skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent the last half-decade or so in the electronics & software end of the fitness industry and I think there are a lot of niches like this. On the one hand you have the massive market for wrist & chest strap Heart Rate Monitors, and the speed/power meters in stationary bikes. On the other there are many much smaller markets that need a particular type of fitness data that doesn't get a whole lot of external exposure.

Getting the data isn't the hard part; knowing how to make it useful is.
Man, this reminds me of "playing" ProgressQuest back in the day. You'd just sit there and watch the task bars fill.
if there was a production-grade memory-safe language with similar performance, i would also advocate for it. it's less that rust is good, and that memory unsafety is bad.
Sure but, like, we knew this was going to happen either this week or next week, right? It was only a question of when.

You know the most interesting thing about this to me is how the absolute number of delta infections decreases so much when omicron comes on the scene. This kinda implies that for at least a significant fraction of the infected, they were exposed to both delta and omicron, and omicron won. I'm really curious how that works. Does anyone know of a clear explanation of the mechanism behind that?
My reading of both:

- Vigna claims small differences in internal states don't have avalanche effects, and the rebuttal says those small differences in internal states don't occur normally, not with the proper seeding steps.

- Vigna claims to be able to predict one particular variant of PCG, and the rebuttal said that that was one of the weaker variants that specifically has "insecure" in the name.

It's persuasive to me in suggesting that Vigna's claims are perhaps not that clear cut.

I am not an expert in PRNG and I wouldn't say this makes PCG win over Xorshiro or not, I just think it's unfortunate that the issue above linked only one side of the argument, especially since I find the other side more pleasant to read.
Thank you! And yes I have no intention of being hired. I have a well-paying job at a New York ad agency working on a Fortune 100 client. I'm busy enough as it is.
> owing to the higher infection rate

This. Just to emphasize the point: As long as the number of cases continues to rise, the situation will become more and more threatening, even if the falatity rate when infectied is low. It just takes longer. But it is harder to get it under control.

In other words: a low infection rate combined with a high fatality (per infection) rate would be better than a high infection rate combined with a low fatality (per infection) rate.
Sometimes, there is also functionality grafted to the wrong place in the system, or on to the wrong system. This can happen for a lot of reasons: expediency ("we have to foo the bar, why don't you implement it there as the release window is just right for our purposes"), bad design, or changing requirements.

If it stays there for too long, it will complicate the design of the underlying system because it has to be kept alive for daily business to go on. Such features are sometimes hiding in plain sight, and are actually causing a lot of pain or cause long-term risks, but we are too shy or spread too thin to address the issue. And why should we? After all, it works at the moment.
> there's a bell curve distribution of risk tolerances and trust in government

OK. With you on that.

> and there can be reasonable people who find themselves on that distribution in a way that makes them more concerned about what they're not being told than the virus

It is at this point they cease being reasonable people.
I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range.

You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
Charms, anyone? ;)
For those interested, here is the shadow: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B001'28.8%22N+93%C2%...

Took me a while to find it, so thought I'd save someone else the scrolling/search cost.
Seems to be more an indication that Go's variable declaration syntax is just not good.
I suppose it's a question of pedagogy to determine how (and how much) teachers should encourage students to present behaviors that make them more likely to learn. My experience (and many others) is that inverting the classroom ends up with the majority of the students not doing the assigned reading/listening/watching.

Most students do their math homework begrudgingly because they get in trouble otherwise; this does not mean that doing the assigned problems does not help them learn...
There may be an increase in collection, but it's backlogged by actual labs doing the work. If you look at the last few days, there's been no real increase in test numbers. We've really hit our limit in daily testing, but positivity keeps going up.
> "Beyond Interactivity"

Wonderful wonderful idea. I mean, like, so much of the idea of computing that were exciting were about simulation. In many ways, we've let simulation run amock outside the human realms with the recent uprise in Machine Learning: let the computer play virtual games with itself to minimize loss, in deeply far off spaces humans can not even comprehend.

> "Our interviewees further conceptualised the progress in idle games as a narrative that is intertwined with system changes (Theme 3) or “paradigm shifts”. Whenever the system changes and players encounter a new cycle of exploration, experimentation and optimisation, a new beat in the narrative unfolds."

Lovely lovely idea. I'm playing a semi-idle game Loop Odyssey now, where specific actions ("talk to this villager") take less action-points (mana) the more you loop around & talk to them. The game is about setting up loops within the current bounds of what you can do, and over time these paths become simpler & simpler for your character & your potential expands beyond this current sphere of the game. It's a wonderful dynamic. I love this paper's description of this.

Universal Paperclips is probably the most broadly known version of this expansion of gameplays, of shifting paradigms.

