skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its been a week to decompress from the hyperbolic headlines of last week, but this is still not enough time to answer the important questions.

* How transmissible is Omicron?

* Are Omicron infections milder, or more severe?

* Can Omicron become dominant in this Delta environment?

* How much can Omicron evade the vaccine-immunity and/or natural-immunity?

These are the only questions people should care about, and it seems like none of these questions have an answer yet.

-------

So I guess... lets wait another week and see if people have good answers to these questions. And if we don't have answers on Dec. 9th, then we will wait another week for Dec. 16th.
> should make the idea of evolution a lot easier for some in various communities to finally grasp

Only if the members of those communities are receptive to re-evaluating their ideas and changing their minds.
Thank you for your feedback.
I think codigo.so can be good for non-English speaking students trying to learn to code.

For the HN audience it doesn't add much value.
The lava layer anti-pattern springs to mind, where the new tech becomes another quirk of the old tech.
News we can use (as home video consumers):

"Very often, the streamed audio is a compressed version that you wouldn't get on a Blu-ray," Mangini explains:

"On Blu-ray, if you select 7.1, that is our full fidelity, 48 kilohertz, 24-bit master audio, just as it came from the mixing studio. You can get that on a Blu-ray, and you can get that on certain premium platforms. I think you have to pay extra money for that.
Thanks, that was an interesting video. I had to rely on auto-translated subtitles but from the little Dutch I can understand, it seems like they got the gist across.

Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet, we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big differences between different countries based on ICU capacity, but we saw the same story everywhere (regional overload around the peak of a wave), with a few minor differences (whether some patients are transferred within the country or to other countries). Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.

High total number notwithstanding though, our ICU capacity actually decreased during the pandemic, see:

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

The graph under "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten" shows total capacity (light blue) + emergency reserve (green), dark blue is occupied beds. There was a pretty sharp drop-off in the total capacity a year ago, and a slower decrease all throughout 2021. Apparently, that's mostly due to nurses quitting in droves since the pandemic made their already bad working conditions even worse.

Our politicians didn't lift a finger to prevent or revert this, and now they're blaming a minority for this massive, massive failure. Just makes me really angry, I'll take downvotes for that if I have to :)
I think it's probably more related to the move to HDR content. Modern movies/tv are shot and edited with HDR in mind. HDR usually has much more granular control over the brightness within a scene, not just that one part can get super bright.

That's great for people with TV's capable of that type of playback, but for everyone else, tough luck unless you have a blacked-out home theatre room to watch all you casual TV in.

I saw a great example of this in a recent LTT video[0] of a cheap "HDR" TV. The shadows all blended together and the highlights just looked like a flat white instead of a very lightly shadowed sparkle.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHwYMwXX88
Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.
Same, I live in a small house by American standards and would willingly live in 1/4 the space if it meant I could easily move to somewhere like Tokyo.
> Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.

You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?
that’s a very good point about pricing happening at the margin, but consider that housing isn’t nearly as fungible as laundry detergent, so there is still a fair bit of pricing friction in housing. that’s because the marginal pricing mechanism occurs at the sub-segment of truly comparable properties (that normalized measures like $/ft^2 can’t capture) not all properties in a locality.
LA will never run out of water; it's not the major water user in CA state and it has a huge body of potentially drinkable water next to it and the cash to use it.
This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium.

Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
I watched Tenet at home with subtitles, and had no problem with it. Between wife going "what are they saying?" halfway thru many movies, and getting kids to read fast, subtitles are just left on all the time now. I'm a bit annoyed at my own propensity to stare at them instead of the action, but it's better than "wait, what?".
That explains why I get beach ball of death in my macOS. Sometime it just hang indefinitely and I was wondering why this behavior exist in Vivaldi. I thought it was a bad memory leak.
Video sounds like a calibration issue, streaming issue, or just a poor TV. Generally only OLED and Plasma are good at showing dark scenes due to very high contrast ratios. On everything else dark scenes just become a washed mess. Another issue is bitrate - dark scenes need very high bitrates to preserve detail. Streaming services almost across the board destroy dark detail (for a counter-example, see Meridian on Netflix, but most of Netflix's streams are not great in this regard).

