skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Distributed wireless infrastructure is very real and a pretty clear use case of web3. Helium Network sells wireless routers, and distributes rewards to routers that provide coverage to the network. Tokens are used to purchase network bandwidth. They have nearly 400K hotspots worldwide. It's also not using the energy-intensive Proof of Work consensus algorithm that you're referring to.
It is funny to see this guy in the comments:

> This sort of safety event will become more common as airlines hire based on equity, not skill.

I meet these people frequently in tech. It is never the Rockstar engineers making this complaint. Good to know it is not just a tech thing.
Oh please. Compare the CO2 emissions of a solar plant with those of a gas plant. Normalize for MWH produced. How many orders of magnitude is the difference?
Still interesting to watch, thank you.
The easy identification is a bit of an acquired skill. I feel like I can identify them at a glance vs similar species, bit it's apparent enough that it isn't always the case.
Well, when I look at Go's mascot, the only thing that comes to mind is, "When a man's gotta go, a man's gotta go..."
Realistically they were over taxed and they missed the SARs outbreak. Probably why they are using draconian methods still and welding people into their homes, to make up for their lax action.
The easiest solution is to buy an off-the-shelf water filtration system such as Survivor Filter Pro:

- https://www.survivorfilter.com/products/pro-series-virus-met...

Products like this are tested against water quality standards and can probably can achieve a better performance/price ratio than what you can build yourself unless you're planning to put significant time and effort into this project.

There are universities working on this problem as well who might already have some projects in progress such as: https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...

If you're planning to build your own system for your own amusement or education, then you should first decide how pure do you want the output fresh water to be, and what is your resource (time and money) as well as energy budget?

1. Reverse osmosis seems like the most pragmatic solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Fresh_water_ap...

You can buy inexpensive membranes, water pumps, and solar panels from places like AliExpress but might need to perform modifications to generate the required pressure:

- Reverse Osmosis Membrane: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32669709750.html
- Solar-powered fountain: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001095938363.html

2. Solar still: use mirrors to focus sunlight and evaporate water. Easy to build but only practical in climates that receive lots of sunlight, only works during daytime.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_still

3. Electrolysis: probably not practical for filtering lots of water on a large scale because it's slow and energy-intensive, but can result in the purest water. Buy a solar panel, put positive anodes and negative cathode into the water to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, and then wait for a long time.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting

If you're planning to drink the water for extended periods of time, it might also be a good idea to remineralize the water:

- https://thewatergeeks.com/how-to-remineralize-ro-water/

Also be aware that if you store the water in a plastic barrel, certain phthalates might leach out which could be carcinogenic or interfere with your hormone system. It might be a better idea to use a stainless steel or glass container.

- https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/11/17614540/pl...
Both have decent reporting and batshit opinion sections.
Thanks for your kind words! Ultimately I think this is going to be part of the camera apps or some built-in app. It is just a function of power.
Now Everywhere Together
Scan objects
It’s not everyday we hear something good about American healthcare. Kudos to those who worked on this bill!
Structured email-like discussions – need feedback
<TL-DR>
I've created a prototype of a system serving the same purpose as email discussions, but working in a more structured and (hopefully) intuitive way.

A quick video demonstrating how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JgeAjwyJok

Do you think something like this can be useful? It does solve a problem for me (more details about my motivation below). But I'm curious if anyone else finds it helpful, so I don't end up trying to solve a problem that only exists for me.
</TL-DR>

At company where I work we use a chat-based tool for quick real-time discussions, but use email threads for more complex discussions on a specific topic involving multiple people. For example, coming up with a release plan, figuring out how to handle an issue etc.

Although in general our email communication does the job pretty well, there are a few issues with it that I find annoying:

- 2 people do "reply all" at the same time, "crossing" messages - last one wins and the other person's reply is not included on future replies unless someone manually "merges" the 2 replies later.

- Some people intentionally "reply all", but not to the latest message in the thread.

- "Inline replies" are done as a hack by manually adding replies to original message text in message history.

- Fixing typos and making other corrections requires a new message to be sent to everyone.

Sometimes, the result of these issues is a thread with multiple "forks" that are hard to follow and understand. In some cases, important information can even get missed, leading to other issues.

So I wanted to come up with a tool that would natively support things like inline/non-latest message replies and editing existing messages. I have a working prototype as shown in the video, but wanted to get a feel of what others think about its value before committing to doing more work on this.
Reference discusses power generation and plant maintenance. You can argue about words but only the net CO2 matters when you’re looking for a simple answer.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. We need net-0 but if you only have a binary 0-not-0 ideal we’ll leave a lot of intermediate options off the table. A Tesla isn’t net-0 but it’s better than a gas truck.

