skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great observation and there's an obvious answer you may have not made the connection on: it's cheaper, more efficient, and saves lives.

Many midwestern states, because of their large land area, face a bit different problem than compact cities: you can only get some place so fast by highway. Furthermore, because of the large distances, it could be too late when certain first responders are dispatched and the information that was given over the phone was incorrect. (Think of software engineering, how many times have you been given the correct and complete requirements the first time?)

Instead, most fire departments not only have the training to hand the exact same emergencies as the EMS, but they also carry the same equipment onboard the fire trucks.

Another scenario, lets say fire was dispatched to car accident because smoke was reported 20m from the city, and when they got there, someone was bleeding severely. If it were me, the answer I wouldn't want to hear is "oh sorry, can't bandage that, we'll call for EMS". Worse, imagine the fire department was on a call like that and a high rise caught fire, 5m down the road. If they didn't take the fire truck, they'd have to drive all the way back to the city, grab the truck, then drive all the way back. That's why you see that all the time, it's the safest thing to do.

And fire departments go way beyond putting out fires. There are departments in cities that are trained in swift water rescue, electrical hazards, gas/chemical leaks, and many more. Think of fire as general rescue workers, rather than putting out flames.

Source: Firsthand volunteer firefighter work
Boomers have (poorly) outsourced the elder care of their parents. This what you get.

Along with the US budget deficits and the national healthcare mess, this is just another thing that generation decided it didn't want to have to deal with (change), so they're kicking the can as far as they can down the road.
I know you've been downvoted by some ignorant skeptics, but can you go into more detail? Would love some sources that I can read more into.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits

It isn’t formed on the surface, but it is naturally occurring.
I think you’re looking at a program verification problem.

With this tool:
http://viper.ethz.ch/
You essentially sprinkle your functions with pre- and post conditions (& loops), press „verify“ and it will verify the correctness of your program code.

There are multiple frontends you can use for different languages. Behind the scenes your code + annotations are converted from e.g. Python/Rust/Go to an intermediate language (Viper), which is then verified.
My guess is that they were club heads, tied to wooden sticks; we are talking about a stone age culture who didn't have too much spare time/resources. They may have started out as utilitarian weaponry, but gradually morphed into status indicators. Knobs make it easier to lash them onto a stick with rope/leather thongs. Weapons/badges of office were often buried along with the owners. Leather/Wood rots so may not have been found along with them, though there may have been traces left behind.
> Do silicon valley companies not screen for intensity of political views during job interviews in order to prevent issues like this?

It would seem that they actively select for it.

> It would seem like it would be better for business to just not let people join the organization if they're relatively likely to one day go on a moral crusade.

To be fair: Blue Team straight up hit the panic button when Trump was elected in 2016.

From a non-US perspective, Trump was... grating? Talked a big game, but clearly didn't have the leadership chops. His "Law and Order" tweets during all the rioting were absolutely pathetic. Blue Team, however, has clearly gone quite insane.

At this point, I'm sort of politically homeless, which puts me in good company. Republicans talk hard about winding the clock back but don't actually seem to do much of anything, Libertarians pretend there is no clock, and Democrats evangelize that we'll finally escape the oppression of time itself once we've burned the clock to cinders.

What a time to be alive.
Best of 2020 in Tech [Talks]
It's still at most n^m different images.
Across USB-C land, there's the various USB3s as well as Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, PCIe, and probably others, too, all sharing the same connector with arbitrary overlaps or omissions of compatibilities across the N-dimensional matrix.
Unpopular opinion: Android is more privacy focussed than iOS.

Especially because during first setup, it clearly asks you to opt-out of services you do not wish to participate in. Also much more transperent.
i agree, thanks for speaking out
If there was no pivot, then there wouldn't have been an API for getting a unique identifier for this device in the first place.

Given that they only recently neutered this API, that seems like a pivot. If you consider that this change was only made in response to criticism that the ITP privacy protections added to Safari were forcing content creators to move from the open web to their app store to remain profitable, then the change seems more like it was forced by the PR pivot than something they were doing out of principle.
My own work laptop is a bit old and has a barrel plug and USB-C. When the laptop is truly out of juice, only the barrel plug will charge it. So I can't leave it at work. YMMV.
What you saw in Texas is actually quite common. In most other states I have lived, there are typically many more fire trucks than ambulances available. Because if that, Fire response times are much shorter and as they are are trained parametics, they are used as first-responders when not fighting fires. The situation you described was likely the handoff between fire and ambulance.
Silvernest is more of a roommate matching service for old folks. Not so much for pairing young and old.
> The next best step is to pledge to not hire ex-Facebookers.

