skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly

No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.

Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.

This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.

Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:

1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.

2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.

[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
I really like Spotify strategy
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2018/01/testing-of-microse...
Doesn't matter in this context though:
> has something special that you don't have

OP's point is that it's not solely up to you to just "do anything".
This resonates somewhat as I turned 35… today.

I thought I would have accomplished a lot more but I also:

- fail to recognise my accomplishments to-date

- cross-compare with others around me (even if they’re not in the same situation)

- have to recognise the variability created by choosing to have others in my life (spouse, children)

I reel when I think about some of my decisions - e.g. not buying a home for my family and continuing to rent but I have to accept that some of that is not all my fault - housing is increasingly expensive and I’ve not been blessed with the same 5-figure deposit contribution from family that my friends have had. I also need to recognise the concept of home ownership is an ideal informed from the previous generation and may or may not be as relevant today.

I do resent the increasing encroachment of work into the home. The delineation between home and work today is tiny and it becomes very difficult to maintain separation between personal / family / work. This becomes especially hard when work expectations ramp up and how we’re all international now. At times I’ve felt like a vessel for family and work duties with no time left in the calendar for personal pursuit.

When it’s difficult to nurture your personal self and develop that internal satisfaction and success, I feel we try to seek that same satisfaction/success in the other domains of family and work which monopolise our calendar and as such look at the measures of success there (a nice car, a decent career, a lofty job title, great family holidays, etc…).
I care, yes. Subconsciously for sure, but also consciously. I really do appreciate fast web sites. And from your post, so do you!

Most unpleasantly slow sites I encounter aren’t slow because they’re 10 MiB or whatever. They’re slow because it takes multiple seconds before a connection is even established and/or the bytes roll in. It’s 2022. Unless hosting on solar power, that’s not acceptable.

I think the web vitals stuff is awesome anyway, if only in bringing attention to the topic. I have some (junior-y) colleagues who simply do not care at all. Hundreds of requests, images popping in late, fonts being requested dozens of times, layout shifts. They need to learn that this is important. Also, the clients. They need to learn this is important, too.
I heard it around that time from gaming news sources as it was expected to effect computer part supply.
That's unreasonable expectations for most, to be honest. I don't know if it's just because it's the HN bubble where everyone seems to be a USD millionaire and run their own successful startups, or if it's a general thing enabled by modern media trends (or something else entirely).

Regardless, it's perfectly possible to succeed at having a happy and fulfilling life without being financially independent. #2 can be achieved if one moves out of the more attractive areas where housing is often far cheaper than in the more hip areas. It may have consequences like an increased commute, or a lower salary, but again, having enough money to never having work isn't going to happen for most of us.
The pursuit of happiness specifically is pointless, and vague. What you need is meaning. Meaningful pursuit is something that you truly, deeply believe in doing because it will make the world better, both for you, and everyone in it.
I'm fairly sure Wolfram's researchers are working on it because they are interested, and want to do it.
There are gas/oil pipelines in many port countries that connect to Germany to bridge the gap until they build their own.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-signs-f...
Never had these ice creams, but Green Tea KitKats from Japan are quite delicious!
To this day it has always been my biggest beef that textbooks don't reflect reality.

If we look back to our school days in maths classes with Sir getting all excited about teaching the class how to do y = 2x - 2, solve for x.

All your average kid does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the **ing point, I'll never use this junk in real life".

Then decades later, people like me occasionally find myself (trying to) understand interesting sounding papers on machine learning, but the maths just flies right over my head.

I'm all for a practical approach to teaching. Its more interesting to learn and as a result it leaves you with a higher chance of the theory sticking in the student's head.

Its better than the alternative approach of just whacking students over the head with dry theory books in the hope that some of it sticks.
All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too.

Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
https://www.ivanmontilla.com

This is my personal blog, I claim is a tech blog, but it's mostly a career advice blog.

I went fancy and installed Grav on it instead of WordPress, I love the speed when it loads. I also use CloudFlare on top of it.
I worked on a lab, wait times < 1 minute were the worst, too long to actively wait, too little to go do something else. Now back in dev work it's even worse, because there's too many opportunities where you 'think' you can bridge that time, but you get lost way too easily.

What somewhat worked for me was time tracking based on my screen's focus (I use Timing for Mac, timingapp.com, no affiliation whatsoever). If anything it makes me aware, but since I use it for billing my hours, there's an incentive to minimise it to keep the day (at least somewhat) short.

Today's for working on my own stuff, so no tracking, hence me falling for the same traps again, and writing this comment. Probably should do it on a day like today as well.
It was pretty terrible. I had dial up at the time and so used offline mode a lot. It was a regular thing where the game would get to 100% ready, I'd launch it online to see that it worked, switch to offline and disconnect and it no longer worked. So you'd repeat this about 6 times and maybe it would stick. There was NO avoiding being online for the first install. I had to spend 2 nights connected to dial up to get HL2:Episode 1 playable and I bought that from a DVD. I played HL2 on Xbox just to avoid Steam.
> Make build process 10s faster, 1000 engineers run this 10x a day, you're saving more than an engineer day per day of time.

