skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rabies is pretty damn scary--but please learn what animals carry rabies where you live.

I've seen people freak out because they've seen a raccoon in the daytime and think (1) raccoons are nocturnal so this one is acting strange, and (2) raccoons are rabies carriers, and so it is probably acting strange because it is rabid.

In fact in this part of the country (western Washington) from 1988-2020 rabies has not been found in any wild terrestrial mammal. The only mammals found to have rabies over that time have been 530 bats, 2 cats, 1 horse, and 1 llama.

There's a nifty map here [1] showing what animal populations have rabies in which states.

So what does it mean when you see a raccoon in the daytime in western Washington? It almost always means they aren't finding enough food at night so have to put in overtime foraging.

This is quite common around breeding time. The pregnant females need more food than normal and often will have to go out during the day to get it.

BTW, I believe it is not known why rabies is not found in wild terrestrial mammals here.

For squirrels there are at least three theories. (1) Squirrels are safely asleep in their nests when bats are out, so don't get bitten by bats and if they get bitten by something else that something else is probably big enough that the encounter is fatal for the squirrel, (2) maybe squirrels have strong natural immunity so don't get it even if they do get bitten, or (3) maybe squirrels are particularly vulnerable to it so if they get bitten by a bat they quickly die before they can spread it and since we don't do autopsies on random dead squirrels we come across we never find out about the briefly rabid squirrels.

For raccoons, I don't think it is clear why they aren't picking it up from bats here.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/wild_an...
It hasn't been appreciably touched in decades. It could definitely use an update. And I need to port it to the new pandoc toolchain.
Pedantic, but you said clogged. And you’re right, which is why I acknowledged the possibility of exactly the situation in those stories.

These deaths were avoidable, and of course some thing that EV’s don’t have to deal with.
Over the broad arc of history things have gotten better over the long term. I'm not sure that's always the case though. Exponential growth of technology, or anything else, physically can't last forever. What does it look like when it stops?

I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.
There are significant political and economic tradeoffs between POW and POS... I highly recommend this article for an analysis of these.

https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.
It's shameful that in the richest country in the world there are people being forced to work 12 or more hours a day just to survive.

And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment.
SQLite is the perfect example of a dev team I actually respect. They have zero tolerance for data loss.
I've stopped reading at the Greta Thunberg cameo, up to that point I was still hoping for a decent article.
Get another job. Your management wants to Design and write code like the past. If they’re criticizing now it’ll never end and you will eventually be fired. I would get another job and just walk with zero notice. They won’t do you any favors in the future.
Sure. Now consider the opposite where the stock flatlines for 4 years whereas the market otherwise goes up. Not as good of a deal any more.
> The same is often true in the JavaScript world, which makes VSC interesting because it’s famously an outlier in the Electron world.

That's because it's not a JS problem so much as it is a problem with the culture of NodeJS/NPM. It happens to be that NodeJS has pretty much cannibalized JS development, however.

Two large pieces of software that make heavy use of JS that most people don't even realize—because they don't feel like the kinds of apps that NPM programmers produce—are Firefox and the Gnome desktop. They're by no means examples of the top end of world's snappiest software, but they are solidly middle-of-the-road in a way that most Electron apps, for example, are not.

Dominant platforms that capture lots of developer attention (like NPM today, and Java starting 15–20 years ago) end up capturing the attention of the sort of programmers who are going to be causing trouble no matter what ecosystem they're working in.
A few takeaways from an old-timer here:

> First, he basically tells me this project should have been finished a long time ago and he can't believe it's taken this long etc. I had no idea that he felt this way before the meeting - I've mostly just been working to get it done before the revised deadline my manager gave me.

You need to communicate, build relationships, and get feedback from many people in the organization. One of those people is your manager's manager.

> He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions.

It may be the case that your manager is wrong, his design suggestions were dumb, etc. Or, it may not. This is one reason you need to get feedback from people other than your manager.

> Part of the reason it had taken so long is because I put a substantial amount of work into a part of the project that's no longer necessary due to changing requirements, which I don't think I could have forseen.

Use this as a learning experience. Do not put work into things that may or may not be needed. The correct way to tackle a big project with changing requirements is to get something working end-to-end, possibly with a whole lot of copy and paste, hacks, hardcoded stuff instead of configuration, whatever. Then, when it is doing what it supposed to do, go back and improve it, rinse and repeat. Do not put lots of work into one part if other parts are missing, non-existent, and the project doesn't work end-to-end.