I actually agree with that, and not because of any personal agenda against FB, but because I don’t want the corrupted, unethical mindset of FB to permeate my organization. I just cannot trust ex-FB employees to make ethical decisions.
Please enough of this. Trying spending 2 minutes googling it. Hint: pyenv
You know there are a lot of places in the US with volunteer fire departments, right?
An Honest Look at Urbit
Except it isn't obvious, because it isn't true. When I was living in an apartment complex, I had a neighbor with a magnesium imbalance, and she had an "emergency" about once every 10 days. Her elderly husband was unable to move her to get her the infusions she needed, so he would call the paramedics, who promptly got her out of the apartment every time. The fire department also brought a truck every time, which blocked the main lane in the apartment complex and kept people from being able to get out of their parking spots... while the ambulance blocked the lane closest to the apartments. The result was that about 40% of the complex couldn't leave as long as the paramedics were there.

At no point did the people from the fire department ever lift a finger to actually do anything to help the paramedics, because the paramedics never needed help.
Right — but we’re collectively okay with violent rioting, including arson and murder… but draw the line at selfies.

This seems more Reichstag Fire than French Revolution.
So the solution is to spend less money but pay people more, and shoulder the rest on taxpayers?

This probably won't work very long since the population isn't as triangular as it used to be (to my understanding this is what happened to Japan).

I get the justified call to fix things for people that require these services. The US can barely afford to school its children, purchase its homes, or enact reasonable public health measures without bankrupting people.

As a society the US is unwilling to consider euthanasia, decriminalization of most nonviolent drugs, effective gun control, and funding infrastructure. The plight of the elderly is on par with the plight of the transient. Policy is actively hostile for them.
Thinking about it there are so many angles from which one could approach it.

It could not be required to run the script. For example require the visitor has his own website and have the script interact with specified tools installed there. Or
a very limited language that disables js for security.

It could be a highly readable DSL, for example something to write interpreters in.

Or something narrow like interact with a rich text editor or data visualizations.

Perhaps a basic game engine.
I saw a fire truck (and ambulance) get called in Santa Cruz, CA, because an elderly person fell inside their house and couldn't get up.
Well, one of the authors is from NVIDIA, and the paper already mentions CUDA, and it's only to argue that CUDA is a good point of reference but doesn't do what the authors need it do (shader programming). SYCL doesn't add anything to that conversation other than being yet another example.
I wish laptops would've standardised on the 20V barrel jack (maybe with slightly different sizes to denote current capability), like they almost did before USB-C came along.
Sounds like an industry that needs regulation and public sector intervention. If you care and have a lot of money, you can pay for home health aids who will do an excellent job caring for your elderly relatives. The issues is that a good number of people just don't care and take an "out of sight out of mind" approach. A startup can't disrupt this, only regulations which protect elder rights can. Those who do care frequently can't afford it, but a startup can eliminate the costs of caring human interaction, which is the primary thing that elderly people today need more of. The government, however, could help pay for these costs by covering more elder care under Medicare.
Surprised this comment is rather downvoted. This view isn't uncommon among pain patients-- such alternatives to opioids are being researched and an article like this appears every so often, but the miracle hasn't panned out. Ziconotide, based on a toxin from a sea snail, is one of the few that have made it through the development process but is still extremely specialized. While it's 1000 times as strong as morphine and non- addictive, there are other considerations with such drugs. Dosing intravenously can cause extremely strong side effects, so the drug is dosed through a pump in the body directly into the spinal fluid. Obviously such an implant must be surgically installed into the patients spine first, which comes with risks of its own. The drug also can cause extreme neurological side effects such as hallucinations, delusions, and suicidal thoughts. For this reason it's contraindicated in those with a history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, or depression. For all these reasons, though it's available it's used as a drug of last resort. Oh and it's quite expensive as well, so it effectively is only available to those who can afford expensive medical treatments. Unfortunately it will still be some time before there are viable alternatives for moderate to severe pain
I think when a string "WEEK_NUM_START_MONDAY" given, it will be transformed into "%U_START_DAY" instead of "%W".

You might consider a whole-word matching.
This is a large-scale study (almost 10,000 participants), so results will be averaged.

I know from family experience that a curious but semi-supervised toddler with an iPad can advance 2 grade years for every 12 months of self-study by watching educational Youtube videos. It's really stunning to see a pre-school child read, write, do math and count money - essentially a functional adult after a year on Youtube.

