skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Historically the UK has been bad for insulation/glazing/energy performance of our homes. In fact, there are ongoing protests at the moment by a group called "Insulate Britain" who want the government to mandate better standards to force older buildings to be upgraded.

Anywhere built and most places upgraded since the 90s should have at least double-glazing, but there are lots of older homes which still have single-pane windows and poor insulation in the roof and walls. Sometimes this is because the building is considered historic or in a "conservation area" (neighbourhood which is considered historic) and there are restrictions on what changes can be made, but often it's just because "that's how it is" here.

I now own a place with triple-glazed windows and doors, and this week when it's been around 12 degrees, I've had the doors open to let air in as it's too warm inside (up to 26 degrees), while my colleague who owns a Victorian-era house which has not been renovated since the 1960s has complained that he needs his heating on already.
That was something that confused me long time when growing up.

First I saw it mentioned in passing some American sitcoms, maybe in some movie, then in Usenet discussions etc. Combined with the "American style portions" in some restaurants, I developed a sense of awe when thinking Americans routinely taking shits that clog the toilet. So many, so big shits that their toilets have plungers.
One factor is simply that there are many more people who speak English than German in the world, and the same is true among the fraction of people who operate scams. But I'd imagine there are also some regulatory factors that make a difference.
Zuckerberg Loses $6B in Hours as Facebook Plunges
This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Have you been reading about this on Facebook?

J/K but the well of truth has indeed been poisoned hasn't it?
The USA has plenty of wood to make wood construction feasible, whereas that is more of a constrained resource. Japan has it bad in both ways: they are addicted to wood construction (quality is lower than even the USA) and have to import it all from Canada. But at least Japan is realistic about pricing in structure depreciation.
You can do EME in iOS Safari now, but it's wonky and not very well implemented and Netflix certainly wouldn't do it by choice.

You also can't do downloads in browser.
In comparison when i lived in Russia we had double glazing but the gap between the panes was about 9 inches wide.

We used to use the space as a make-shift freezer, worked great, 10/10.
Some clothing brands already take in used clothes for recycling (with rebates for future purchases to incentivise people)
This would only make it worse. The reason barely anyone in my environment uses WhatsApp is because they don't trust them. I doubt they would trust the US gov more than Facebook, these days.
>big stone or brick buildings

You must not live in a place where earthquakes are common. Stone and brick tends to crack and crumble in earthquakes. For earthquakes you want wooden houses that can flex and sway when the ground underneath starts moving.
Acoustic Guitar Instrumental Beat 2021
One of my pet theories is that flimsy homes reflect an economics signaling problem: it is hard to prove to a buyer the value of quality. Whereas size is easier. As a suburban home owner, I would have preferred the quality-square footage point to lean a bit more towards quality.
good. fuck this guy
Would you? What if the drones are carrying grenades?

I mean, I can see how it’s less than ideal, but I don’t think it’s safe to assume you’d do more harm than good.
Due to Brexit merchant fees in the UK are no longer capped.

Visa for example, plan to increase the interchange fee on digital payments made between European customers and British businesses from 0.3% to 1.5%. Other providers will surely follow.

Still lower fees than in the states but probably not for long.
I tried really hard to like Julia and it just isn't happening for me. Slow startup, bad documentation, fragmented ecosystem, poor error messages and stack traces, encouraging the use of unicode glyphs and operators... it's been a horrible beginner experience all while the Julia community keeps telling everyone (and each other) how amazing the language is. I'm not seeing it.
I would think "old school" air burst flak could be enough... you only need a thick enough cloud of shrapnel flying around.
How can we differentiate COVID and lockdown symptoms?
And some viruses are worse than others. Some will hide out in your spinal cord forever and make an appearance when you're under stress. If you've ever had to watch someone go through an outbreak of shingles... holy crap that looks miserable. I had Mono when I was 15 and still get what I take to be occasional, minor resurgences of that level of total body-wide exhaustion, every five years or so for a couple days. A friend who had mono confirmed that he experienced the same. It's a particular, very identifiable feeling throughout your body - not too different from the feeling after the second and third covid shots.
> Another weird observation is the flush performance of European toilets. They don't clog up:

They also don't flush. It's one of the most frustrating things of living in the UK as an expat. 2-3 flushes for solid waste is almost mandatory, and the issue always crops up at someone else's house.
As the article points out, it seems apple missed the ball with integration into other apps. I'm not completely certain, but I don't think apps have the capability to "hook-in" to Siri in any useful way. Apple's obsession with maintaining control means they never nurtured this kind of development.
Playing Battleships over BGP (2018)
Snapchat launches Run for Office portal to encourage users toward campaigns
if you (God forbid) have covid symptoms, you'll differentiate.
WA _is_ a better alternative to SMS and mail. Outs not the only one perhaps, but that doesn’t make that statement less true.
Why? I mean, the last time I recall someone faking a crime like that was Jussie Smollett and he only got hit with a $130k fine or thereabouts.

