the sense that the Polio vaccine was a vaccine.

The polio vaccine is also not 100% effective. Both polio vaccines and covid vaccines reduce but do not eliminate your chance of being infected. In what sense is the covid vaccine not a "true vaccine"?

Edit: We have other vaccines that have even lower level of preventative efficacy than the covid vaccines do against delta and we still administer them.
Wild animals can spread COVID, so I don't see how it can ever be eliminated. We may be able to reduce R temporarily in humans via social distancing measures, but it's going to tick back up as soon as the restrictions are lifted.
Counting down to the moment when mainstream media changes its tune to something like "Big Pharma! Rushed (Trump's) (non)-vaccines! $$$! etc."
"Infant mortality" plays a big role in life expectancy. The dividing line between a stillbirth and infant mortality can be a very fine line and varies widely in the developed world.

Strangely enough, the combined term (stillbirth + infant mortality) doesn't vary nearly as much. That says there's a big data problem with counting infant mortality, and thus a big data problem with life expectancy.
> It would probably initially drive up prices of goods due to a shortage of electric delivery vehicles or the need to repack everything onto smaller local trucks outside the city, but I think it'd be worth it.

There was a decade where we often ate plain white rice exclusively, as it was all we could afford. Even a small jump in prices would have increased the number of days where we couldn't afford any food at all.

Many, many folks are in similar situations. I feel we should factor them into these equations.
The documents that the article is based on demonstrate the lab was doing GoF experiments to infect humanized mice with chimeras based on bat coronaviruses and got a grant to do further such research starting in 2019. And lo - we get a break out of something looking like a bat based chimera that infects human cells in 2019. Bit of a coincidence there.
New Design for Client Website
1. The breaking of some libraries in JDK 9 had very little to do with modules and was mostly due to weak encapsulation. Almost all issues stemmed from libraries, written to be non-portable, hacking into JDK internals and becoming entangled with the particulars of JDK 8. When those internals changed, they broke. With modules' strong encapsulation now finally enabled, this won't happen again. In other words, modules weren't the cause of the breakages, but added to prevent them in the future. Unfortunately, they were blamed for the problems they were created to prevent because they were the most famous feature in JDK 9.

2. Modules are becoming the core of Java's security strategy. Without them, your code only does what you think it does unless any library decides it should do something else.

3. The reduction of security and maintenance concerns have already yielded tremendous dividends, as we the JDK developers have been freed to work on other stuff. Your complaint is like someone finally getting a fast internet connection, saying, all that noise and dirt of tearing up the street putting in the cable ducts have been in vain; they should have just given us fast internet, because that's all we wanted.

So, we've got better security and a drastic reduction in future breakages, all for negligible backward-incompatible changes to the spec.
In the UK since we have barely any hospital beds I can see a strong case for universal vaccination to avoid inundating hospitals. One could also simply deprioritise the unvaccinated (though the privacy problem would arise.) The only politically palatable alternative has been lockdowns it seems.
Tracking Tiger Global's Tech Investments
Going through the latest fundraising announcements, I feel like every second tech company on this planet is getting funded by Tiger Global.

I may have exaggerated here but according to FT, 180+!!! VC deals with Tiger Global involvement have been announced year to date already.

In order to track Tiger's movements and frankly learn about the companies they are funding, I started a Substack newsletter called "Tracking Tiger Global" that provides weekly updates on their latest investments. Link to Substack - https://trackingtigerglobal.substack.com/.

If you find it interesting, please subscribe and share! :)
It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
It looks like about 57 years.

Assuming constant acceleration to the 1/2-way point, flip, deceleration, and using http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.ph... :

Time elapsed (in starship's frame of reference, "Proper time")
T = (c/a) * ArcCosh[a*d/(c^2) + 1] (given acceleration and distance)
year = 365.25*24*3600; c = 3E8; a=9.8; d=1.25*1_000_000*(c * year)
from math import acosh
T = (c/a) * acosh(a*d/(c*c) + 1)
print(T/year)
=> 14.3 years each quarter
=> 57 years round trip

The speed at flip would be 99.99999999993978% c - good thing intergalactic space is mostly empty.
Modern C (from C99 onward) introduces a few families of sized types -- [u]int[_least|_fast|][8|16|32|64]_t. The non-least-or-fast types are not guaranteed to exist (e.g., int8_t is optional because implementation may be unreasonable on a 24-bit DSP with no sub-word operations), but the _least and _fast types are generally what you want anyway, unless you're relying on unsigned overflow behavior.

In my experience, modern code is either written almost entirely in terms of sized values like int32_t (when assuming a "normal" platform), or almost entirely in terms of _least/_fast values (when going for maximum portability). The only case that "naked" int/long is still common in this model is in a few specific uses such as loop indices where it's idiomatic.

The _fast and _least types are especially interesting, pragmatically. "int_fast8_t" means "I need a signed value that can store values between -128 and 127, doesn't have defined behavior on overflow, and is allowed to fill a register / use a word worth of memory." "int_least8_t" means "I need a signed value that can store values between -128 and 127, doesn't have defined behavior on overflow, and I am likely to have a significant number of these in memory so please pack them as efficiently as reasonable." (And of course we have bit packing when we need to pack more efficiently than reasonable; bit-packing with int_fast8_t allows you to represent "I need this to take exactly 8 bits of memory, whatever it costs compute-wise, because I'm basically filling memory with these.")