Note that it's important to monitor their use for kids' toys "unboxing videos", which will imprint consumerism on them.

I was lucky to grow up with B&W non-cable TV, so did not understand what consumer "brand names" were until I was around 30 years-old. Meanwhile my co-workers were unconsciously singing commercial jingles - I was like, "What are you doing?"
Facebook whistleblower accuses the platform of a 'betrayal of democracy'
The environmental activists routinely being intimidated and murdered in the Amazon would like to dispute this.
Would this be a good way to avoid censorship. Encode an image by mixing it with a private key image, maybe xor the cells or something like that. Post online. Anyone with the key image can decode.
Do you work in distributed systems at a level where you understand their claims, and the significance of this work vs. a general dislike of their high level implementation choices? Not implying anything with the previous statement except that not all software people understand strict serializability, etc. in distributed systems. In this case, you need some understanding to critique the paper.

And if you do work in distributed systems at that level, please elaborate in detail what you're trying to refute, because it's all "I feel this should be bad. We need to be careful in trusting them!", which is unconvincing.
Sure. I am not talking about large things like chair lifts for stairs but rather small problems that cumulatively could drive a senior out of their home.

- Gutters. Being on a roof at 78 is not safe and contracting out gutter cleaning can be expensive. Some way to make gutters easier to empty/make them not require emptying. I imagine a robotic snake that wiggles through, but I am sure the real solution is more mundane.

- Small steps. Lots of little steps are casually put into homes. For example, the garage often has a step into the powder room or there is a step between the living room and the kitchen. Yes, you can put a small stool there, but it moves and isn't that stable and is still too high. What I want is a small ramp that they can shuffle up if they need to and is sturdy enough that it won't move and is thin enough at the top to fit under the door.

- Food prep. An automated way to stir a pot. Oven trays with easy to grasp sides. Automated peelers/choppers. The tasks which are hard on old hands or require stability.

- Social connection. Event info has moved online, but it is hard for them to access. I did a hackathon project on this where it was an Alexa skill for getting event info. Ideally there might be some rideshare integration as well.

- Cleaning. I find it crazy that humans still clean virtually every toilet. There has got to be a better way. Toilets are one of the hardest things for them because you have to get down on hands and knees.
In other news, observers note that the sun does indeed set in the west each day!
No that is not why. Some municipalities require Fire departments to staff paramedics on their trucks and private ambulance companies tend to use EMTs.
> Whoever spread that “death panels” meme should be forced to write America a check for five hundred billion dollars.

Something tells me Sarah Palin doesn't have that much money
> the San Bernardino case was a very intentionally public op to convince us that they will "fight" for our right to privacy

You’ve reversed cause and effect. Apple’s surprise at the backlash to their position on San Bernardino is well documented. It directly led to the softening of their stance on privacy.
He can choose as he likes; he can ascribe difficulty to difficult times if he likes, and he can assert that religion is useful at those times if he likes. He can choose to do as he likes.

I choose to not rely on a crutch of lies to navigate my path. I choose to live, and do good precisely because that is my choice - not in fear or jealous protection of some after-death reward.

I have lived through deaths of relatives. I have lived through the birth of children. The ache of sadness that cannot be assuaged, and the joy of new birth that cannot be measured are part and parcel of this thing called life.

To artificially limit that experience of living, for the sole purpose of imposing a patriarchal control structure that empowers the few at the expense of the many is not noble or social. It is in fact a terrible slavery that is willingly entered into by far too many. It is a generational mental straightjacket that only few have the keys to escape from. It is a horror.

So forgive me if I do not run, laughing and willing, towards the maw of religious doctrine and be swallowed whole, be made less than what I could be. Forgive me if instead I recoil in disgust and denial of the empowerment of others to dictate my life and how I live it, in order to serve their interests rather than my own. Forgive me if my reaction to this sermon on the mount is utter and complete rejection, as the opposite of everything I stand for and desire in life.

You are born. You live. You die. You are not special. Words I live by.
The firefighters are finding it hard to do their jobs because they're being called to help do chores for senior homes. That is what the whole article is about. It sounds to me like they wouldn't mind helping the elderly if it didn't prevent them from fulfilling their primary job of, you know, fighting fires.
This makes for an interesting thought experiment: purposefully combining oil rigs and pipelines with populated areas, so that in case something goes wrong humans get hit first. I imagine then we'd hold oil infrastructure maintenance to a higher standard than the appalling “monthly surface checks”.

Of course, it's idealistic and humans would never behave this way.
> inflation caused by government paying debts by (literally) printing money.

