skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pretty cool, from a "check-in-self-serve-here" perspective.

In contrast, in Quebec Canada, the QR codes are issued to people once they get vaccinated, and contain the person's name and vaccination(s) statuses, and digital signature by the issuer directly in the QR code.

The government then published 2 apps on the app stores:
* App for users to easily host the QR code (instead of email/PDFs/etc), but more importantly:
* App for businesses to scan the user-presented QR code and validate the signature, to allow into the premises (after also checking a photo ID to ensure person face matches ID and ID name matches name in QR code)

The above is because some businesses, like sit-down restaurants (even if eating on the terrace), are required to ensure patrons are fully vaccinated.

I don't know if the "scan" app also remembers who it scans for contact-tracing purposes or not - but there's a separate contact-tracing app for that, also published by the government, that uses iOS's and Android's contact-tracing facilities.
Thanks!

That’s true, the business name could be uppercase, but it feels suboptimal to be changing text displayed to users (and shouting at them). It would drop the final version from 5 to 4.
IIRC Italy had a similar issue, where authorities initially tried to encourage gatherings to downplay Covid and made public events themselves for PR, there was a "Milan doesn't stop" campaign, etc - while (in hindsight) those were the key weeks where very rapid spread was happening, causing thousands of deaths afterwards
Oh. I didn't think I would need to ever point to the 'is it a meteorite?' [0] flowchart. I guess how hard you have to fake depends on who you are convincing. Slag can fool your friends, but anyone who studies or collects meteorites will probably require some multi stage metallurgical process to convince.

[0] https://geoscience.unlv.edu/what-to-do-if-you-think-that-you...
All important points, enzyme proteins are quite temperature sensitive
The only 'signature' one could expect is from flanking sequences. Some viruses, transposons, and bacteria leave such sequence, but it is not universal. And we're talking about organisms here, whole genomes of many mega/giga-bases vs. viruses of mere kilobases. Even knowing what to look for, it can be quite difficult: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940375/

In a lab setting, a simple restriction digest and recombination can yield a modification with no signature, or else you can generate SNPs with PCR. And you would want to, as viral genomes are so small, often with overlapping ORFs, that you don't have much room to leave a bunch of junk around.

There is no signature. What we can do is look at sequence similarity and decide how probable or improbable a given sequence combination is from the viral genome sampling available. It's a lot of handwavy Bayesian statistics, based on incomplete sampling.
Maybe a rock hurtling at terminal velocity straight towards your head (approximately) makes some interesting high frequency sound waves that only dogs can hear?
Dogs definitely have some sort of “sixth sense” or are very attuned to the environment.

Tons of reports of dogs waking their humans prior to impending but hard to detect dangers such as earthquakes…
This is mitigated somewhat by having integration tests (which shine in migration-like situations like this despite their many other problems). You can write tests that defend you from some of the breakages at Google and guarantee they will be run.
> I have never worked for an employer where it was obvious that everyone was only out for themselves.

I guess you mustn't have worked for very many employers. Or at least not in the USA. The sentiment is endemic where I am in Houston, TX and previously in CA
> You've got to be in a serious intellectual bubble to be thinking that most people are carefully considering the options and making the best choices for themselves

It's risky to dismiss people that make different choices than you as idiots not being able to make the best choices for themselves. 'Best' here is entirely relative.

For example, I know (in real life), folks that are making the choice to not submit to vaccine mandates because that aligns with their principals which is a preferred choice for them than surviving into old age. It is utter arrogance to argue they are not making the best choice for themselves.
Are you assuming grid-scale storage exists and is deployed widely in your scenario?
I think you are missing the point.

Yes, lying governments don't deserve to be trusted. It is still unfortunate that the damage done may be so severe that for some people it will be irreparable. This isn't an absolution of the establishment, or a condemnation of those who lost trust.

Increased barriers to developing better establishments in the future are still regrettable.
Eh, if you want an airgapped phone, use it in airplane mode. Obviously, the phone needs some network infra for things like updates or timekeeping. You can route it over vpn if you want and you can build everything yourself and host all the servers yourself too if you so prefer. This type of pedantry is more harmful than useful to casual users who would be far better served with grapheneos than some non-existent ideal phone.
funny. I literally just wrote I wished Unity was more in line with blender. I often find myself in awe as how amazing blender UI is, and how artists approach is different than average programmer's approach.

if I may suggest a few tips:
-use spacebar to open command search box. I wish more software had this.
-use hotkeys rather than menus.
-when you use an operator you can see additional options at the bottom bar.
-blender is based on operators and context. once you get used to the fact whatever you do is based on where your mouse is, it actually makes a lot more sense than traditional software where hotkeys are pretty much global.
> Sorry but that’s a lousy argument.