If you care about it, Blu-ray and OLED should give you excellent dark scene detail.
It may have been possible to contain it early on. Way too late now. It's here to stay forever, with new strains constantly evolving.
To be fair, since the minimum rent time of these instances in the cloud is 24h, chances are even a cloud-provided instance is unused for quite some time.
Probably (and I'm guessing, not the author here) took a snapshot of the data and hardcoded that to be sent to the client instead of live data.
> people are ok with being wealthy.

Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs.

Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?

Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respect to the evolution of groups and cultures (meta groups).
There’s not even evidence for reincarnation “on Earth” in the Bible anyways so not sure what the OP is going on about.

I do think it is a useful exercise to imagine yourself in the future though. It’s much easier when you have children to be connected to the future.
My employer really wants to use this. The IT department dislikes supporting Apple hardware and software. But...we have a product that needs to end up in the Apple App Store. They tried to convince the iOS engineers that it would be fine to work in a virtualized environment (and cheaper), but we really were not convinced that would be workable in the long run. I was willing to give it a shot, but the effort eventually fizzled out, likely over Amazon's costs.
‘Ghost Signs’ Haunt London’s Reviving Neighborhoods
Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason?

It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
To my knowledge no booster is approved for use within 6 months of another shot, and 6 months is overkill unless you're extremely high risk, e.g. in the "still wiping down door dash deliveries with bleach wipes" kind of high risk.
Because the media/political narrative is to sustain continual panic. If you state that "the new strain is more contagious but the symptoms are basically the same as a common cold" then the panic will subside. Be we immediately saw even greater panic and now even more "containment" actions that further disrupt society. Despite there being no evidence that it's more virulent. In fact, the evidence seems to be that it's much less virulent.

If this new strain is basically a common cold, then it's in our best interest for it to spread as quickly as possible. And that's normally what viruses do, they get less virulent. The vaccines have obviously failed at slowing the spread and have put evolutionary pressure on the virus to evade the very specific spike protein that the vaccines contain. If we all get broader protection, then this thing will be over without the need for liberty-crippling mandates.

Instead, it's almost impossible to get any sort of sober analysis of how this variant's symptoms differ from other variants.
If the current state of Covid is not acceptable and it is determined that the disease needs to be eradicated, these vaccines aren't enough. We will have to start elimination of reservoir animal colonies near human civilization at a global scale. Go into bat habitats with flamethrowers. The vaccines are too leaky and another mutation in a animal population and we are back where we started.

Although, if it was a lab leak and we didn't have a animal population to worry about we could save a lot of animals. We could also accept that it's now endemic.
React.js is overrated, use Svelte instead
Cats catch mice, not rats. You’d need some terrier dogs to clean this up.
> With a projected score of 11+ SPECInt2006/GHz

That seems to imply a certain integer arithmetic performance, but I wonder what the floating point performance is. They could have just said "X flops".

Comparing to other benchmarks at [1], I have no idea, because they all have denormalized results, so totals, rather than per GHz per core. Nice reporting.

How fast is this thing? Pentium? first gen i3? current gent ryzen 5? The fact that they are being so obtuse about it leads me to believe performance isn't great.

[1] https://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cint2006;op=dum...
He tried to talk to them and they told him to go away. (I know, that seems strange to me too.) He went to the other police station at 1:30 am, about 2 hours after the incident.
I'm not victim blaming you. Anyone who reads HN understands that a huge chunk of the contemporary web provides a fucked up experience for readers and viewers because of ad placement. I consider that complaining about any particular instance of ads doing that is essentially redundant at this point. The web is screwed up by ads, use an ad blocker or complain about online ads in general, not any particular article.

> I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content.

There are 6 paragraphs of introduction before jumping right into the Nolan case. With default font sizing, it's a bit less than 1 page of content in my web browser. How is that "drags on so long before it gets to the actual content"?

I tried to restrict my remarks to the article in question. You closed with the sweeping generalization "Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next."
most "artificial origin" hypotheses centre around a lab-leak.

The number of scenarios where the new variant is engineered are vastly reduced, since it's less likely that this variant is a lab leak.