My understanding is that it was paying debts by buying the thing the debt was denominated in (gold?) by printing money. Which meant that as the early money printed caused some level of inflation, they then needed to print that much more to make the next payment.
I think they capture the feel of the black-and-white LCD digital watch world from before color display android everything ubiquity.
Workplace (the product) has nothing to do with this but it's the policy of Facebook (the company) to trust their employees to use any information responsibly to do their jobs (with the exception of user or HR data).
> A C API can called by every language under the sun.

And is usually only used as a last resort. I've lost count of the number of libraries reimplemented in different languages just to avoid using a C-style API at all.

> C is the lingua franca of computer science.

Is it? If you were to randomly draw a developer from the body of working programmers, how confident would you really be that they could competently write a good portable C program, or even write one at all? I certainly wouldn't put any money on it.

C++ is the preferred language of web browsers, interpreters, games/game engines, GUIs, heterogeneous programming frameworks, and every relevant C compiler.

And to reiterate, a C ABI is inherently more fragile than a C++ ABI simply due to the lack of name mangling, among other things. The fact that platforms choose to never touch their libc doesn't change that. But if you have to maintain a C library you will feel this.
Don't forget sales tax. You lose a lot on that when switching cars quickly.
Fires are down something like 95% over the last 40 years.

Why are firefighters involved in emergency care at all? Firefighters in basically all jurisdictions are just looting municipal budgets.

Privatize emergency response.
Maximum fdb cluster size is actually not that large, in host count terms, and the maximum practical size per host is similarly not large for the Apple scale, so they are almost certainly sharding objects across hundreds or thousands of clusters.

This has nice properties for blast containment.
And the other end of the spectrum you have companies that don’t bother to include it even if the cable/device would match the certification.
Or we could just you know, invest into this since all of us will be old some day and some of us may, even after a life time of contribution, could face unlucky circumstances that leave us alone in the end?

What's wrong with dignity for other people, I feel like trying to maximize for monetary profit is going to be our downfall.
And how would you define the months, literally months of BLM and etc protests in which many, many people participated in the burning of buildings, mass looting and other random destruction across a number of American cities before the Capitol uprising as you call it?
To expand on the sibling comment, Facebook has two classes of shares. Class A shares have one vote and are the shares that are traded on stock exchanges. Class B shares get 10 votes each and are held by Zuckerberg and friends. Zuckerberg has enough Class B shares that he really can't be outvoted by other investors.
> Is it really this hard to get a wise ruler who both cares about the well being of humans and can take the long term view? Someone who can tell fact from fiction.

Most of them "can", but the ones who "will" get weeded out early or are made out to be lepers (Ralph Nader comes to mind).
>The US can barely afford to school its children

You're the richest nation on earth.
You can afford it, the people who control the purse strings choose to use it on other shit that benefits themselves.
The worst part is the payment structure and how it doesn't allow real choice. If you told the 88 year old:

"We can (a) pay $500,000 on treatments that will likely extend your life 1 year, or (b) put $250,000 in a tax-advantaged account to put your great-grandchildren through college", I bet that 99% of those 88 year olds would take option B and take hospice care instead. They would all prioritize their children, grandchildren, etc!

But that's not the option... it's them, vs some nebulous national slush fund of cash where they and nobody they know gets no benefit out of being selfless. We should fix that.
Honestly a cheap boom mic is going to be the optimum of ease-of-use and noise input isolation.

There are plenty of fairly cheap earbuds with built-in boom mics, of varying quality.

If folks really have an aversion to over-ear headphones I'd suggest that direction.
Would you demonise a group that handed out free flamethrowers to everyone who walked past? They don't really care what people do with those flamethrowers, they just make them available. Maybe they have ads plastered on them so the more people carrying those attention grabbing flamethrowers the better.

It's basically the same argument that the people making tools available have no responsibility for what users do with them (which is BS). The tools of misinformation are out there and being widely used and Facebook made them available. It's important that they take responsibility for that.
So if I put something in a superconducting cavity, and seal it closed, then put that inside a vacuum chamber, and magnetically suspend the whole thing, the contents of that cavity break off into their own reality until the container is re-opened?

Interesting idea, seems like part of the plot device of the movie Primer.
I was a firefighter and EMT in Washington State about twenty years ago. On certain EMS calls we routinely dispatched an aid car (ambulance) and an engine to ensure enough crew (two from aid car, usually three on the engine) on scene to handle what might arise, such as the need for CPR, or getting a corpulent patient down a flight of stairs on a stair-chair.