> MacBooks are most performant

Huh? MacBooks have the same performance as corresponding Windows laptops. That only slightly changed with M1, but it doesn't seem anything to do with vertical integration, and rather just the result of buying out 5nm production.

Also there is complete lack of models with Nvidia GPUs, so they are a lackluster in graphics.
I did mean paternalism, thank you for the correction.

I agree with you that nudging can certainly be a tool to realize outcomes.

I seem to have a disagreement with you in that it seems obvious to me that governments across the world have zero to offer in the way of visions for a future that are at all positive for me personally, my family, my community.

I think our institutions are not worthy of trust, and I think there is ample evidence that every major institutional category is captured and serves the interests of a tiny elite. You said 'mask off' in your earlier comment, and I think that's interesting because from where I'm sitting the mask is off, but it's the rulers' masks--they clearly view the common citizenry as a threat and a nuisance, and their goals have nothing to do with our wellbeing. Whatever stated goals they have are two-faced and half-hearted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

The Sylacauga meteorite fell on November 30, 1954, at 12:46 local time (18:46 UT) in Oak Grove, Alabama, near Sylacauga. It is commonly called the Hodges meteorite because a fragment of it struck Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges (1920–1972).
Yeah, by mass. Look into the actual dollar numbers. It’s not economically viable to feed human-edible soy to cattle. There are much cheaper food sources. Cows just get the scraps (which outweigh the human-destined product). It’s not grown “for cattle” in the sense that cattle have essentially zero effect on the amount of soy that gets grown. https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/soy
That would be politically problematic because of our relations with Russia. Also, the tundra is going to thaw soon.
The US military probably thinks so, but I believe a major goal of NIF is the ability to model whether the ones the US already built will still work without setting one off.
I thought "potent" was a term referring to the strength of a particular composition of a particular drug. I thought "powerful" was the term that you could use to compare one drug to another, irrespective of dose.

Have I got it back-to-front?
When the cine shills and bots haven't figured out what the new script is yet...
Havana Syndrome Hits at Least 5 U.S. Families Connected to Embassy in Colombia
NFTs can be anything, so the potential future use cases may be extremely diverse, but let's limit ourselves to the current main narrative, which is art.

Optimistically, NFTs give artists and photographers a new channel to sell their work without being constrained too much by middle men. As an example, photographers often try to monetize using stock agencies, whom fully dictate terms and give them pennies, whilst keeping most of the resell value themselves.

As such, NFTs offer less gatekeepers, less or no cut on revenue, as well as new technical possibilities. The artist has far more control, and thus economic freedom. At least potentially.

As to whether this actually leads to artists more successfully monetizing is another question entirely. Too soon to tell.
https://archive.ph/wip/hvUgF
> But here are a few questions for you and others to consider. Insurance will pay for chiropractic treatment most of the time. Why?

It's popular.

> Another question worth pondering: people go back to chiropractors for repeated treatment

It feels good and they think it helps. But people are very bad at judging whether treatments are effective. That's why we need double-blind placebo controlled trials. And chiro fails those.
Ah, gotcha. I thought I recognized the prefixes from Organic, but I don't think I've seen it used like this here. Neat!
Obviously the decay effects on finances aren’t seen for a while. However Adobe is currently around a top 25-30 company in the US by market cap. Their profits and revenue are enormous nowadays.

The decay is glacial at best right now.
Wouldn’t be too hard to extract the files out of the installer and install it yourself with a companion program and just hot link the installer. No clue why they didn’t just do that.
I find that the codes will in fact scan if you use a third party QR app. Luckily, the URL will open directly to the Service NSW app's sign in page, so whoever was in charge of that got something right.

I can't wait to see how dreadful the vaccination passport apps will be. With the current "digital certificate" being a pdf with zero security, it is sure to be laughable.
Ask HN: Any Artists on HN?
just out of curiosity, I wonder how many people here use Blender, Unity, Unreal or other tools, and for what purpose.

let's have a discussion :)
PTE Summarize Written Text – Tips and Templates
It’s a damn religion at this point. The masks most people wear do basically nothing. Wearing an effective mask (for some value of “effective”) is not comfortable at all!
This page describes what is or isn't supported.

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/postgresql/overview
Is Sucking Carbon Out of the Air the Solution to Our Climate Crisis?
For what it's worth, HN throttles the opinions it doesn't like. And you're clearly not looking hard enough for me to consider that you're arguing your case in good faith. Bye.
Sure, and there are also billions (?) of photos of the Mona Lisa, countless fakes, drawings, scribbles, desktop wallpapers, and posters sold.

The owners of those things aren't holding priceless art they can resell but they do definitively OWN those things despite their value generally being at or close to $0. It's the same for NFTs and your example proves my point.