Other scenarios can still be within the realm of plausibility, but there are fewer of them.
They also do reduce infection and transmission, just not completely prevent it all the time.
>it's got more than twice the population density of Houston

You're comparing a neighborhood of Boston to one of the largest cities in the US.

A more apt comparison would be the West University Place suburb of Houston that has roughly the same population density and similar size as JP. It's an older Houston suburb.

A "dense" suburban area would be something Jamaica in Queens, NYC. That has something like 6 times the density of JP.
Thank you for sharing these golden experiences here.

If you'll bear with me, I will try to articulate my perspective on the slugging out parts and risk-taking. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

There are two types of markets - open markets and winner-takes-all markets. You can tell the difference between these markets by the number of sustainable players in each market and by the distribution of available revenues across these players. Revenue distribution in open markets follows a power law distribution with a fat tail. Revenue distribution in winner-takes-all markets resembles an exponential distribution with a virtually non-existent tail.

The market you are trying to go after should define your approach to slugging it out and to the way that you take risks.

If you are participating in a winner-takes-all market, you should be pushing your balls to the wall and taking any risks necessary to give yourself the best shot at being one of the winners.

If, on the other hand, you are participating in an open market, there is a pronounced asymmetry between upside and downside from each risk that you take. This asymmetry means that you should be maximizing the number of risks that you take, but you should limit amount that you bet so that a risk not panning out is not catastrophic. The longer you survive, the better chance you have of hitting it big.

Most founders I know act as if they are participating in winner-takes-all markets. However, if you are running a startup, chances are that you are participating in an open market with a fat tailed distribution of long-term valuations for players in that market.

The reason that it is easy to fall into the illusion that you are in a winner-takes-all market is because VC funding is a winner takes all game. It is easy to conflate the act of raising money with the act of growing a business.

Personally, once I understood that my market was open, I was able to comfortably take my foot off the pedal a bit and this had a positive impact on my whole team and on our business.

But back to your point about slugging it out, I think you slugging it out was you taking those small bets in an open market. It was a necessary step to your current success. Because the alternative is sticking with your day job, and that just makes you far too slow to jump on opportunities.
+1 - I _really_ wanted to like Vivaldi, but... no.
Median wealth? Better today.

Levels of debt? Probably worse today.

Job satisfaction? Probably worse.

Median income per household? Better.

Per person? Better.

Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.

Healthcare cost? Probably worse.

Suicide rates? Probably worse.

Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.

Corruption? Probably better, though more publicized (maybe better because more publicized).

Cost of higher education? Worse if you go to an expensive school. But there's never been a time when it's easier to educate yourself, for free, if you don't care about the piece of paper.

Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
Creating and Delivering Software: Some Stories with a Lesson
The historical mask wearing yes. For the current status, it's probably obedience, sprinkled with some guilt-tripping by the media.
About 20,000 a month. We use Amazon as storage and backup only. Everything else is on premise.
I think it's the interpretation/bias of louder as better/clearer. If the sound effects are louder, they're seen as better. This bias even works on the small scale when testing audiophiles: You play them a sample of music twice but tell them the sound is coming from two different sources. If you play one sample slightly louder than the other, they'll identify it as coming from from a higher-quality system.

Sound people complain about compression (muddy), not wide dynamic range (drama and depth.)
> All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

XMPP fits this definition.

Bulk activity occurs via decentralized federation.

Regulation occurs via yearly updated XMPP compliance suites. https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/
This is damning evidence that packet shaping is completely necessary and that net neutrality is unrealistic.

All packets are not created equally: zoom packets for client A or Call of Duty packets for client B should go ahead of a 30s chunk of Netflix video for client C that has 60 seconds of video in the tank.

The net neutrality solution to this problem is to spend billions of dollars building out redundant and wide pipes so that everyone can go fast all the time.

Comcast solved it with router configuration.
The State govt could take back development authority from local governments. Otherwise the only hope is that the railroads eminent domain some land and building giant housing complexes with a train station attached.
No, but increased vaccination rates and resultant lower case rates mean the conditions that are ideal for the formation of variants arise less often.

(Yes, I know the vaccine isn't completely sterilizing, but it still has significantly tamped down the degree of spread).
The way to solve the parking problem is to price street parking, not to require new buildings to build parking while the existing houses get off scott free. It's the exact same supply and demand argument: limited supply so how do you reduce demand to the supply that exists? Increase prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

-- edit --

Them: Facebook is bad
You: What about Twitter and TikTok ?