Which is a big deal, but hardly <<super>> serious jail time. The risk-reward here looks like it might be a bit skewed. $137 million is not a normal amount of money. It only looks like $130k if you ignore the logarithmic nature of the Hindu-Arabic number system.
If we're sharing anecdotes here, I've been enjoying my chronic tinnitus for close to 20 years. It has developed after a bad flu and then never left. It's not a thing you can get used to, at least I haven't been able to.
You can try "everything". A search tool that works very well for me.
Multiple dupes of this (from different sources) oldest and most commented discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28751538
I know several people who've contributed to Ardupilot who are 100% "hobby guys". I've modified Ardupilot (and BetaFlight and iNav) for my own hobby use (but nothing really worth or in a state to contribute back).

While it's true drone technology "could be used for harmful applications", that's also true for, say, compilers. Do you hold the gcc/clang developers to account for being "blind to the military applications of what they were making"? Or OpenStreetMap contributors? Or the engineers who designed the HiLux? Or the Casio F-91W watch designers? None of those were "designed for military application" yet all ended up being used for them.

Where does the line need to get drawn? between my rights to design/build/fly drones as a hobby, commercial/industrial rights to use drones for photography or cinematograpy or crop monitoring or search and rescue or shark surveillance at swimming beachs - and the need to restrict "military applications" of that?

Are people who, say, write blog posts explaining how to use microcontroller RTOS libraries for hard real time guarantees, with mentioned examples like nuclear power plant control "blind to the military applications of what they're making"? (Yeah, sorry. I profile stalked you a little there...)
Yeah, that's kinda sus.
Am I the only one who thinks Siri "just works" as it should?

Sure it's far from perfect, but it almost never failed me to call or text someone, ask about weather, take a note/reminder, switch the lights using my smart outlet, or to set an alarm (my personal highest use-case).

Sure it could do more, but I don't thik it didn't "figure out the job".
In Sweden we often build ‘stick frame’ as is common in the US and shown in the pictures in the article. But we somehow manage to do it much more ruggedly than in the US, and finish with better materials and triple glazing and so on. We usually use vertical plank on the outside (vinyl is unheard of).

I’m very interested in building, have done major renovations and am embarking on a self build project so I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos showing American construction. And it’s like the same as we use nowadays in the Nordics, but flimsier. And this is my subjective opinion, but uglier.

Of course some parts of the US have to contend with heat and termites and things, but there is plenty of the US that is equiv climate to Sweden.
I don't agree with the article at all. New materials and houses in Europe are built using wood and other derived products from wood, plastics and so on. Only a tiny fraction of the house is built on concrete. Having said so, some of the arguments to me are fit on Survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias. I'm a big follower of builers in Youtube and the amount of things that are done today in USA when building houses is quite impressive.
The reality is exactly the opposite. The media has so overblown the risk of COVID that 41% of Democrats now believe that you have a greater than 50% chance of being hospitalized if you contract it:

https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...

>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"

Why this matters is that an over-estimation of the risk for low-risk demographics has led to behavioral patterns that are net harmful. For example, the climate of fear around COVID has maybe reduced the very minute risk the virus poses to children (0.003% IFR, or about equivalent to the risk of dying if stung by a bee), at the cost of an unprecedented rise in childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."

The response to COVID, with respect to children, is going to cause far more deaths in the long run than it mitigates.
Mine is the opposite - my career slowing down my life with my kids.
Epic Motivational Music Mix
Same here in NZ - the main thing that makes it easy is that we have absolutely no deductions, if I have one employer my tax will likely be done perfectly. If I want I can go online with the IRD and fill out my tax form (my W2 equivalents are available), it's probably worth doing if I've had 2 jobs, if I don't the govt will do it for me and send me refund if I have one coming.

I run a small biz, I do PAYE on a simple spreadsheet, then type the results onto an IRD web page, takes me less than 10 minutes a month.
n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?

