skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitalizations, it can? Or was it expected that the vaccine would reduce transmission to the point where it wouldn't spread so much?

This sounds reasonable, but aren't fully vaccinated people ending up in the hospital pretty regularly too [2]? Using the 94% effective figure from the early trials, say fully vaccinated people are 20 times less likely to be hospitalized.

I don't know much about virology but I understand exponential growth. It looks like the cases are doubling every 2 weeks (edit: I guess this might even be a few days? See [0]). In a few months, almost everyone will get it. In the last two week period, won't half the population catch it? In that case, even with 100% vaccination, hospitalizations would still be 1/20 of half the maximum due to COVID. Right?

That's something I've never understood about the pandemic. Is reducing hospitalizations by a factor of 20 enough that having everyone get the virus is no longer a concern? Or was it expected that the vaccines reduce transmission enough that everyone wouldn't get it anymore? Canada has like 75% [1] (edit: oops, originally I said 85% here, but I guess that's in people 12 years and older) or higher vaccination and is still seeing record case numbers everywhere.

This isn't really an argument for or against kids in schools. I am just surprised that people are so quick to say "we have a vaccine so there's no need to worry about COVID in anyone vaccinated now". Certainly it seems like many health officials say something similar, so I must have missed something. (Or are they just trying to encourage everyone to get vaccinated? I know that many people don't really understand the details and would (erroneously) just say "it's not 100% effective so why bother")

Sources:

* "The spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus appears to be doubling every two to three days" [0]

* "The cumulative percent of people fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine in Canada was 76.83% as of January 1, 2022." [1]

* "Fifty per cent of hospitalizations now, in Quebec, are due to people not having been vaccinated," [2]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/08/omicron-covid-...

[1]: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccination-cover...

[2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/duclos-mandatory-vaccinatio...
> In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies.

I find this assertion hard to believe. Merkel has been in charge of Germany's federal government for the past two decades, and throughout this period Germany's energy production from renewable sources has skyrocketed from virtually none to the leading energy source, with a share of over 60% of the nation's energy production.

In fact, if anything, Germany's production from renewables has been accelerating.

https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/power-g...

Could you provide any source that supports your assertion that the previous government has been stalling renewables?
Isn't the "computer illiterate" the majority of people. Those other activities are working professionals in relatively niche fields.
Created can mean different things to different people. Maybe an ecommerce order is created in the sense it's been updated in the inventory database and a record added to some sort of fulfilment system but there's still outstanding data warehouse sync jobs, some order analysis/product recommender job, and some anti fraud jobs (that just need to complete before the order picking in the warehouse begins)
I recently wrote about how encoding ULIDs in the UUID format could help with some of these problems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794186

https://sudhir.io/uuids-ulids
Are there SQL servers intended for direct public usage? EDIT: I do understand the ubiquity of SQL servers :) I'm asking about ones that expose a good chunk of SQL to end users, since theoretically one could build on that
Throwaway account because I currently work at GS and I too have the NDAs.

Great post! I've been at GS for ~8 years and I can say this is a pretty accurate description of what a GS internship is like nowadays. These 2 points ring out as the most true to me:

1. Lots of red tape. You need to get approvals for any and all access. You're 100% right, its all regulation stuff, but its still annoying as fuck. And since there are so many approvals being requested left and right, managers tend to get swarmed and not really care too much about 99% of requests so its just a matter of chasing to get things approved. To add an annoying cherry on top one of the main systems that you request access through is a bit of a legacy system, so propagation of approvals takes a few hours, which sometimes leaves you sitting on your hands and just waiting. Its not too bad though, and in the last few years a lot of effort has been put into reducing these waiting times.

2. Inhouse building. GS suffered from this a lot, as did all the big banks in the past. All of our legacy is inhouse and it slows us down today. The good news (which you also alluded too) is that for the last ~5 of so years there have been monumental shifts in pushing us towards open-source ways (shameless plug, we even have open source roles we are hiring for: https://bit.ly/3GkJGCM ), so modern development in GS is getting much better.

My only question here which you didn't address in the blog post is: if GS offered you a permanent role, would you take it?
The issue with these facilities is that they need to be safe for thousand(s) of years and nobody really knows if they are. Moreover the experience in Germany is that the operators, politicians, construction companies... take shortcuts for various (primarily economic reasons), which makes safety even more questionable.

This is one of the primary things that fueled nuclear scepticism in Germany, people become more aware of the news around nuclear power operators and the dogeiness that is happening. For example it happened multiple times that there were incidents that should have been reported by law and operators didn't report because it possibly would have meant to a shutdown period. Usually, nothing came out of these violations, even though there are provisions that require operators to be "trustworthy".