I'm pointing out that you are not refuting their point while still defending Facebook.

It seems you believe social medias are the way they are because that's all they can be.

It shows a lack of imagination and understanding of how they influence each others rather than compete to the benefit of users and society.
1/ who actually wants to live in a ADU?

2/ adding 1 more unit to a plot is hardly going to make dent in the crisis.

We need to look at Asia to see how they offer affordable house: giant high density housing complexes with ground floor grocery stores and shopping malls for convenient access.
> Tinfoil hat on - has anyone considered how suspicious that only the commercial products worked, maybe the post is just a very clever shill for those products?

Not really, tinfoil actually worked, but it was apparently too difficult to get right:

> In my experiments, I found I could sometimes achieve approximately 90 dB attenuation by carefully wrapping the generator in foil and double folding the seams on all sides, which is quite good (comparable to commercial pouches).

This actually matches my experience with a GPS logger. It only had an on/off switch and I wanted to download the track from my trip without getting points from the download location at the end. IIRC, it was still able to get fixes even wrapped in tin foil.
People complain about parking requirements but, in most US cities (and indeed in a great deal of the world) most households have cars. If I lived in Seattle, even if I didn't need one day to day for work/errands/etc., I'd certainly own one for going out to the mountains and so forth on the weekends.
You can also put some books under the laptop and use it as a screen while connected to an external keyboard at desk height.
Lowercase a's would probably make that acronym more apparent on this forum I think.
If you're looking for prior art, Ada has the Bit_Order and Scalar_Storage_Order attributes[0]; the latter is a GNAT extension.

[0] https://www.adacore.com/gems/gem-140-bridging-the-endianness...
I have to wonder if Rich Hickey every read Polya's How to Solve It ?
Cool. Would you mind sharing the make and model, though?
This is really dumb.

There was no pan-Euro response nor was there a pan-American response, so these groupings are arbitrary. Unless you have an objective "score" that Euro lockdowns and policies on average went further than American lockdown policies, these numbers are meaningless.

You could easily justify the differences as deriving from Europe having an objectively healthier population and better healthcare systems than the US.
Put differently, "affordable housing" and "housing as investment" are at odds. People don't acknowledge this tension enough, I suspect because many people want to switch to the housing-as-investment team.
It's a free ride when you've already paid.
So we will get multiple competing strains that mutate quicker than we can develop the vaccine, with us trying to predict which strain will be dominant. Flue Vaccine is effectiveness estimated to be around 30% because of this.

Dr Christina Parks testimony for Michigan HB4471, explains this effect.
https://youtu.be/8DOOZpGA_VI
The meeting was arranged by Lin Wood at the time and he was promptly fired afterward. FYI the 'ok' sign is also used by lots of 'normal' conservatives and even non conservatives. The symbology was invented by 4chan first along with many other campaigns to turn widely used symbols (Pepe) into something associated with nazis. A lot of people who aren't affiliated in any way with nazis still continue to use it because of the original trolling motive and/or they don't know of the association.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhou...
Microsoft controls the OS, they already can track activity of any userland program, can't they?
But is that because the majority of the stuff being served to him by Google has been video for his experience on the internet, and that's what he's used to, or because it's better, or because he actually just prefers it. (And, to be fair, we're probably not talking about the same sort of information, but the question still applies generally.)
Tutorial for Parsing with Nom 5
> #2. Repeal CA prop. 13, all housing should be taxed at current market value. (exclusions for older retirees and the disabled)

Why the exclusions? Is there a reason to give extra help for the disabled to own homes (and, implicitly, not help disabled renters a similar amount)?

Older retirees could sell off a third of their house's value and cover property taxes for something like 20 years.
People can also follow additive scores. This is what e.g. the DSM does.

A spreadsheet-like printed table where you mark items and sum scores in your head is probably easier to follow than a similarly-powered decision tree. Of course, you can't guarantee that a linear decision boundary exists, but in case there is one, the standard tools (Gauss-Markov/FWL theorems, p-values, etc.) are much, much more robust than CART or C4.5.