It's never been about the image, it's about the provenance.

At least in recent history, visual content has always been copyable, and digital content PERFECTLY copyable, but NFTs are unique in that they attach an easily verifiable ownership record to digital content, much like physically holding something provides ownership in the real world to complement the physical characteristics.

I don't see anyone in this post's comments calling for the end of paper because someone used it to print a photograph of the Mona Lisa and someone could potentially try to sell it (although I imagine some people argued this when photographs came about).

New mediums have always started their lives looking like copies of old mediums.
Nothing. But the utility it provides is a unification layer for heterogeneous data sources to enable ad-hoc queries on the consumer side.
The NFT space is pretty interesting.

I've got some friends who are modeling the CryptoPunks prices with machine learning over at https://deepnftvalue.com

Pretty interesting stuff. These asset prices behave pretty exotically.
Implement and manage tiered pricing and features in SaaS apps
In the case of earthquakes, dogs can detect compression waves which travel faster than the stronger and more destructive transverse waves. In the case of a meteorite it is harder to imagine a plausible mechanism. As most meteorites are supersonic, it's not possible for any waves to arrive at their destination before they do.

[UPDATE] Reading some of the other comments it occurred to me that this particular meteorite was probably traveling at terminal velocity, and was thus sub-sonic. So it's possible a dog could hear its approach.
Looks like most of the force of the impact was absorbed by the rafter and then it deflected off into the room.
The voters of those left-wing parties identify as "left" so if a Rush Limbaugh encourages people to distrust the "left" then those voters simply distrust Rush Limbaugh instead of altering their vote. Otherwise, if he covers Left-1 party with shit, Left-2 gains voters; if he points out a scandal in Left-2, Left-1 gains voters; if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely Left-3 that opposes Left-1 and Left-2 on that policy, but he won't convince them to vote for a Right party if there are reasonable Left options. Unlike the two-party scenario where you might disagree with your "main" party on a single key issue and thus feel forced to vote for "the other" party, in a multi-party environment you generally choose an alternative that's quite close in other aspects as well.
> bar-headed geese have been doing it since before there was a mountain range there

The Himalayas formed fifty millions years ago. Geese apparently appeared ten million years ago. How would this be possible?
Wisconsinites plan to sue “every school board” that ignores CDC’s Covid advice
> About 1500.

Nope. Average charge load for a windmill is ~35%, vs. over 90% for NPPs. Thus, you would need roughly thrice as many, and that in places with alternating winds – otherwise you would just get blackouts.
I really like Type Driven Development in Idris but that's a little more serious (it's things you can do in production!). But my all time favourite writing ever is https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
finally. just few days ago saw a discussion on HN about python and gil. I'm glad some work is being done.

well played
I went to Buffalo Grove High School in this same district and graduated many years ago. At the time no IPTV systems or EPIC bell systems were in place. However, as soon as I walked in my freshman year I noticed the 'teacher' WiFi was only using MAC Address Filtering. One minute scan and a spoof later I was poking around to discover a whole lot was visible from this privileged network. “...From the results, we found various devices exposed on the district network. These included printers, IP phones... and even security cameras without any password authentication!” It was even worse back then. It was all exposed on wide open WiFi!

My senior prank was going to revolve around the printers. We were shocked to discover every printer not just in BG but across the entire district was accessible with no authentication of any kind. We cooked up ideas and were planning to print either porn or I has cheezburger/lolcat memes via telnet (I'm dating myself.)

Ultimately I got into other trouble before we could execute and figured this wasn’t worth not graduating over. I moved on and so happy to see a much better prank on this same network happen so many years later with almost no repercussions. Congratulations and great prank!
Roads aren't badly designed because no one has "reported" them. Improving roads for pedestrians needs to be a priority for politicians, instead of convenient commuting by cars. And for that to happen, voters need to see the world like it is: drivers run over pedestrians.
Fusion plants cannot be 100x bigger.

The grid doesn't cope well with current 2GWe plants going offline suddenly. It would not cope at all with a 200GWe plant doing that.

Besides the waste heat dissipation issues...
All this. Plus TI-86 king fu. Though this was 1991-1995, IoT didn’t exist and email and web access was mostly through AOL or Prodigy.
Scents and Sensibility (1992)
Interesting, I haven't noticed writing style being especially challenging. Mostly because I'm not a native english speaker and read a lot of fantasy/sci-fi/etc books in english. They _all_ start off like "and then gromulars grokled grampors and fiddled fibbles flamboyantly" for several chapters. Then two things start to happen at the same time -- 1: author gets tired of introducing new things in fancy ways and goes on with the plot, and 2: reader slowly gets used to terms and concepts that are relevant enough to be used in the rest of the book.
I don't buy into this level of moral relativism.