Looking at other countries, e.g. France, information was very biased to keep bad news about nuclear away. For example my partner told me that when Tschernobyl happened when she was young they were essentially told that all radiation had stopped at the border and now restrictions regarding vegetables, mushrooms etc were necessary.
most things are scams to some degree (the US educational system, degrees from mediocre institutions, US health insurance, corporations like Amazon and Facebook, the meat industry, the prison industry), yet we have to live with them
We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to your project. Good luck with it.
I have two toddler granddaughters. Both their parents had COVID last year (presumably delta), so I guess the kids must have caught it too. Their mother teaches in primary school, and is tested daily.

It's completely inadequate to rely on online schooling for small kids; a large part of what's important in their schooling is interacting with other kids. Over-12s: maybe not so much.

So I think it's inevitable that more-or-less all schools are going to be disease-ridden. Really, they always have been (i.e. not just COVID). It's similar with hospitals; the whole point of a hospital is that it's full of sick people. I hate hospital waiting rooms.
The building management companies were fine with commercial keys in the 80s. They are paying for a system to map entitlement to lock.

The quality of the lock is a small part of the overall equation.

I’ll give you an example of my home. The previously homeowner installed a high quality Medeco lock. It’s difficult to pick (unless you are YouTube’s lockpickinglawyee) and the keys are a pain to duplicate.

Secure, right? Not really. My front door is on a porch with a window, and you could trivially use a thin metal bar to pop the window open, assuming that you wanted to keep the noise down.
Bookstack looks like an amazing feat of engineering — it’s overwhelmingly the wiki I want to deploy given other F/OSS options. just today I was showing it to a friend and it is impressive how clean and considered it is. Thanks for maintaining and improving this project
I re-read your comment and you do say "same" prefixes (I think I read it as "shared"), which AWS hasn't changed the behavior of (AFAIK). You're right that objects with the exact same prefix are still routed to the same shard (set?) and have that throughput limit.

P.S.: In a few projects I've built prefixes using timestamps, but not at the very beginning, and worried that they weren't getting sharded out. The change I linked to fixes that problem.
> is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers?

We do not have a spare universe without such additions to answer that question.

Hornsea Project 1 (1.2GW nameplate electricity generation from wind turbines in the North Sea) is running right now and is paid £140 per MWh under CfD terms. So, on a nice fresh day that's £168 000 per hour.

In 2019 you could say that's a ludicrous subsidy, the market price for electricity in the UK was about £50 per MWh so the government (and thus rate payers ultimately) are paying about 200% extra to subsidise this wind farm.

On the other hand, today (in January 2022) the market price is fluctuating closer to £200 per MWh due to gas prices and so £140 per MWh looks like a bargain.

[ The way Contracts for Difference works is you sell your electricity like everybody else, via some mix of long term and short term contracts, and the government tops up the difference between the market price and your "strike price" so that your income is always determined by your strike price not subject to changes in the market price. This also means if market prices are higher (as they often have been this past year) you pay the government back the difference so you still only get the income your strike price guaranteed. As a result the risk of not generating electricity stays with you, as does the risk of not selling your electricity for market prices but the government eats your risk that market prices are far lower than you expected while also gobbling up any windfall profits if market prices are far higher ]

Now, if Hornsea and similar wind farms don't exist, does the UK magically pay the same price £140 per MWh for that electricity even though gas is expensive and it has no other source of electricity ? Or do the prices go up even further? Maybe with no other choice the UK buys electricity for £300 per MWh or even £500 per MWh. The lights must stay on after all.

Also there are secondary effects. If you propose a new wind farm today, to start construction in 2024 and be online in 2030, you're not going to get a strike price of £140 per MWh because of course prices came down due to investment in the sector. But if there was no investment, why wouldn't you find wind farms in 2030 just as expensive as they were in 2015 ? And not only did prices come down, efficiency went up as suppliers gained experience and competed to offer better products, when Hornsea was proposed a 8MW turbine was best-in-class, Hornsea Project 2 intends up to 15MW turbines. The taller structure offers not only more peak power output, it also delivers higher capacity factor because high altitude winds are more constant.
Blockchain/NFTs have no value for ticketing, and they arguably are worse for consumers. The ticketing database is centralized: the event host decides if the ticket is valid or not.

So what do they do differently? They allow users to transfer a single ticket without notifying the event host or the host's ticketing platform.