I’m arguing against oversimplification, because if we want to take that to extremes we have no net-0 options right now. We need to build them. Every KG of CO2 we don’t emit now is one less we need to bury in decades to come. So do a Manhattan Project on emissions but make easily-adopted changes in the near term.
I bet having 6 times as much inertia for the weight makes things strange.

In all seriousness, it's going to be mostly resistance exercises. But we can probably do better resistance exercises with gravity to help posture and alignment.
Lava tubes could help a lot.
I’m not sure why this keeps getting regurgitated. Are you honestly arguing that the CO2 emissions in the production and operation of a solar plant are even remotely comparable to the emissions of a gas plant? If I have to explicitly spell all that out every time then we can’t have a conversation. It’s an absurd standard.
There are more Pakistani citizens living in the UAE than there are UAE citizens. So if Pakistan has a problem with fake pilot licenses, then so does the UAE.
Rather than parsing HTML, it might be easier to look for news organizations that publish an RSS feed and transform that into something that is more accessible and internationalized.
If you limit mailbox sizes you can run 500 users on a pretty modest VM
Perhaps there are some uses that make sense, in terms of weather reports or things like that. However, in terms of "reducing it down to its essence", some propaganda expert (Ivy Lee maybe, or others) of the 1930s said something like this:

"Propaganda consists of taking a complex idea, simplifying it down to the point where a small child could understand it, and then repeating, repeating, repeating."

Twitter is the ideal platform for that kind of approach, isn't it? I don't think it's healthy for people to spend a lot of time on Twitter for reasons like that.
I really like the live web cam feeds. They give some action movie hacker vibes!
A lot of these projects are very serious, make the world a better place kind of thing, which is awesome, so I apologize if my project is more of just a fun thing. With Flash now being EOL, a lot of Flash games are disappearing from the net. While there are existing projects to create an open source Flash player which is good for legacy compatibility, nobody will build new Flash games. So my vision is to create a modern browser based platform that offers a vaguely similar but overall superior experience.

I'm using JavaScript to leverage modern browsers and Node.js to create a platform that makes the creation of online, multiplayer games easy. It is comprised of a few different interesting sub-projects like an async streaming library and my own rendering/templating library (which I know will annoy some people for not using an existing framework).

Right now it's only a few thousand lines of JavaScript but it's complicated due to a large number of moving pieces. Also, I'm using things that require the very latest browsers and Node versions to make life easier, like top level await. Getting Node and the browsers to use the same modules is a PITA to set up initially but then reduces effort moving forward. My outlook is we can circle back and address compatibility issues after making a full POC.

There are lots of interesting problems in this space, dealing with concurrency, async, race conditions, consistency, serializing/deserializing cycle detection, and also interesting browser side stuff with the rendering framework.

The future vision is to make Electron/Cordava (or similar) apps and replicate some of the old flash game sites like Kongregate. We will open source the underlying tech, make some of our own games, and then get others to make games and publish on our site.

Anybody who is good with modern async JavaScript can help, and knowledge of XML, HTML, CSS, SVG, Node, WebASM, Electron/Cordova (or similar) is all helpful. I'm open to converting to TypeScript if somebody knows it well, but it's not a priority.

In my estimate, there's a hundred hours of work required to have a solid POC.

If any of this sounds interesting, email is in my profile.
There's shipping/delivery address addressed to me, I'd say it's easily parsed if Gmail bothered to scan the email body text properly.

I've tried that (?) support link with adding a screenshot in their other services reporting bugs (like Google Search Console), no idea if anybody reads them but I'll give it a go.
Please link to the comment
The adulation for the "big names" in Theranos's board of directors is absolutely cringey to read in retrospect. No wonder Holmes managed to fool the world, it's too easy to be mesmerized by undeserved clout.
They had nothing, nobody saw them demonstrate anything because they had nothing, and yet folks ran to defend them.

Presumably over some sense of fairness or something?
Here's the problem with coal power, the damage is not equatable to nuclear plants:

There is no way to control the impact to the environment - areas immediately surrounding a coal plant have much higher cancer rates, the ground & streams becomes toxic, wider areas have heightened acid rain risks. Then you get to impact on the global climate. All this in a perfectly operated idealized plant.

In a nuclear plant that is run properly, not even perfectly, produces radioactive waste. No atmospheric pollution, no water pollution.

Major "normal" failures cause radiation leaks. These are so rare that the events are individually named. Accidents that result in atypical operation that don't even harm the plant, let alone cause external impact are all recorded, and systems are updated to prevent recurrence. Even major events like three mile island have not caused any excess deaths or cancers.

Catastrophic failures have basically be down to understood design flaws: Chernobyl had an RBMK reactor with know flaws, Fukushima had emergency generators in the basement despite being advised to place them higher up. Precisely because of flooding concerns.