I upgraded my home internet to one 2x as fast as the old service, so that I would spend only half as much time online, but it didn't work. Speed up the build process and the build will just get more complicated and the test suite slower, until it once again slows to the point of being barely tolerable. ISTM that part of Go's early popularity was from its fast builds.
I'm in my 50s and I like to think I've had a reasonable career so far.

However, by far the most fulfilling thing I've done for a long long time is helping out in a foodbank in a nearby town.

So my biggest regret at the moment is actually realising that, at least for me, helping other people actually can be rather more fulfilling than achieving purely personal goals - I wish I'd realised this sooner.
Yes, Real estate has nimbyed up all over
> Sacrificing your personal now for a better future is one of those church ideals that always struck me as weird.

I think in certain ways they're valid, but more for creating circumstances that will allow you to do fulfilling things in the future. Taking care of your body now to avoid health issues in the future, saving now so you don't have to worry about money in the future.

I guess a common baseline requirement for happiness is a sense of freedom. A healthy body gives you freedom to move (move in the broadest sense of the word, meaning also mobility, being able to pick something up from the floor without too many aches and pains), some financial backing means you're not constantly worrying about where your next meal comes from, so you're free to think about other things.
Imagine that you're trapped in the matrix. A dream where all projects, even the most impressive, are just videogames and dust.

The only worthwhile achievements would be to become aware of your predicament and to escape the matrix.

And any worthwhile pursuit other than that is just a deeper kind of trap. Distracting you while the clock ticks away.
> 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work".

I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):

Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.

So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.

To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...
Isn't life merely thinking you'll accomplish something big in the future when you are young (from by a bias that shows people accomplishing grand things more than others), and then basiclaly being too busy just living for a couple of decades, and finally accepting that merely living is accomplishment enough?

This panic over accomplishment must be a cultural phenomenon. I can't relate. Is there a wide group of people who are in panic over that their life might end up being merely "lived" without companies founded, books published, mountains climbed?
He's not missing the link. The link is the empty string.
First recognize that lawyers are not a technical issue and that mostly they handle independent cases and subpoena requests. Since the work is fairly compartmentalized (unlike software development) throwing more people at the problem has less of a consequence. Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.

Furthermore, developing tech for managing this is likely to be unnecessary as there are existing software packages already out there. Doing business across the world and handling legal issues is not unique to Twitter.
Cloth masks are not as good as properly fitted KN95/99 masks, but they are not utterly useless.

There's a ton of evidence supporting this, and it doesn't help your argument to deny it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510705/
https://new.pythonforengineers.com/ --> Originally had just Python stuff, recently moving to more generally "programming things"
You can make a pretty good argument that the popularity of canned foods really came post-WWII.
I have made this small tool which coverts simple text to full database script with foreign keys, there are some limitations thought, its main purpose is to shorten time spend on remembering syntax and creating database.
Currently MSSQL , MySQL and PostgreSQL are supported.

https://text2db.com/
I replaced Hugo with 80 lines of code.

https://alexxx.co/static-site-generator.html

Features partial templates, markdown/html, mustache variables, html prettified, dead simple.

PS.: please give me ideas to reduce LOC or simplify code.
More the overuse of his name to name other things and the fact he has been talking about revolutioning science for at least 2 facades without doing it.
Also see redbean http://redbean.justine.lol/
Is this US/location dependent? I'm an ACM member from India and I've not received any such communication.
One would expect that after stuxnet and the whole NSA/Snowden thing that the consensus on the capabilities and competence of the US intelligence services and NSA would be positive.
https://thejamespaterson.com

I got a bit obsessed with CSS animations and a video about beautiful VHS tapes.
https://www.yusufaytas.com
I write about tech and other stuff since 2000s
https://www.splitbrain.org powered by DokuWiki for years now, but started as a bunch of PHP scripts.
Absolute skepticism works well in philosophy lectures, but it's not a good heuristic in real life. Most facts we find by scientific short term consensus are quite close to reality.
Paramount won’t stop making Star Trek NFTs
Make build process 10s faster, 1000 engineers run this 10x a day

Depends where you are starting from. Taking the build from 100 to 90 seconds probably won't make a difference since people will be used to doing something else while waiting for the build to finish in the background. taking it from 10.1 to 0.1 seconds will make a huge difference since you can change your entire development process when builds are 'instant' and you can get constant feedback on any changes you make. Of course the second one is a hell of a lot harder.
Impact of modern packaging on the taste itself has been proven to be neglible in double blind studies. However, the taste of milk varies wildly based on the animal (food, location, roaming, season etc.) and also of course the process applied to sterilize the milk (pasteurization/UHT, skimming, filtering). Same milk from from same cow will taste very different when raw vs UHT. I am very much a UHT person, but for some weird reason my country (UK) considers UHT second grade so it's not always easy to find them - or they are shunned to "baking" aisles.
Despite limitations, if you can find ways to simply tolerate these techniques, you will find that you then automatically empower others on your team.