That's just going to turn event tickets into an even more speculative market for scalpers than they already were. It improves accessibility and UX for scalpers, not actual fans. That makes tickets artificially rise and probably leads to empty seats. Bad for everyone.
This week in KDE: better MTP support
That sounds nice and simple, and fits in 64 bits (vs 128):

"we settled on a composition of: timestamp, worker number and sequence number.
Sequence numbers are per-thread and worker numbers are chosen at startup via zookeeper"
How would the Maori even know that at that time? By looking down from the top of Mount Ruapehu?
I think nuclear would be, if the seventies had not happened.
What's wrong with Iran? Last I checked it's a beautiful country with nice and educated people.
Is it better to product radioactive waste thats gonna leak and cost hundreds of generation insane amounts of money and we will happily live on one bug radioactive dump?

Its better to use invest in renewables
I am curious, too. I have been in the Clojure ecosystem for a minute, but have always been curious about the "real juice" of clisp.
There several iterator libraries around but generics has made easier to compose iterators into a single one.
More like keeping cars which are intended to be leased/rented in service longer.
In the UK 'Professor' takes precedence (and isn't abbreviated? If it were it would be without the full stop (aka 'period')) - even if someone managed to become a professor at a chartered university without a doctorate it's just irrelevant at that point. Titles can be 'doubled-up' if they convey different things though, for example a knighted professor would be Professor Sir/Dame (male/female).

Debrett's used to have some nice public web pages on this & similar, but it seems to have been removed or paywalled.
I don't follow.

"They" can do just about anything they want. They can make their amendment. They can declare the blockchain null and void. They can hold a gun to your head and tell you to sell your NFT. They can even pull the trigger, in an attempt to make an example out of you for the next fool that tries to defy their authority. But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT without your volition. Not without breaking some of the fundamental mathematical ideas behind encryption.

Is there value in that in present day society? Maybe not. But there is undeniably something special about it.
> These kinds of changes are not cost-free: people who drove oil trucks will need to find other jobs, and we should help them make the transition.

Who is “we”?

If it isn’t the people who own the oil trucks, how is it going to happen?

So far, the “we” hasn’t been them, and that’s one reason it’s taking so long to happen.
New from Apple store.
This is absolutely correct. In my personal case, the vicious censoring in which major internet companies and news sources have indulged recently, made me distrust all COVID information in general. I got vaccinated, but didn't get a booster, and did not wear a mask on a bus during my foreign travels (in that country noone wore masks basically), and as a result, got a fairly bad case of covid in November. I believe that in my specific case if there was no censoring, I would have read up more and have been more vigilant.
They can change the content, you’ll just know they did it. Much like if my watch gets stolen I’ll know, but I still don’t have a watch anymore.
Because 124 random bits are still way enough to make collisions extremely unlikely (needs on the order of 2^62 UUIDs even with birthday paradox - good luck storing them all), yet they are still recognizable as being of that specific format.
Yeah, you have a point. I'm actually unlucky enough to live in a country where the authorities have made growing and purchasing even the mildest recreative drugs illegal roughly half a century ago, and haven't yet fixed this error. So I buy them illegally, using crypto.
Ink printer is a scam. We've known it for years.

How is this not ripe for disruption?

Honestly, I haven't bothered owning a printer, but if I had to -- I would probably try my luck at a laserprinter.
It has already happened, and nobody cared. Very early on, the bitcoin blockchain ended up playing host to some illegal images, but nobody took down bitcoin or bitcoin nodes for storing them.
6% was just one year, not a long term value.

And nobody should be using common currency as a store of value.

The USD is designed to have a bit of inflation, i.e. it's not supposed to be a store of value on purpose.
As opposed to the non-monopolistic practices of Facebook and their messengers?
One often encounters the claim that RAID 5 is supposedly dead because declared unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of high capacity hard drives 1e-15 is too high a RAID5 array rebuild is supposedly likely to fail before completion.

It turns out, this worry was based mostly on naive misunderstanding of the failure modes of RAID controllers. URE usually do not cause complete rebuild failure, only a failed stripe.

In reality, you can RAID 5 just fine with howsoever big enterprise disks, if 1) you use just a few of them in the RAID set, say 3 disks; 2) you can tolerate occasional very rare failed stripe (which can cause few files being corrupted). This can be the case for multi-day backups, for example.

In case you want to be on the safe side regarding failed stripes using RAID5 + high capacity disks, you can create multiple smaller arrays on the RAID5 disk set. Say, with 3x18TB disks, total available space is 36TB, but if you partition it into 6x6TB arrays , then any failure during one array rebuild can affect only 1/6 of the data.
LoL is good. Here's a taste of what you can expect:

Casting SPELs in LISP: https://www.lisperati.com/casting.html
I don't think the bootloops count as hardware failure?
This cost is nothing if you compare it to cost of sagely storing waste from plants for thousands of years.
Aesthetics and gameplay are completely separate topics. Procedural generation can increase the visual quality without having anything to do with how you play.