Shout in specific to Progress Quest. An irc #idlerpg style game:

> Progress Quest removes any player input beyond character building as a critique to contemporary role-playing games.

Make a character, and let them free amid the virtual. Utterly free, unconstrained, ever adventuring (so long as the app is running). Been a long time since I ran this, but I probably still have a save. Will boot it soon. :)
There are products and studies now with Liraglutide and semaglutide, which show consistent and maintainable weight loss, but neither has been on the market for 5 years yet afaik, and the longest study only ran for 2 yearsit seems. Though it seems likely sustainable results from a 2 year study will hold for 5 years.

https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/165203/weg...
Yes, and now they are in additional high-traffic midtown locations, where there was previously no booth. Same principle as opening more supermarket checkout lanes: if one booth has a gigantic line, add another booth at the opposite end of the block -> two shorter lines that don't block sidewalk traffic.
It would be nice if there were a drug to counteract the changes that make it so hard to keep weight off.

Losing it is easy.

I’ve lost 100lbs five times in my life.

It’s fucked.
Ah got it. I had no intention of doing that. I do think most of us, marketers or developers would like to make some impact. That impact is not always financial. But marketing is not necessarily always about finances. It's about understanding users/consumers and what gets them excited.
... naturally, I'm a day late to this note. All the same, it's worth mentioning that I feel like I'm a member of the HN tribe, although it's been many years since I"ve really done much creative hacking. All the same, I deeply appreciate the kindness & joy that HN people pass along. Oh, there are a still few niches where techno-oddballs are appreciated.

Warm wishes,
-Cliff
I said this elsewhere, but you’re still culpable for murder if you kill someone in the process of killing themselves.

> If someone is on downward trajectory towards death, why not give them cheap generics at human safe doses?

What is a human safe dose for someone whose body is so compromised that they’re close to death? If the doctor prescribes a medication that doesn’t have, at a minimum, peer reviewed research showing its effectiveness in these situations, they are going to be liable for negligent manslaughter, if not murder.

And rightly so, when you think of the broader implications of allowing doctors to do whatever they want to the dying.
Counterpoint: https://theprepared.com/blog/73-of-covid-cases-arent-omicron...
Hack to edit redbean files as archives in Emacs
> JSON doesn't need to be UTF-8 or a superset of ASCII to be valid. It can be any representation of Unicode, including UTF-16, UTF-32, GB 18030, etc

Sure, it can also be gzipped, encrypted, etc but that goes back to the point that there's nothing inherently special about JSON as it relates to encoding to a byte stream. All there is to it is that somewhere in a program there's an encode/decode contract to extract meaning out of the byte stream, and in a protocol one most likely only looks at byte streams as sequences of bytes (because performance-wise, it doesn't make sense to look at payload size in terms of number of codepoints/graphemes at a protocol level)
I'm really afraid it will mutate into something more serious as well as being as virulent as it current is. That would be really really bad.
Why are you questioning that? You should first question "Are you suggesting such a stupid doctor exists? What basis do you have for that, show proof."
Actually, we already know he's doing more than "farming fake internet points", don't we? Because the story has now been posted here.

Exacerbating, btw.
I actually struggle to see this guy's perspective. If a family are that desperate for their relative to be given ivermectin/hydroxychloroquine/god knows what else it isn't obvious why he wouldn't hand them out.

The role of a doctor, when someone is sick, is to offer good advice and stop them doing anything that will be really damaging to themselves. I'd see this as more similar to a dying man getting access to a priest than anything else.

Maybe this woman would have been screaming at him anyway, but I can see why she would be angry. He is obviously being a bit arrogant. The dude was dying, let the family believe what they want at that point.
Covid Panic Is a Site of Inter-Elite Competition
I'm hopeful that it gets replaced in the nearish future by a pure Julia parser. Femtolisp is definitely cute, but as other parts of compilation have sped up, Julia's parser has started to show up as a measurable percentage of compile time. Getting a parser written in pure Julia would make it easier to make improvements, and it would be a decent amount faster (see CSTParser.jl which is roughly 10x faster than Julia's built-in parser).
I wonder if it would have been easier to use a JTAG probe to read/write the BIOS. I would be surprised if the motherboard didn't have a JTAG port.
Lots of people died this week from flu and the common cold as well, so let's not freak out just yet.
FWIW here's the URL of article today in the Atlantic that explains what it means to say that "covid may become endemic":

"We’re Not at Endemicity Yet":

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/covid-is-...
Not sure I see what you're seeing - Account created in early 2020, only started posting 9 months ago, all posts in QAnonCasualties.
Yes! I run this zero-volume business for fun ... and the joy of meeting interesting people. So your note brings a broad smile to this tired astronomer's face. Thank yoU!
Against delta, the early research showed 2 doses + boosters to be more effective than the original 2 dose series ever were. For instance, [0] shows them being 20x more effective compared to the control group with two vaccine doses (which corresponds to something like 60x better than someone completely unvaccinated)

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
You can configure Kodi to use other video players to actually play. Probably worth doing. I do it myself because for whatever reason Kodi's player crashes like crazy on my Windows htpc.
I believe there is someone using it in production for a field deployed embedded system that is tied to revenue.

