skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is there any good software for tracking results of diagnostic lab tests?
I'm looking for some software to track the results of diagnostic lab tests (blood, urine, fecal, etc) over time. I have an interest in it for the purpose of optimizing my health and managing chronic conditions.

I'm intersted in any software with these features. But bonus points for software that 1) uses AI to predict or highlight health issues 2) has a good privacy policy and doesn't share data with advertisers or insurance companies 3) is partially or fully open source 4) is self hosted or local, but SaaS is ok too.
I think a fisheye lens plus face recognition should solve that nicely. As long as you can see the watch screen, the image could be cropped, skewed and rotated to focus on your face.
I just gave this workflow a shot and it was great. Thanks for the tip! Do you use anything for committing more granular chunks of code? I'm just committing groups of files but after reading about magit on other hn threads, I feel like I could do better.

edit: added question
Microsoft's new leadership may have "lowered the temperature and refocused the company" to open-source software, but now they're more than ever anticompetitively promoting Edge and Videos and etc., progressively making it harder to switch browsers or make Start/F1 search open a different browser, manipulating users who use Edge search for Chrome, making Edge run in the background for fast start (I suspect to make it appear faster to start than Chrome), baking telemetry into Windows and VS Code and PowerShell and vcpkg, releasing proprietary extensions for proprietary VS Code which won't run on open-source VSCodium, performing hostile takeovers of .NET Foundation projects, etc.
I will make sure to conform in some low cost ways to preserve my ability to bring out my eccentricities when I find hem particularly valuable. So I make sure not to leave the people I talk to feeling weirded out by hints, and to ask questions about how they are doing and so on, but I won’t use a chair with a back or stop coding in order to have a better on time record for meetings.
What the hell is going on with Lambda School?
I think one caveat is that systemd stops the old instance before starting the new one. This will give you a latency blip as requests will be queued during that time. The nginx approach doesn't introduce any latency impact.
What you're missing is that we're eventually (arguably right now) going to be referring to colds and other weak mutations of COVID as "COVID" still, and by virtue of still calling it COVID and still having these COVID dashboards, it's never ending. There is no end, it is a new normal for millions. Too many people's brains short circuited, too many people got anchored to March 2020.
> When one looks at the rate by age, we see that 60+ is at almost 87%

This... isn't great, tho. It's high 90s in Ireland and Spain, say. Unvaccinated over-60s drive a lot of hospitalisation; this really needs to be as high as possible.

> I don’t get this obsession with hitting some arbitrary numbers. Herd immunity’s been off the table since Delta. The vaccines don’t protect well from infection with Omicron.

The vaccines provide considerable protection against hospitalisation and death. Right now, really, no-one is worrying that much about infection; that ship has largely sailed. The key to getting through the current wave in Europe will be protecting the hospital system, and the best remaining way to do that is to get people, particularly older people, vaccinated and boosted.
Living forever might not be that fun. People we know would still die for accidental reasons all the time. Maybe we can't cope with that for centuries or millennia and morale starts to take hits after a while.
yes. would letting the original strains run amok freely have been better? I guess more people would have died, but it would have been over sooner.
Didn't know how to make link clickable other than in comments, since I did not submit with URL initially:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_4Fb7mOtDc
Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win, the winners appoint the financial elite to be board members of the organization that is capable of printing money and giving bailouts/buying poisoned assets from said financial institutions. The money is not made from FED profits, the money is made by the financial institutions owned by the board members. What's so hard to understand about that? It's clearly a scam.

It does not only happen at the central-banking level, but it's another tool used by them.
Let me give you a similar example, not directly involving central banking, from my country. Paulo Guedes is the founder of BTG Pactual bank. He goes on and funds the candidate Jair Bolsonaro for presidency. Once elected, Bolsonaro appoints Guedes to Ministry of Economy. His monetary policies decisions makes the USD/BRL go from R$3.71 to R$5.70. November/2021 comes by and pandora papers are released. We find out the dude has almost 10 million USD stashed in offshore tax-heavens. His decisions made his personal fortune grow by 14 million BRL(equivalent to 956 years of minimum wage).

This does not involve central banking directly but the idea is the same: put the financial elite in positions that allow them to make large scale decisions to grow their personal fortunes while affecting the lives of all others. It's a scam.
They just have to post the minimum and maximum starting salary for the position. I'm having a hard time seeing how this solves anything.