If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.
My guess would be that there are enough natural catastrophes which make it cheaper to build a house from scratch than a sturdy house.
There was a conference talk roughly ten years ago which talked about houses and joked about people not knowing the tale of the three little pigs.
This might be helpful for some context:

"Affecting approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population, hypochondria has no specific cause, but is often found in people who have had previous experience with a serious illness, especially in childhood"
(source: https://www.everydayhealth.com/anxiety/understanding-hypocho...)

Not disputing/arguing whether Long Covid exists or how bad it could be since I'm not qualified to. But just remarking that there are plenty of people out there who regularly think they're sick/have symptoms anyway.
> I assume like most things the builders are customer driven and clearly there is no market for it in many places?

I'm no expert but I understand it's regulation-driven. The building codes for European houses are much stricter and specify materials, etc.
"I worked with a network engineer who misconfigured a router that was connecting a bank to it's DR site. The engineer had to drive across town to manually patch into the router to fix it.
DR downtime was about an hour, but the bank fired him anyway."
so prod wasn't down and he fixed it in a hour and they fired the guy who knew how to fix such things so quickly. Idiot manager at the bank.
One of these drones in the second video is pretty much upside down as far as I can see.
This is something that's hard to talk about because it's both painful for patients to hear, and legitimately controversial due to shortage of data.

There doesn't seem to be a syndrome here. There's a handful of different symptoms, and they mostly don't occur together. There's certainly long-term symptoms, and mostly correlated with disease severity. You have long-term effects of hypoxia, and long term effects of lung damage, which you see in a significant number of patients who had severe disease. The hypoxia from untreated covid infection causes all sorts of multiple organ damage. This is entirely uncontroversial and well-understood.

In addition, there is some kind of likely autoimmune response, which is sometimes triggered by covid, sometimes goes away after vaccination, and has very variable severity and duration. This is really poorly understood, and seems to be similar to CFS. It is more frequent in more severe cases, but not exclusive to them (just rare for low-severity cases).

On top of that, there's an increased level of anxiety and depression in patients, but there's not enough data here to exclude a population effect. Anxiety and depression has jumped on a population level in covid-affected regions regardless of infection status.

Now, while having any long-term effect is common, having any particular long-term effect is rare, and multiple effects coinciding is both rare and strongly correlated with disease severity. My opinion is that treating these three categories of long-term effects as a syndrome is wrong, and trying to treat them as if they're the same thing is going to lead to worse patient outcomes.

There's a huge problem with this however - "long covid" is a patient-preferred term for a reason - it gets taken seriously. Those that have done the research on CFS know that patients with CFS get ignored and shrugged at for decades, and know if they lose the "long covid" wave of interest in the biomed/research/practitioner community they're screwed for the foreseeable future. Which is why patients insist on long-term post-covid effects being seen as a syndrome, and attack anyone who questions this (I have personally been attacked verbally about expressing this opinion). And I get it. CFS patients have been left alone in the dark for far too long, just like several other poorly understood diseases that systematically get ignored, mis-treated, or patients accused of making it up (see also: fibromyalgia, depression, a number of cognitive disorders in history). "long covid" is getting a fresh look at by the medical community, and this is a source of hope that it's mean to destroy. But reality doesn't care about whether it's mean, and I believe in reality we're dealing with a number of entirely separate syndromes that need to be treated very differently from each other, and bunching them together is distorting both the conversation and the treatments.
> In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens.

Last time I checked everything but private use was against their TOS. Other than that this sounds like a horrible situation the government should be blamed for.
This is a civil case. Juries are only for criminal cases.
I have never found this even with heavy workloads. There are usually two buttons, one for narrow bandwidth, and another for full-spectrum flushing.
Gotta press the right button, not the water-saving button.
Ah, the old ‘vaccinations will prevent mutations’ fantasy.

Even if you believe it is possible to vaccinate the entire human population world wide and that vaccinations prevent infections, covid spreads through animal reservoirs. Are you suggesting we can vaccinate all animals?
Insurely | Full-time | Onsite | Stockholm, Sweden | Software Engineer, All levels | https://insurely.se

Insurely is a platform in the open insurance space. We are aiming to challenge the insurance industry
through our open insurance platform and products. We have a lot of exciting challenges ahead and are
rapidly growing, especially within the tech side of the organization. Since it's still in the
early stages you'd play a central role in our tech-team and have a lot of impact and responsibility
on both the product as well as the technical choices we'd make.

Essentially we provide standardized APIs to collect your insurance policies, to be used in sales flows or
to help you get a better understanding of your insurance situation.