IIRC Forwards compatibility is not an issue because those deployments are one-and-done.
Death by Coconut
There's multiple cycles. Hype usually predates the technology by several years. Drones are common now. But the last drone hype I saw was 20 years ago. AI has been around longer than I was born. Stuff like DDD and functional programming are ancient but they've become more popular in recent years.

I think it takes a long time. Often the tech is a puzzle piece when we don't have the rest of the puzzle yet.
Look for something in web3 / Decentralized Finance, there is a ton of money flowing into it right now and almost all jobs are remote.
Christmas Is Canceled
When a backdoor is so obviously intentional, and perhaps state sponsored, one has to wonder if the vendor "fix" is to simply hide it better.
Depends on the algorithm, I suppose? Many algorithms that consume randomness in a way that is performance sensitive, like audio or image synthesis, are going to be processing streams of data and in that context being able to just stream random bits out of a cache line and into registers and through operations without making a bunch of calls is going to produce some advantages, even if a modern out of order processor can hide a lot of that. TBH I doubt the function call overhead even matters so much as the overall structure being something that will approach the maximum throughput of your hardware.

It's a big advantage that the internal state of some PRNGs is very small, but you're still mutating the internal state, which means now you're creating dependency chains and dirtying a cache line, etc. Someone who's actually built chips before would know far better than me whether all of that adds up to a 1% hit to throughput or a 10% hit, though.
The author of this site and the founder of YC wrote Lisp books, and then a bunch of influential essays about Lisp (starting ~20 years ago):

http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html

This site is written in Arc, his first Lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28155134
Do you have a source? I follow covid news stuff pretty closely and saw nothing like that.
My dad developed a spare tire in middle age. His doctor sent him to a nutritionist, who listlessly gave him a nutrition plan and explained it to him, and scheduled a followup in 3 months.

He returned in 3 months, and shocked the nutritionist is he was exactly on the target weight and had followed the plan. She remarked that nobody had ever followed her plans before.

He never regained the weight.

I've seen statistics that only 5% of dieters keep the weight off more than 5 years. It's not impossible, but it is unusual. I've known a couple others who've done it, too.
Startup failure is a feature, not a bug
> they are going to be liable for negligent manslaughter, if not murder.

hmm could they then not simply allow patients to sign liability waivers?
> I'm surprised at the lack of ventures working to distance themselves from the content of the conversations.

Me too. I struggle to understand why most communication platforms don't try to do end-to-end encryption. From what I've seen, it can one, be a lot more complicated technically and two, hard to make a user experience that people enjoy. However, I don't know if people starting companies think enough about the ramifications of knowing (and storing) what people are saying to each other, legally and emotionally.

I've been wanting to do more work online, especially over the pandemic, helping people express emotions and I've often balked at platforms because they don't have e2ee or they say they do and then are found out to not have it (ie Zoom). Most people may not desire this, but as someone who wants to run classes and have conversations about deep emotions, I strongly want almost all of the platforms to be e2ee. I would love gather.town, Discourse, Discord, Guilded, Clubhouse, and many other communication platforms to have e2ee as default.

I want this for personal conversations but I strongly want/need this for professional conversations, and because it hasn't really been there on many of these platforms, I've just not had those conversations.
That's just one variable, are hospitalization rates going up at a similar rate? That's the critical and undeniably most important number for setting policy.
> If the Hong Kong report is accurate, could regular nasal washing slow viral replication, e.g. in early stages of infection? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620312

There is also evidence that certain mouth rinses reduce infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab [1] though without a trial it’s hard to know how that translates to real world transmission.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/10/3/272
> I've been on reddit for 14 years, trust me

What about your history here? Your most recent submission was flagged dead.

Speaking of Occam’s Razor, if someone claims to be certain a person is lying yet provides simply “believe me” as evidence, the simplest explanation is that the accuser is lying.
Please see https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544#issuecomment-36396... and https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/663. In particular, `For every codepoint of zig source code, it is an error for the codepoint to be one of U+0000-U+0009, U+000b-U+001f, U+007f, U+0085, U+2028, U+2029`. Hard tab is U+0009, which is called out as specifically an error. This could just be stale docs, but it's linked to from the wiki as well: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-fmt-hav.... Again, if this is all old, please ignore (and maybe make it a priority to update?). But the general tone is: "No tabs, only spaces"
There is, for practical purposes, noplace where one can't use C++, except where gatekeepers exercise power keep it out. Typically it would be only a day's work to get those building with a C++ compiler, whence they could begin modernizing.