Employers can easily get around this by using ad copy saying "Starting salary between $15k and $50k yearly depending on experience blah blah blah.."
Our expectation of pain actually affects experienced chronic pain. Because it isn't strictly bodily damage that is responsible for "feeling" pain, it is also how our brain processes that sensory information. This is how acute pain becomes chronic, the brain "overfits" for detecting that sensory input from the nerves to try to bring our attention to it more and more, as this might have been evolutionarily helpful. But when under treatment during this era of modern medicine, dwelling on the pain or feeling helpless about it we allow our brain to prioritize the signals as a stressor and increase the "pain volume" which ends up being counterproductive to our daily lives.

Learning this has allowed me to significantly reduce pain medication intake and increase physical activity. Measured and steady physical activity is often the solution for chronic pain, when convention and intuition dictates that rest is the solution. This leads to a cycle of increased stiffness and lack of mobility. Pain isn't "just in your head" but understanding that the pain experience can be mediated in more ways than solely just medication (thankful as I am for it) is empowering and hope inducing.

So all that is to say that I am not surprised if it turns out our mind can affect our body in the ways stated in this article.
You are not allowed to bring your own liquor on the plane, plus, they we're drinking a ridiculous amount of alcohol and getting shit face. You aren't allowed to vape neither, like you aren't allowed to dance and have sex. I don't get why people don't see how their behaviors was completely unacceptable. The authorities also think it was unacceptable since they we're all picked up when they landed back.
Chatbots were trendy because people thought they were AI and could do the same work as a human. They were wrong and now chatbots have become nothing but a fad.

What's more useful are live chats where users can contact someone for help live on a chat screen. This is the future, not stupid chatbots.
The Worst Technology of 2021
Lol. Offers don't really explode on timelines less than a few weeks. If you get pressure from a company to accept their offer in less than a week or 2, that's a red flag, especially if they want you to start right now.
>It's never been that peaceful in the world.

The presence of peace, or the absence of war is indeed a big plus, but doesn't mean automatic happiness for everyone.
And that is 400Gbps encrypted!

Side Note, aren't they 2U?
Should be fixed now; thanks for the heads up!
The epidemic ends when the unusually high threat of serious illness or death ends, though, right?

If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.
Add the "I just can't have fun without alcohol" and it is not ambiguous.
It's definitely bypassable, but it sets the floor. Not only do employers have to post hard numbers on ads, it's possible to see what other companies are paying too, so if you manager is trying to short change you during hikes you have a lot of ammo to counter argue. And you could just leave if the grass is actually greener elsewhere.
But this means, that we can reopen everything, let young people "live", and target the efforts towards old people (and other risk groups).

Atleast here in slovenia, most of the mandates affect mostly the young and healthy... yes, theoretically neither 20yo bobby nor his grandpa can enter nightclubs, due to them being closed, but with such data, we could reopen nightclubs, let bobby party and do all the stupid stuff we were free to do at 20yo, and focus the effort at grandpa, so he gets vaccinated, gets the masks, has somone bring him food, so he doesnt have to go to the stores, subsidize a plan for a smartphone to encourage more videoconferencing instead of live visits, give out free tests at home, to detect the infection early, etc.
This was my initial reaction too: it doesn't seem to pass basic conservation of mass.

But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet.

Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm.

Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
Amen to esoteric Spring issues. I once dealt with a jar that suddenly started failing despite no code changes because Spring uses the order of files in the zip file/jar to determine initialization order. Turns out one that particular time files ended up in a weird order inside the jar file.
> 500 people have signed an online petition supporting it
I'm not sure why you aren't getting interviews, but I've had multiple coding jobs in the past where the interviews had little to no technical quizzing at all. Don't get too discouraged, there's probably a match out there for you, maybe just not at a FAANG or one of those super competitive companies (which, quite honestly, I wouldn't want to work for anyway--but it's personal preference).

You can always move onto a more competitive company later once your resume has some solid experience on it, if that's your cup of tea.
[flagged] misleading title
Calling zvi's blog "useful" is an understatement, he's practically a lesser deity of covid-19 modeling.
Good enough because it's good enough (most of the time) for the user to do what they need to do. That's all that's needed. Not perfection.