Our tech stack:
- Java / Spring boot, NodeJS + Typescript, Javascript + React
- Terraform
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Apply: https://careers.insurely.se, or e-mail me on jesper [at] insurely.se
That sounds like the company's problem, not yours, although being evidently a conscientious sort I can see why you'd take it as your own.

If your company has a risk register, this is an important item to add, and if not it's time to make one.
It’s only a conspiracy theory when people I don’t like say it.
I'd just say that you had an address for Facebook in your address book. The page somehow vanished and you don't know their address any more. So you start phoning other people and knocking on their door to try and find what their address is. Everyone else is doing this and no one knows what their address is. So you've got millions of people phoning each other and knocking on doors.

Facebook being down was already an issue, but everyone phoning and knocking on doors was causing disruption to everyone else.
I know someone who, six months later is still struggling to balance, suffering with cognitive problems as well as chronic recall and speech problems. We can differentiate between Long Covid and "lockdown symptoms" because nobody suffers any of these by staying indoors more often than usual and having a reduced social life.
Actually they do, for the most use cases. Sending messages, performing certain actions like switching things are the biggest use cases for most 3rd party apps for regular users. For the rest (power users), adding a Siri shortcut within the app almost covers every possible scenario.
Two things.

One, houses are built out of the most abundant/cheap materials. In some places this is literally concrete. In North America it is lumber.

Two. The construction cost of the house follows that of the land. Cheap land, cheap construction (relatively).

An anecdote. This has happened twice now with different visitors from my old country (Germany). I tour them around and show them exactly how houses are built here. In one case, the construction was so shoddy that there were holes in the exterior sheathing where they had slipped when cutting something with a chainsaw. In the other case, the construction was, by North American standards, quite good and solid, and the people building the house were happy to let us tour inside (two of my visitors in this case were construction carpenters).

In both cases, after showing them how houses are built, I then took them to a model home. And in both cases they were absolutely floored by the luxury and wished they could have a house like that in Germany. Houses there may be solidly built, but they don't have, say, a huge basement with only minimal support columns and 8+ foot ceiling. Or a master bedroom with luxurious ensuite, walk-in closets and nearby laundry room. Or a family room with 12 foot high windows. When everything is tradition bound, flights of fancy like this don't happen at this price point.
Yes, within the context of this conversation it's obviously the concept Roadster presented recently.

Oddly enough you decided to anchor yourself on the Roadster, even if you dismissed it (despite making no sense), you'd still have the Semi-Truck, and Truck... what are those? Production vehicles?
Exactly! Gosh, I never understood why placing a bathroom next to the bedroom - the first and last room you visit everyday - is such a foreign idea to german architects...
Or else? You will angrily stamp your foot? Start an e-petition?
> Some guy says it's overblown and this is ranking on HN?

The guy quoted for said statement is a professor of medicine of a reputable university, so he does have the authority thing sorted out.

Also, I feel the quote means something different than the original interpretation. After reading the article, it seems that John Bell simply states that a) long Covid is "more complicated than people assume", and b) it's incidence is lower than initial (and conservative) estimates.

The article mentions that "half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it."

And that's pretty much it.

There is no harm in improving our understanding of the real world effects of a disease.
If you try doing that in a company that has any sense, you'll be stopped right in your tracks. If it's allowed, then even if conspiring you just made a huge point.
As a guy who played very loud music for many years, I can relate. Until you said this I was sitting here in silence out in the country listening to frogs and now all I hear is that high whine. I think like a lot of other shit I just learn to tune it out.
It’s definitely technically possible to have secondary’s on a separate network that do zone axfr from the primary. That’s not to imply it’s trivial / easy at FB’s scale (query volume) or topology complexity (as in GSLB).
> Many ISPs have a local monopoly over broadband access.

Not outside of the US, and net neutrality was still considered important.

If my ISP blocked Netflix tomorrow I've got 5G coming into my house and the choice of twenty competing ISPs. I still think the entire company should get dismantled if they were stupid enough to do that from a regulatory POV.
Most people in China don't believe me when I tell that most Americans are living in wooden houses. More or less the same in Russia.

People keep thinking that what they see in movies is some kind of massive stage set, or something.
Those would cost an absolute fortune (and I’m sure they exist on the ultra high end in the US). Typical American home construction seems to be ~100usd/sqft; Germany appears to be 2-3000eur/sqm.

And very (IMO pointlessly) big houses are currently in vogue in the US; there’d probably be limited market for moderate sized houses of high quality construction vs 3000sqft houses of cheap construction.