For example, increasing background details (more pedestrians, cars, traffic, sounds, etc) in a city scene can greatly add to the atmosphere regardless of your specific gameplay loop.
There's even a music video for Land of Lisp!
There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?
To me, it seemed that if a browser had passed every test, the user might not be able to use many web sites. Perhaps the current status is a conscious decision by developers to keep users from hating their browser. Security vs usability.
Curious why you feel that way, I've been playing league of legends for about that long and although i don't spend nearly as much time as I used to on it, it still does mostly bring me joy whenever I get to play. Is the disappointment you feel linked to winning vs losing or are you always unhappy regardless of the outcome of the game?
How many lions are in my room at the moment? Hopefully zero.
As I type this, I'm infected with Covid. I have a wife and three kids, all tested positive.

The oldest complained of a sore throat for one day, the others were "a bit tired" for two days.
I've had it the worst. I had intestinal issues for 3 says and now have a mild sore throat and fatigue. Overall, I skipped about 2 half days of work because I felt tired. (I work from home)

Omicron has swept through pretty much every family we interact with.

1. We and most people we interact with are very responsible wrt stopping the spread. Vaccines, Masks, social distancing. Both my wife and I work from home.

We got infected anyway.

2. For people under 65 with no comorbidities, Covid, in general, is nothing to be afraid of. My in-laws (both over 70) got it just before us. They basically had nasty head cold symptoms for 3 days.

3. Omicron is far more mild than prior strains.

4. For people with comorbidities, even the flu is something to be afraid of. Before covid, the flu was the cause of most cardiac and pnemonia related mortality. Prior strains of Covid are worse, for sure, but deaths due to influenza should be enough to make people panic. We just never assigned flu as the underlying cause of death. *[0]

5. I think the last data I saw on the Pfizer vaccine said it was 24% effective against omicron. I don't know what this means exactly. But current evidence says that was too optimistic.
*[1]
3 shots of it wasn't enough to stop the contagion, though maybe it made my symptoms milder. Who knows.

5. Omicron is likely a much more effective inoculation against covid than the vaccines which all now appear to be outdated. *[2]

My takeaway from all of this:
Vaccines aren't helping.
Masks and social distancing aren't helping.
Omicron itself might be the biggest help we have.
It's time to work to stop the hysteria, and also update our covid policies, because they're no longer relevant.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#

[2] https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising...
Not true https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-...
Such a nice tool - we use it at work, and the people managing like how simple it us to use!
I’m smoke free for 8 days, and it was very much a question of realising I didn’t want it anymore.

I wouldn’t generalise on such things though, everyone is different.
Even Nintendo has stopped region locking games
I'm assuming that you're using maildir, in which case running an imap server can be pretty easy to do. I've always used courier from the default debian install and it looks in ~/Maildir for the mails and ~/Maildir/.foldername/ for folders under the inbox and it has worked well for me before. I seem to recall the last time i tried dovecot (maybe a decade ago?) it was more difficult to setup but courier has always been nice and simple for me to manage since it's using the default PAM authentication stuff. Probably not what you'd want for an install with lots and lots of users and more complicated authentication needs but for a backup mail server it's worked great for me and also for my parents
Been using this daily. It's much better.
Read posts below about people 1/3rd of kids from area. The fact that you dont see it straight away doesnt mean there are no victims.
Actually, thanks a lot for the recommendation. I'll be migrating my custom domain from Google apps into something else and this will be of great help.
>CGNAT exists (and well... it "works").

FTFY. CGNAT means consumers get to be behind a double NAT, no port forwarding, poor P2P support, etc. CGNAT is the IPv4 solution of last resort.
While the problem on the article is less of an issue in Postgres (the indexing cache locality is still there), they are still slower than the serial ones.

I don't know if you save enough problems by using them as alternative keys in Postgres for it to be faster, my guess is that just using them as primary key would be faster than a serial primary key and an UUID alternative one. Still, UUIDs are much more useful as client-facing data than as a pure database value, so I would also do that (and standardize my PK format), probably paying a performance penalty.
I guess it’s just about everyone’s slightly different scenarios. My typical example: I have all my photos on Dropbox. Some of them a decade old. Don’t need them taking up SSD space. Don’t need to carry them around. But once in a blue moon I want to see a decade old photo from my phone while I’m on the other side of planet. Same for my ebooks, older work files, tax returns, etc, etc.
Some is likely being paid to promote Wolfram products on Wikipedia
This could be really cool. Hope it does well and other historical artifacts could be recreated for exploration.