> For instance he said I should have looked at other projects to see how they accomplished what I'm trying to do.

This is great advice. It is often the case that if you ask the right question/person, someone will say "oh, yeah, I already did that, here's the code." or "I tried that last year, and it didn't work". Or, they might not, but the only way is to ask around, talk to people. This also goes back to the first point, build relationships with people other than your manager, because your manager doesn't know everything, and is probably wrong about a bunch of stuff.
The connection is far from remote.

Bitcoin caused an almost instant 10% increase to electricity usage in Kazakshtan. For obvious reasons, all of that increase has to be supplied with additional gas and coal consumption.

Because of the contracts that Kazakshtan signs for its fossil fuel supply, this extra capacity has to be at a higher cost. At least, that's how these contracts typically work, and I'd be very doubtful that Russia would agree to subsidies Kazakh crypto miners, but they do subsidise residential energy consumption in exchange for other concessions.

Indeed, normally, Kazakstan wouldn't see a natural gaz price increase because they negotiate fixed cost contracts with Russia (at least, this is what they used to do and what its neighbors do right now). If they exceed baseline capacity, prices rise significantly.

This means that the price of electricity and fossil fuel must increase strongly, and the proximal cause is indeed Bitcoin.

As far as inequality, Kazakhstan has a Gini coefficient of around 27.4, which is lot lower than lost countries. If this was actually caused by inequality, we would expect to see similar conflicts in many more countries.

On the other hand, rising natural gas and electricity prices are a much stronger and more frequent signal of social unrest, with dozens of precedents all over the world.

Because of this, it seems to me that rising energy prices are indeed the proximate cause of the current unrest, and Bitcoin is likely the proximate cause of rising energy prices.
There are a couple assumptions you're making here. For instance the firing (from your perspective likely but will they really?). Take a step back and take stock of the situation.

Communicate with your manager. Your manager not being there in that meeting definitely didn't do you any favors. Make sure the both of your are on the same page. They should have been there to deflect. Be proactive about communicating and making sure everyone is in alignment. Easier said than done especially if the company is smaller or the manager is busy. But a 20 minute time investment per week will be worth it.

Figure out why this happened. Figure out what can be fixed and move on. But be vigilant because that kind of behavior is frankly uncalled for. On the other hand getting a new job in this market should not be too hard.
Yes hi, "aspergers" is an unfortunate nomenclature and many autistic folks (myself included) strongly resent it. It was named after a Nazi doctor (Hans Asperger) and used to classify autistic folks into "useful" and "non-useful" people -- as Nazis and Eugenicists are known to do. When you think of it, if you could refer to folks on the spectrum as such, without referencing the outdated nomenclature (the DSM-5 replaced it for diagnostics, now everything falls under the Autism Spectrum, rather than viewing the "higher functioning" folks as having a distinct diagnosis)

Thanks!
Any decentralized distributed ledger is by definition more energy intensive and wasteful.

All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.

From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.

With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.

Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.

The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.
There are thousands of workplace to go. Weird this is not the main answer
You're saying the ability to make a phone call from anywhere is a more significant change than the ability to make phone calls at all?
So the percentage makes it look impressive, but... you're saving no more than 5MB. Don't get me wrong, I like smaller images, but I feel like "smaller than Alpine" is getting into -funroll-loops territory of over-optimizing.
To me, it comes down to this line:

> have a computer program generate a predicted word

Do steno devices do this? This right there easily disqualifies it from competitions. It's like using the keyboard autocomplete. If you're using a machine to predict and correctly type the word for you, it defeats half the point of typing competitions, which is specifically about typing words without typos. The majority of time lost in these typing races is when you make a typo and have to go back to correct it.

Also, separately, I know HN skews more towards pogrammers, and I feel these keyboards wouldn't be very useful for that.
Well at least you are dead within a few days but as an insomnia sufferer FFI (Fatal Familial Insomnia) really scares the shit out of me - you die due to being unable to sleep - not even propofol helps.
I like that idea, it could be a worthwhile project - I doubt it's for me, but I also can see this work for the right team. Many good ideas in this thread now!
>People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.