Even more: Perfection takes a lot of time. Perfection therefore means less software reaching the user. So, is the imperfect software more useful to the user than no software at all? In most cases, yes, even with all the problems the software causes. (Because if it were otherwise, wouldn't the users stop using the software?)
I disagree that the food was better for them previously. For as 'bad' as the foods are that we eat today, we have access to plenty of vitamins and nutritional issues in childhood are much less prevalent. Read about iodine deficiency for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency.

That said, there is certainly plenty of truth to the house building/land use issues. I don't think anywhere has fully handled the new technology of the automobile well as the handling of automobiles has been a major driver of the issues in housing. Unchecked automobile use allows much more land to be used, but conversely encourages dumb land use rules that encourage sprawl and add miserable amounts of noise, pollution, and render most public space (roads) uninhabitable by people. I think the next century will have society figuring out a better balance or some new solutions.
These bots seem equivalent to an adult with amnesia after every spoken sentence. Absolute understanding of the language, and some impressive display of recalling facts, but without any understanding of the environment or context of the conversation.

This is polar opposite to any experience I've had with children. Children are aware of their environment and have complex thoughts, but sometimes they are unable to convey those thoughts with words. Children seem to remember conversations, and if I were to say "Go get me a red lego" and then subsequently say "now a green one" there is no ambiguity or confusion.

To me as these bots have "advanced" it has only highlighted how absurdly far we are from anything even approaching actual intelligence, even the intelligence of a toddler. The contextual awareness I have seen in bots is not much more than a cheap trick that is trivially fooled in scenarios that would not fool a child.
Why indeed? Is this supposed to be a dunk? If you're paying based on value derived from their work, what does it matter where they live (assuming remote work is acceptable, of course)?
The popular culture in those days and may be even a few decades after that always predicted food intake to minimized to pills. Has there ever been attempt to do so? I mean any company or university attempting to deliver the same nutrients and satisfaction in a much reduced form factor?
I had a positive interaction with a chat bot yesterday that serves as a good example of what you describe. My home internet had an outage and I went to my cable company's website to report the incident and perhaps get an ETA of when it will be restored. I interacted fully with a customer service chat bot which handled the whole situation flawlessly.
(author here) Without something like Browsix you have to make a choice: find a JavaScript library or implement the functionality you want to run client side, or run existing Unix programs and libraries (that expect a filesystem, to be able to fork children, etc) server side. If you run software server side, now you have to worry about containerizing/security as well as horizontal scaling.

Browsix addresses this by letting you run Unix programs directly in the browser, taking advantage of the significant compute power on peoples laptops (and even phones nowadays!), eliminating a whole class of security issues (software explicitly will only have access to the current users data in the browser tab) and scaling concerns.
Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled.

If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
You seem to be largely agreeing with the person you’re replying to. No need to disparage them.

TFA made a universal claim. OP replied “not true, here’s where it doesn’t hold.” Bringing up cases where it does hold doesn’t change anything.
"poorly monitored infections of the immunocompromised can easily explain this. It hardly seems necessary to posit nefarious secret labs when COVID is constantly spreading among billions of people, a significant fraction of whom are immunocompromised and chronically infected in minimally monitored areas."

How do "poorly monitored infections of the immunocompromised" explain weirdnesses 2 and 4? (Referring to the blog post under discussion)

Did the blog author "posit nefarious secret labs"? Not that I'm seeing. There are labs all over the world doing things with SARS-CoV-2, probably for what they believe to be legitimate reasons. "Nefariousness" and "secrecy" is not in the article. "Nefariousness" and "secrecy" are not part of the hypothesis.

"a significant fraction of whom are immunocompromised and chronically infected in minimally monitored areas": Contrary to people's seeming stereotypes about "Africa," South Africa monitors SARS-CoV-2 really well. The hypothetical immunocompromised person in Alina's discussion would not be someone untreated in some remote village, unnoticed for a year and a half. No, to get that level of immune evasion, Alina must be talking about someone who was being treated medically, with fancy treatments, and being monitored for a very long time.

Well, for one thing: My first question is "Who is it? Who is this person who received all the convalescent plasma and all the different monoclonal antibodies for a year and half, in well-monitored South Africa?"

But even if we don't know who this hypothetical person is, there are other problems:

That person apparently never infected anyone else. And...that person in a year and a half never had any _intermediate_ viruses that infected anyone else either, to account for the gaps in the phylogenetic tree. And...that person had a set of mutations that you might expect to see in a humanized mouse (Weirdness 4).