As for waste: Nuclear waste is of course hard to manage, with most "solutions" being "bury it". Whatever the end solution is, we know it won't be as horrific as a coal plants solution: aerosolizing it and pumping it into the atmosphere.

A lot of noise is made about decommissioning a nuclear plant. Decommission a nuclear plant means deconstruction of the reactor and removing the remaining waste. There is no need to remediate the land itself. No one talks about decommissioning coal plants as they simply don't: the land on and around the site is left permanently toxic.
Ironic, considering Holme's father was VP at Enron...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808
Sadly, there is almost never any meaningful discussion or analysis of the role her gender likely played in this mess. I made a stab at talking about it only very seldom and it generally didn't get well received nor taken seriously as any kind of valid point of view, even though my interest is as a woman trying to sort out how you actually find your path forward.
I guess I'm echoing others here, but fuzzing is magical. I've given introductions to fuzz-testing to more than a few developers, and found interesting bugs in my own code using them.

Until now I've used "go-fuzz", but I'm very much looking forward to having real integrated fuzzing in the standard compiler/toolchain. That has to make things easier to explain and add to more projects.

Even with "100% test coverage" finding bugs due to fuzzing shows how hard testing can be.
Ahh, Thank you
If you’re asking someone to compare numbers, then it wasn’t really as simple as you originally stated
That's mostly to watch for allergic reactions, which if you get you need medical assistance asap. Nothing to do with the covid vaccine itself.
The key is to have a regular interval timetable, with "pulses" to allow easy transfers:

http://sydneyferry.blogspot.com/2017/09/six-benefits-of-regu...

The Swiss are masters of this. I recently had a complicated 4-leg journey from Zurich airport, from a mainline InterCity train to a rack railway up a mountain, and every single transfer was timed at exactly 5 minutes.
Genuary 2022
> A maintainers fund to support all the FLOSS projects the world depends on?

It might be a better idea to partner with an existing organization such as the Software in the Public Interest non-profit.
https://www.spi-inc.org/
No1 says we should go coal instead of atom. We should go GREEN and BLUE (water) all the way and as hard as we can. They're SAFE energy sources. And as many said.
Burying nuclear waste in ground is not the solution. If something we should send it somewhere out of our planet ; )
Exactly, the recipients are really in a bad financial situation and many of them live in tents even in the freezing weather. So we've looked into alternative ways to do this, and we're now focusing on NGOs partnerships (NGOs pay, and the recipient gets it for free; we already have one experimental partnership) and crowdfunding (planing on announcing a campaign sometime this month!).
and that is their only activity on the site too
We have one in the Twin Cities too on 394, a pair of lanes that depending on the time goes one way in the morning, the other in the evening.
And notice how it was downvoted to near the bottom of the page. Not all of the best/well informed comments rise to the top.
Ask HN: Which News Sources Do You Pay For?
I currently subscribe to Apple News+ (Time, Newsweek, WSJ, etc.) and The Economist. I don’t feel that NYT/WaPo provide enough quality content to warrant separate subscriptions. Even with The Economist I hesitated, but the content and analysis are really top-notch and, even if I don’t read everything, it’s at least worth supporting and helping sustain the publication.
actually, i watched a video about it after this that also said it was optimistic, and now i understand what you meant.

it's optimistic in that it's not yet a realized future and we still have the opportunity to change course.

i agree, and i hope we make strong moves together as a society to curb climate disaster. admittedly i'm not holding my breath.
Well then, compaq is another great example. Quickest company to a billion in sales at the time. Built an IBM clone on venture capital and IBM ignored them until they were first to market with a 386, managed to kill the PS/2 architecture and became.the industry trend setter in desktops for a decade.

Every american household had an RCA product at one time, dominant electronic manufacturer torn to shreds by upstart Japanese minnows who became giants (Sony, Pioneer).

Tandy, once a minnow, then an innovative giant in PCs killed dead by Dell and other startup clone makers.

Yahoo and AOL murdered by a tiny startup called Google.

Digital Equipment Corporation, once giant killers themselves in minicomputers, a segment they defined with the pdp and vax machines, slaughtered by upstart Sun Microsystems.

The examples are literally endless.
> I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever logged in

How? Why? This seems crazy to me. As a long time Reddit user, I've cultivated a nice list of subreddits specific to my interests; without all the noise. Reddit's default frontpage has become pretty terrible and useless.
Obese carriers shed lot more virus, so they would be expected to have higher attack rates.

----

Exhaled aerosol increases with COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/8/e2021830118

In our observational cohort study of the exhaled breath particles of 194 healthy human subjects, and in our experimental infection study of eight nonhuman primates infected, by aerosol, with SARS-CoV-2, we found that exhaled aerosol particles vary between subjects by three orders of magnitude, with exhaled respiratory droplet number increasing with degree of COVID-19 infection and elevated BMI-years.
Hi Scott,

This is Alina Chan, one of the authors of the book.