With customer service systems I have to disagree here. I've got experience working with these issues and for the vast majority of companies most contacts to customer support are for small, banal, things that current crappy chatbots can easily solve. The 80-20 rule works here too.

Bad companies try to do too many things with their chatbots, and use it as a way to make it harder for customers to actually get to talk to a human.

Good companies use them to allow customers to solve common issues faster than getting a real human on the line.

Then there's the other issue of how people want to find information - some people want to find it themselfes and do not want to talk to a person, whereas others specifically want to ask someone and do not want to look at all. For the latter group, no chat bot or fancy autocomplete knwoledgebase (Looking at you Zendesk) or similar will work. They'll always try to contact support as their first step, and they will get very frustrated if you make it impossible.

If your a more software oriented company, it can be very benificial to have software developers (or even a team, if you're a larger company) devoted to helping support. The majority of issues customers contact support for are UI/UX or business process related, and if you systematically start to solve them you will reduce customer support burden and customer support related costs.
I suppose then we are getting into the nitty gritty of what the definition of typing is. Typing to me is entering text data. For me, if I use something like Swype on my phone, where I don't even have to hit the actual letters I am trying to type, I would still call it typing. This device looks like it's matching a chord made up of the majority of the letters of a word to the expected word. I would still call that typing. Just like driving with adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, and automatic emergency breaking would still be called driving for me.
Stop thinking about it.
Keep working hard.
Maybe push back harder against design decisions that you disagree with.

Always remember that almost any negative comments might be due to the perpetrator simply having a bad day.
Kinda. I expected some people to leave a good feedback, but theirs was way beyond my expectations.
I think it depends on the situation. I definitely agree that performance-based firings would tend to be extremely brutal compared to the approach I advocate for here (largely due to the various risks posed by aggrieved employees).

Perhaps I should add that this advice best (only?) applies if you're leaving a company in a sort of "natural parting of ways" kind of situation? Thanks for the feedback.
France eyes quick anti-China action to bail out Lithuania in trade war
I have something that blips on the hour. Not every hour though.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.nadolski.bl...
HL7 is a standards development organization, not a data exchange format. They publish several major standards including V2 Messaging, CDA, and FHIR.
Welcome to adulthood it sucks, youre gonna love it.

If you manage to find a workplace that does not sport atleast one manager that does this, consider yourself lucky.

My advice, look for truths in what he said ( I am sure he was correct on some aspect somewhere ) and work on that.
Ignore the rest and move on.
I don't know the solution. I don't know how we determine a better solution.

I do know that once you publicly share an idea without somehow copyrighting it, people will run with it and the originator can get badly screwed financially by people talented at essentially intellectual theft and lining their own pockets who have an absence of ethics and are too stupid to see that screwing their source is not in their long-term best interest.
I hear you man. I’m the first person to excoriate bullshit engineer speak, but alas, I am not a CS major. So yes, I agree, API calls will not magically conjure up more healthcare NPCs. Fine.

My question has nothing to do with the elasticity of the healthcare system which obviously has its own hosts of issues and which we won’t get into here.

But if you’d rather pivot to that then the spirit of my response still has play: why hasn’t the healthcare industry optimized the incentives for healthcare workers to take on this Sisyphean task? Can you please point to some instances of hospital boards increasing pay, benefits, etc. that could offset the risk for these workers?

I guess my major point here is that your highly rational civic minded approach to the crux of the issue here is disjointed: on one hand you lament the ineffectiveness of the healthcare system and in the same breath take a defeatist approach to it as if nothing can be done internally to alleviate the toll the virus is taking on it.

And the sad reality is: it’s the same old shit, everyone wants to praise the heroes (Tiktok nurses) and yet, here we are, two years later, with the same dysfunctional system that got us here. At what point will we collectively try to address the root cause instead of the end user?

Again, here’s reality, with a little less imagination:

Similar to the tech industry, people who architect these systems are, lo and behold, nowhere to be found when these systems go haywire.

And because of this the media apparatus and their apologists uses the oldest trick in the book which is: “Let’s frame this as a them vs. them thing and let people strangle each other over hospital beds”.

When in reality, all that needs to be done is break out the same checkbook that pays for all our wars.