Sure they might have different principles than me. So do people who support child marriage in India.

I have no qualms about outlawing child marriage though. Maybe that is ultimately relative and maybe it is western arrogance. I'm fine with it.
Yeah that's a trade off we have - without the app installed scanning the QR code yields "No usable data found".
They achieve the same goal, but cockroachDB usually relies on the NTP and Spanner makes use of specialized clocks on Google datacenter to be able to sync the multiple instances.
I don't know if you're aware, but that law (known as NetzDG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act) does a lot more than what you described. It requires social networks to delete "obviously illegal" posts within 24 hours of receiving a complaint, or face a €5 million fine per offense.

What social network will risk such a fine to keep a single post?

> I am honestly surprised that style of enforcement isn't more common internationally.

Probably because the NetzDG considered incompatible with both the German constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights (but the European Commission illegally does not allow access to their legal assessment regarding that law), and is opposed by many human rights groups, including Reporters Without Borders and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression.
I can appreciate that this is a "Reproduced Snapshot". I don't see anywhere that clarifies what it means, but I assume that this means it's not a simple copy/paste of text, nor a screenshot.

The reason for avoiding both of those is to avoid passing through watermarking that can reveal how the data was leaked.

Text can be watermarked by including unicode characters that look identical to ASCII characters or including invisible characters like zero-width spaces. Copy-pasting text will keep those characters.

Images from screenshots can be watermarked by having subtly differently colored pixels, subtle differences in text spacing, etc.
I once met a man who was intimately familiar with the details of the linux kernel and how the new chiplet architecture in AMD processors resembles a NUMA architecture and thus impacts VM performance. He was well versed in shell scripting, k8s, docker, the principles of observability, and infrastructure as code. He could explain the difference between READ COMMITED and REPEATABLE READ or LSTMs or distributed consistency models off the top of his head. He didn't have a CS degree so obviously he wasn't as intelligent as me, but even so I found him a little intimidating for some reason.

But then I asked him -

"Given an array of positive integers target and an array initial of same size with all zeros.

Return the minimum number of operations to form a target array from initial if you are allowed to do the following operation:

Choose any subarray from initial and increment each value by one.

"

He was stumped. As I had suspected, he wasn't quite up to the job of an SRE. I immediately failed him and returned to editing my networking.yaml file. Someone has to maintain the bar around here..
> "But the workers had seen a meteorite, or a falling star, explode and there was a couple of booms"

Dogs don't really like 'booms'.
Wow - I did NOT see this coming.

Crazy - and GREAT!

Cloud Spanner in my mind was always "cool" - but I never saw myself understanding how to use it.

I think for folks bridging from something like postgresql, this could also make spanner more accessible.

My own use cases can all be handled so simply with postgresql I don't see needing the spanner scale, but for others perhaps valuable.
Some people have (kinda) learnt to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_breathing
Nice! Having documents programmatically generating the codes from the underlying data is definitely much nicer and more editable than hard-coding static images (I say this even after writing the blog post that does ridiculous things with SVGs in order to avoid JS, ah well).

For these particular posters, I suspect they’re generated in HTML/JS that the business can then print in their browser (or generated directly as a PDF, but I’ve seen some posters that have the classic printed-from-web-page header and footer with URL etc).

There’s a lot of businesses in NSW/Australia, and all the posters are near identical. Thus, they wouldn’t be hand-crafted each time, and programmatically inserting a custom code into a word document would be a … surprising implementation decision (to me).
Flexibility. A roof will apply substantial stopping force to a fast moving object over a very short distance until the roof breaks. (And bit more as the broken piece of roof accelerates.). A pillow or mattress will deform a lot without breaking, so the smaller stopping force will be applied over a much larger distance.

(Energy change = force times distance)
This sort of mixes up a number of issues:

The whole git/mercurial thing is, as I understand it, related to the extensibility of the systems. Mercurial is hackable and extensible in ways that matter, git isn't (or at least wasn't)

The one version policy only really matters for third party dependencies. If you're making a change to a library that is entirely within the monorepo, you can do a three phase migration (add the new functionality, migrate users, deprecate the old functionality). Google is exceedingly efficient at this, and the vast majority of the time these migrations can be done without any effort by local owners.

For third party deps, you can't usually do that, but there's a workaround[2].

I also think that this post and the one here[1] are amusingly both on the front page at the same time. This one decrying the exact sort of mandate based approaches that "make SRE scale".

Also worth mentioning that

> The person making the new API is expected to change client code to match, but is not responsible for ensuring the change does not break the client.

Is just explicitly untrue. There are policies that are clear about this (this generally comes down to "we cannot break your tests, but if it isn't tested, we can't know we broke it")

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825352

[2]: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/oneversion/#tempor...