You see, then, that while this is all "possible" it's not very parsimonious. I think we do better to begin with parsimonious hypotheses and try to test those and rule those out.

The lab leak is a parsimonious hypothesis -- but instead, mainstream people, for whatever reason, are portraying it as so far-fetched as not to merit consideration -- they would dismiss it, rather unscientifically, as if the hypothesis were really wild and not meriting consideration, like "Space aliens from planet X did it." Then, instead, they put forward hypotheses that are in fact way more far-fetched because they don't account for the data neatly, like "it was an immune compromised person" -- but the set of circumstances in which that would be true, while kinda-sorta possible, is much more unlikely than the circumstances of "lab leak."

The failure of the scientific community to address this really makes no sense to me.
Colorado is 1.7% of USA population and can be easily excluded; Colorado+NY is already 7.7%, and eventually you reach a large enough critical mass that can't be ignored without consequence.

However, I presume that the main target of this law is not megacorps advertising remote positions but rather local businesses hiring local workers - which can't get around this requirement.
I hope your wife is ok. Unfortunately, infection with Omicron is inevitable and not preventable, without living in a bubble. It's too infectious, and the vaccine, unlike with previous variants, does basically nothing to stop transmission. Combine that with an R0 equivalent to measles, and avoiding infection was never possible. She probably took every precaution she could reasonably take, and still got infected. That was my experience as well.

Statistically, people who are healthy and vaxxed developing severe symptoms from Omicron are outliers. That is no comfort to you, and I can assure you I know how you feel on that front when people like me tell you the stats. My mother-in-law suffered a very rare (statistically) adverse event from her second Pfizer shot in May, which killed her. She was in her early 60s, and healthy, but suffered cardiac arrest 3 hours after her second shot, in the midst of a fever. It was an exceedingly rare event, but it was no comfort to us to be told that.
I think this gets at what the actual value prop (not the marketed one) of chatbots really is: scale.

There will not, in the foreseeable future, be a model/ensemble/pipeline capable of conversing at the level of a human representative. Thinking of them as "humans, but cheaper" is destined to fail.

There are, however, use-cases where communicating with a huge group of individuals on a one-on-one level is useful. For example, years ago a company called Mainstay (then AdmitHub) built a chatbot for Georgia State designed to reduce "summer melt," a phenomenon in which intending freshmen drop off between graduating high school and enrolling in classes. For this use case, getting human-level conversation wasn't as critical as effective performance on tasks like question answering. Their bot, Pounce, was credited with a ~20% decrease in summer melt. They have a proper study here: https://mainstay.com/case-study/how-georgia-state-university...

This is an example, in my opinion, of the sweet-spot where intelligent, individualized, but not-near-human-level communication is needed, at a scale that goes beyond what you could reasonably do manually without an enormous dedicated staff.

Now, I don't know how numerous those opportunities are, or if they come anywhere close to the level of hype and funding chatbot companies have received. I just think that in a vacuum, there is a set of problems where they have value.
I think a lot of people wanted it to be true because building a chatbot is way easier than building a full 2-dimensional UI. To the extent that you can get users to use a command-line interface in the 21st century you've made your job as a developer much easier.
Immunity is a spectrum, not a binary condition. Infection by previous variants appears to still provide a significant level of durable cellular immunity against Omicron.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1
Bash Aliases for Fun and Productivity
I use chatbots to search for pages on websites where search is otherwise broken, like one of my bank's. I have never found a good use for them.

They were once advertised to help your granny use the website but I haven't met a chatbot that could help me do something.
Keep in mind, that between the "like the flu" and "mild" designator, folks are dismissing the severity of Omicron. But we must keep in mind that "mild" is in reference to "severe" which entails death and ground glass lungs.
http://marginalrevolution.com/

I used to write more essays but now often post links to http://jakeseliger.com
Is the Army giving everyone a personal device to run Threema on? That's why people use WhatsApp - because people already have it on their phones. If the Army wants people to install a special app people are likely to ask them to provide the device.
I think this is supposed to be true, but nowadays when the wealthy mostly hold assets that have real value, like real estate and equities, as opposed to USD in a bank account, I'm not sure how well it works.
No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people.

> Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?

They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence.

> The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making

This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.