I’m sorry man, but the increased load on facilities, and furthermore, the “lack” of qualified professionals is an apologist pundit opinion full-stop, and quite frankly, borderline offensive.
We had a bat in the house years ago. In my 3am stupor I tried to let it out until Dr. Spouse berated me and said we must catch it. Darn thing disappeared. Animal control came and couldn't find it. That's when I started reading about rabies. Freaked me out. Up until that point I had the attitude that if something felt off, just go to a doctor. Nope. Omae wa mo shindeiru.

We had booked 2 adults and 2 diaper-age kids for PEP shots when I took the day off and turned the house upside down trying to find the bat. Eventually I found the dumb thing stuck to a glue trap for mice. No rabies.

But yeah, people were looking at me like I was bonkers for scheduling the shots. "Did it bite you?" No idea! But I'm not going to take my chances on being the second person ever to come out not quite dead from a drug-induced coma after symptoms set in.
Making mostly-clean water into clean water with reverse osmosis is pretty viable.

It's far cheaper than the reverse osmosis of seawater done in many parts of the world.
I thought the survival rate was extremely high if you get the vaccine very soon after being bitten?
How I made a game engine and game from (almost) scratch
There are all kinds of potential confounders, for example in other analysis of surgeries we sometimes see that senior surgeons get worse results than less experienced surgeons because senior surgeons take on all the non-standard risky cases and leave routine operations to less experienced surgeons; however, aspects like this and also "male doctors and female doctors are attracted to different specialties" would not adequately explain that the correlation is specific to female patients.

One thing that has been studied and plausibly seems relevant is the issue that (at least earlier, perhaps this has improved after criticism) often when teaching internal anatomy, the male body is implicitly considered as "the default" and female specifics are (were?) looked at only with respect to the reproductive system, while in reality there are all kinds of average differences; the same applies to all kinds of drugs which often are tested only on males for efficiency (and later on everyone for safety, incl teratogenic issues) simply assuming that the effectiveness and side effects are the same for everyone, which is known not to be fully true. So it may be that doctors out of med school are literally a bit less prepared to handle female bodies than male ones. However, that would apply to both male and female doctors equally, so that's not a good explanation as well.
> it'll be easier to go on that cheaper trip at a later date than the more expensive one

How can you infer that just from its price though? :P
Ask HN: Looking to get back to RoR, resources?
Recently I built a project in Nodejs, my fav stack and the one I use professionally. I had neat little decent idea but wanted to make it live asap. But I have been bogged down in stuff that was solved like 20 years ago.

- db migrations (non-existent in nodejs/express)

- form validations error propagation (manual)

- csrf token generation

- db controllers

- autofill forms when error happens

and more....

I'm 3 weeks in and STILL reinventing just auth/forms/security stuff.

I hate using libraries that require MORE time learning them than just writing it from scratch. Because they cover 90 other use cases and have design that encompasses all those scenarios but in turn becomes complex.

I remember working rails for about 6 months, it was pure joy. When I found a job where I had to go back to nodejs, I was almost sad that I'm leaving it.

Nodejs is GREAT once everything has been setup and wired.

But if you are starting from scratch. It just takes forever.
Inflation is super complicated because it depends on what types of assets are held by whom and how susceptible those assets are to inflation. For example, high rates of inflation during/after WWII were a large contributing factor in a net reduction in wealth inequality, because much of the wealthy was heavily invested in fixed-return war bonds. Much of the rentier economy of the 19th century elite depended on predictably low (almost nonexistant) inflation in order to sustain their fortunes. Theoretically, the financial assets of today's wealthy should be somewhat less vulnerable to inflation (real returns over the last ~80 years seem to be lower during periods of high inflation but it's also sometimes hard to untangle inflation from the overall state of the economy). Ultimately, inflation is a pretty crude instrument in terms of who it affects; I think it's hard to make sweeping statements about who it's "good" for that hold up well over time.
I'm guessing that hands drifting only happens when you're really pushing for speed and get sloppy?
I agree with that. When I've interviewed in the past I approached it from two ways. First, I asked them to throw out a number - normally that didn't work and they threw it back to me b/c the person I was talking to was really just trying to fill out a field. So then I went on to my next step (which required some research before talking w/ the person). I threw out a number that was two brackets higher than the one I was applying for. I knew it was too high, but I figured if they wanted me that badly, they could give me that price or show their hand and tell me what they're willing to offer. That tricked worked every time.