In general, I find that these types give modern C a good balance between declaring requirements on types and not overly trying to control their size.
I'm no 9/11 truther but I'm fascinated by the subject at the same time. It's such a complex subject and there are no easy and simple answers. There are many angles to take into consideration. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle as with most things these days.

I thought this video was interesting since it doesn't really seem to claim anything. It's asking difficult questions though:

The Debate: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=829

Part 1 - Air Defence: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=878

Part 2 - The Hijackers: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=3378

Part 3 - The Airplanes: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=5802

Part 4 - The Pentagon: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=7011

Part 5 - Flight 93: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=8272

Part 6 - The Twin Towers: - https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=9681

Part 7 - Building 7: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=16141
>Inaccurate and dangerously wrong conjecture. Research published long before COVID-19 proved the efficacy of masking in blocking particulate matter.

Sure, but what wasn't certain was things like:
Was covid transmitted in the air by particles (yes)? Was it transmitted via aerosols (no)? Was it transmitted by touch (no)? How many particles are needed to infect someone (unsure)? Do masks protect me or someone else? What type of masks are needed to protect? How many masks do I need to wear?

From my exposure, I saw non experts being very emphatic about answers that actually took a long time to get answers to. These emphatic non experts alienated people that continued continued be unsure. In some cases, the experts were emphatic - and then wrong - which further alienated people.
Recent events confirm that the only thing which has been reduced is the WHO's standards.
Sounds sensible to me.

The US in general has super lax driving tests. Here in Denmark it's about 3 months of theoretical classes side-by-side with driving with a certified driving instructor. We also learn the basics of cars on a closed track, and later learn to drive in slippery conditions on the same closed tracks. The closed-track tests include being able to catch the car after pulling the handbrake in a turn while going 80 km/h (50 mph).

Oh, and to actually get your license you also have to drive 45 minutes with a police official checking your every move.
Protect who though? Who do masks protect at this point? People who are vaccinated? They have no need to worry. People who are unvaccinated? They made that choice.

There is literally no reason for a vaccinated individual to wear a mask. Vaccines work. They are the ticket out of this. Not masks.
> This is the "Science is a Liar sometimes"[1] defense

No, this is not "Science is a liar sometimes" defense.

When we were misled about mask efficacy with a number of circular lies (you don't need masks, you do need masks, double mask!, cloth masks are as effective as N9ts, N95 is overkill, it is not aerosolized, etc) a good number of those were well-known lies of varying proportion, and not the scientific method in progress.

The truth was that people were lying to us consciously to preserve N95 mask supply for frontline workers, but that truth would have gone much further than the mistruths and half truths we were told.

At the same time as the hyperbole was spreading about covid taking over ERs and News coverage was emphasizing this fact, my surgeon wife was telling me how empty all of the hospitals were, and the on-call cases dropped to nothingness because people were isolating and not going outside. But still, the drumbeat of 24/7 news cycle kept putting out bogus info about saturation of ERs and ICUs chock full of intubated covid patients.

If there has been any damage done to science by our authorities during this crisis, it is completely self-inflicted.
The common terminology is Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)
I doubt regular beatings work, but having authority over your child, even if it takes physical punishment to obtain is one thing I see extremely lacking with my peers who are parents.

But my point was more about comparing generations, I feel like a lot of struggles like having to learn how to control your temper or focus, are wiped away with drugs, and in general society is very good at removing historic hardships you had to overcome. On the flip side a lot of artificial stress and challenges are introduced with modern life (grade chasing since preschool, social media) - I don't feel like this would have felt meaningful to me so I don't envy the current generation of children.
I’m talking about the amount of time and effort one has to put in. Losing weight can take years even for a determined person, recommended weight loss speed is usually 1-2 lbs per week at most.

To get vaccinated you have to just drop by the pharmacy during your grocery store run, wait about 15 minutes after the shot for observation, and it’s complete. (If taking a 2 shot vaccine, repeat the same 30 minute task 4 weeks later).

Asking people to become non-obese before entering society is an entirely different level of effort. Asking people to become non-elderly is an impossibility at our current or near-future level of science.

H1N1 was nowhere near as dangerous as COVID-19. And even in that case there’s no reason to believe getting the flu vaccine that year was a bad idea. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps... “ In 2018, a study team including CDC scientists analyzed and published vaccine safety data on adjuvanted pH1N1 vaccines (arenaprix-AS03, Focetria-MF59, and Pandemrix-AS03) from 10 global study sites. Researchers did not detect any associations between the vaccines and narcolepsy.”
I live the US but did not go through the US school system — it was truly a genuine and sincere question. It does appear to be a state or even more local requirement, which is definitely different.

> Foolish me, I expect the Federal government to operate within the limits of the US Constitution.

Now agreed, it’s different from the school mandate(s), but I still don’t yet understand this derisive leap to claims of unconstitutionality. OSHA legislation is broad in the responsibilities of employers, and one can make an argument (the quality of which I won’t inflate) that executive orders can be used to enforce that in this way. Certainly it seems to track with the frankly enormous executive power that the last 4 presidents, current included, have made ample use of. At least that executive power is mostly time-limited, given term limits.

And at least in theory, questions of bodily autonomy seem to have been side-stepped with the “or test weekly” provision, however impractical that may be for many.
The first sounds reasonable, the second and third are not. Thank you Jason Rohrer for refusing to implement the tools of mass surveillance, censorship and privacy invasion.