There are plenty of loadable modules in C++ for Linux and BSDs, and plugins for Postgres, in places where there is no expectation of upstreaming them.

Zig is in a similar boat.
I’ve become increasingly interested in what I think would be called “computational botany” if it were to be fleshed out. In looking at this and articles like it, and speaking with both trained and amateur botanists, a common thread is that the appearance of a plant has become increasingly detached from its scientific classification. A frequent refrain in nature hikes I’ve been a part of goes along the lines of: “this plant used to be family X, but then dna testing showed it was actually family Z” - “what? You’re kidding, that’s family Z? It has all the characteristics of an X!” - “Yep, Z. I don’t much understand it myself but apparently that’s what the dna says.”

I think this is a bit silly. It’s akin to categorizing programs by the libraries they use or the programming language they’re written in rather than the problems they solve. What’s more useful to the layperson: “VSCode, IntelliJ, and Vim are Text Editor family; Slack, Talk2Me, and mIrc are Chat family” or “VSCode and Slack are Electron family; IntelliJ and Talk2Me are Java family; and Vim and mIrc are C family”?

The idea with my proposed “Computational Botany” is that the only information used to classify a plant is that same information that would be used to generate a computer model of the plant. So if a specimen has all the markers of an X appearance wise, such that implementing its clone would take the least changes when starting from an existing X, it’s an X.

Of course, the actual implementation of these models may end up requiring an unattainable God-level intelligence, but I leave that as an exercise to future me (or you!)
These are undoubtedly the exception. Now, i can understand that the exception can feel like the rule when your job is to deal with the exception, but most people who get COVID don't die or go to the hospital.

That doesn't mean that COVID isn't bad, or that people shouldn't consider getting the vaccine (especially if they are old, obese, or have diabetes). It just means that his experience is not representative of what COVID is like for most people.
> XML kinda requires DOM parsing

Why? Streaming/evented (e.g., SAX) parsing for XML is as old as XML.
https://archive.md/53Mj8
Is this at all analogous to how we used red/blue shift to determine the speed at which astronomical objects are moving towards/away from us?
I would strongly recommend against namecheap.

You can only tell how a registrar handles problems when they occur.
I ran a large non-controversial content forum ranked high globally, but a user posted illegal image, namecheap.com suddenly sent me a link warning that they will suspend my domain completely within 24 hours, if I did not delete two problem images (which were inappropriate/troublesome images but in the context of the forum posts, "a very poor attempt at humor").

If I missed the warning email or checked my email after 24 hours they would have completely suspended my domain. I'm talking about a site with MILLIONS of visitors per month and ten thousands of posts per day, not some small blog. I thought the warning was SPAM then looked at the headers and then found it was really namecheap.
Doctors take a Hippocratic oath to do no harm. They must follow an ethical code. Ivermectin is pointless for that treatment, and would have terribly harming side effects. If you think otherwise, it's clear why you don't understand the MD's rationale.
Staff or experienced senior engineer at a company with stocks or options that have 2x to 3x since getting hired and it's pretty doable. Even large companies like Nvidia and Tesla have gone up significantly in just the last year. Without stock appreciation it's pretty hard though so it mostly comes down to luck.
> we don’t know how transferable those numbers

With a growing number of real-life cases, hopefully there are multiple studies already in progress.
Because he can afford to lose.
3.6?
A lot of speculation.

Is there a way to know the average hospital duration in SA for people without a previous infection?

I know the current data in SA says it went from 8,5 days to 2,5 days.

The variable currently, if the data can be cross-referenced to other countries, is the high infection rate of delta in SA.

Excluding previously infected from hospital stay would create an educated guess in my eyes. If it stays <3,5 days for example, that would seem like good news.
It's incredible what's been left behind and still in decent shape. As you've found, any place with a lot of human traffic tends to get destroyed by vandals but fortunately the SW deserts are massive and hold a shocking amount of old mining roads that lead to well preserved locations. A spot that requires a modest amount of effort to reach tends to filter out the idiots.

Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.
> Sounds fairly energetic to me.

Sounds fairly powerful to me.
You have nothing—zero—to back up your argument.

So please. Don't ask us to trust you when you give us no reason to. Instead, you could just support your argument.
Unclear, but they must have published early trial data with discussion of why they didn’t go higher?