Thank you very much for your thorough review of our book :)

On the Laos connection, I made a thread on Twitter to lay out the latest findings about virus samples being sent directly from Laos to Wuhan over several years: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1476231824267485190?s=20

I hope this is a good update on that point.

Happy new year!
In my experience such tests quickly become unmaintainable and suddenly the correctness of the test becomes dependent on the order tests are run in preventing you from running subsets, running them in parallel, being extremely flaky (since the shape of the data is random on each machine it’s run on). This is discussed but dismissed, but tests need to be as maintainable as the code itself.

I tried this on a codebase I came into that had maybe 10 end to end integration tests. This was a bit worse because each test relied on the one declared before it running. Refactored it so that we spun up a unique s3rver and tore it down for each test. Sure, this means only the test cases we write are tested. That’s a feature not a bug. If you want coverage of weird states then use proper testing tools (eg fuzzing and property testing) to generate those complex test cases. Doing so formally is a much better recipe for success then hoping upon success by incidental randomness. I went from spending a day and a half and failing to add one new unit tests of some functionality to a day of pretty straightforward test case writing once I refactored each test to be standalone. Make it easy to write and debug tests not harder and let your testing frameworks handle the heavy lifting of finding corner cases.

Also, converting serial tests to parallel isn’t as complicated as the author makes it sound. You would start piecemeal and let that grow by enforcing policies in code review about what tests look like going forward while you go through the backlog of converting brokenness (running the parallel pieces in parallel and the serial pieces serially)
> Plenty of other European countries are taking far less lenient stances towards the question than does Denmark. Talk of forced vaccinations in Austria, for example.

I don't know the details of Austria's potential mandatory vaccination. But I have read that their vaccination passports account for prior covid recovery. In the US prior recovery is completely ignored.
An interesting, untapped source of data might be past legal cases where databases were made public in the process of discovery.

For example, during the electronic discovery (e-Discovery) process, the litigants may provide csv files which it might be useful to process into a more structured format.
For example, the Enron email dataset:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/

If you can somehow negotiate rights to make these databases publicly available, it might be a good idea to donate/upload the data to the Internet Archive or some universities for posterity: https://archive.org/
The Guardian. I read News Ltd, when I can, for the other point of view. I skip paywalls judiciously for the others, mainly their weekly/monthly limit to view.

I also support theconversation.com. Its non-peer-review publishing of academic content, with a current-affairs context to most stories. So its like behind-the-news stuff. I say 'non peer review' because the actual articles themselves are just that: not peer reviewed. But they often, if not always, cite peer review work
That account was created the same day the comment was posted, most likely for the single purpose of posting the comment. Makes me think it's either an insider or someone with beef against the company.
I want to correct my initial take above. The JavaScript code I was looking at actually appears to show/hide children in threads.

The indentation appears to be handled separately by invisible GIFs:

<td class="ind" indent="0">
<img src="s.gif" height="1" width="0">
</td>

<td class="ind" indent="1">
<img src="s.gif" height="1" width="40">
</td>

<td class="ind" indent="2">
<img src="s.gif" height="1" width="80">
</td>
yes, coal doesn't lead to a choice between obliterating northern hemisphere vs living with 30x radiation.
What is the backup for these systems when the temperatures drop below a range where the heat pump cannot keep up? Down south they use an “emergency” second-stage which is just electricity fed wires that glow hot and those are incredibly inefficient compared to a traditional gas fired furnace. However those temps usually happen a few days maximum every winter.

Heat pumps are great when operating within certain temperature range but aren’t they much better suited for milder environments where they function reasonably well? Quebec temperatures regularly drop to the point where such “emergency” heat is necessary many days in the winter.

Perhaps Canadian heat pumps are designed differently or have better backup mechanism? This article does not say whether other second stage heating sources than electricity are allowed but implies they are not.
Curious if that last comment is true or logical. It sounds wrong but I’m not an expert.

I don’t think we have any long term space missions for which power is a serious concern not easily solved with simple solar panels?
a good example of doing Auth-Basic in PHP is https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php
It’s purely insane that the term ‘financial ruin’ is even in TFA. I’m glad I live in a country where I can’t wake up from a coma a million dollars in debt.
It is as simple as I originally stated.

The argument that solar emits carbon is counting the carbon emitted in construction and plant operation. That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power that it isn’t even worth talking about for the purposes of classifying gas as “green”.

Getting the construction and logistics of anything carbon neutral is orthogonal to the carbon emissions in the production of power.

Bringing up construction CO2 is a red herring at best. I asked for numbers to illustrate how ridiculous the argument is.