I agree this is a shitty way to manage complexity, but at the same time it's super intuitive for lots of people. Maybe find ways to apply it conservatively and guide the non-hardcore emacs users down a path that won't drive you mad.
Starting capital and social connections is like having thousands of lottery tickets.

You need to be smart enough to check the winning numbers, but that's far from enough to win.
WWI soldiers marched literally for days straight with 85 pounds of equipment on their backs.
Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some?

From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.
If they have the data that supports their claims, papers who counter the popular narrative are about the most valuable thing a scientist can publish to further their career. Nobody cites papers that just reproduce existing results.
Does he know spanish?
In the city I live, there's a vegan market twice a month and they have a nice food market. One of the stalls was Ethiopian food, and I'd never tried it before so I decided to get lunch there.

It was really tasty, from what I remember a lot of it was mashed up in a texture similar to hummous. No idea how authentic it was as I have nothing to compare it to but amazing whatever it was.

so I wouldn't so it's taking off yet, but it probably will :)
This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
Finish what you start is such a great philosophy - I am trying my best to do that too.
Shouldn’t matter? No. Does matter? Yes.

And that’s why things get politicised in the first place.
"Taking full precautions against airborne transmission would require major changes at hospitals"

Major changes such as, er, occasionally opening a window to let some fresh air in? That's a basic, obvious precaution that's been known since the dawn of time that wasn't done at all in the UK hospital ward where my mother caught and then died from Covid late last year. I know because I was there. The cluelessness re. viral spread almost two years into the pandemic was just astounding and I'm still very, very angry about it.
But left and right are two directions on a single axis per definition.

I am homosexual and for LGB rights, but feel mostly disdain for Q and especially T and the other made up letters. I support a strong social security system, free health care, livable pensions etc. and I believe the rich should be taxed more, minimum wages should be increased significantly. I am for a very selective immigration and asylum system based on merit of the immigrant for the country (Australia/Canada). "#MY_COUNTRY first!" deeply resonated with my soul, every politician should live that.

Am I left? Am I right? I feel like those labels absolutely do not apply to me.

When I talk about the "mono culture", what I mean is, for example most of my homosexual peers seem to feel subconsciously forced to support opinions of parties that traditionally support them that are actively harmful to them, e.g. letting Muslim immigrants into the country.
With HN's obsession with “founders” of startups, it's perhaps not surprising that Wolfram gets so much sympathy here. It's hero worship.

I think Wolfram is a victim of his own success. His achievements in software have let him avoid the necessary humility in being an academic.
> Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on

Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention.

I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things:

1) Widespread mask-wearing in public spaces
2) Japanese not turning up to work to cough and splutter all over their colleagues

Both the above never happened in the West. It was hard enough to get your average dumb Westerner to comply during COVID.

The Japanese mentality of taking into account the impact of your actions on others has served them well.

That is why Japan has seen less than 1/10th of the COVID cases that, for example, the UK had. Despite Japan being 2x UK population and living/working in SIGNIFICANTLY higher density.
For sure. When I was 15, I looked back on my 10-year old self as someone who didn't know anything but now I had learned a lot. When I was 20, I looked back on my 15-year old self as someone who knew nothing but now I was an adult. At 25, I looked at my 20-year old self in the same way. Repeat for the next few steps. I'm now 35, pretty happy with how it is going life- and career-wise and I look back on my 30-year old self as someone who was starting to get it but was still rather young and naive.

Today I feel like a proper adult who does adulty things and has life figured out reasonably well, but no doubt 40-year old me will think my current self was still pretty young and inexperienced.
Actually:

- Epic Launcher is using Rosetta
- Unreal Editor is using Rosetta (first launch took an hour or two, maxing out one core only)
- ShaderCompileWorker is using Rosetta
- Packaged project for macOS is using Rosetta

So I'm not quite sure what they're talking about.
I stopped reading right here:

"Considering the factors mentioned above, we can reason that unit tests are only useful to verify pure business logic inside of a given function."

That just isn't true and it makes the rest of the blogpost also not true.

A unit test should test "a unit of functionality" not just a method or a class. Your unit tests also shouldn't be coupled to the implementation of your unit of functionality. If you are making classes or methods public because you want to unit test them, you're doing it wrong.

The exception is maybe those tests you are writing while you're doing the coding. But you don't have to keep them around as they are.
Visual inspection in manufacturing is a very solved problem, especially in the AI field. The big bucks are in pattern matching anyway... it's a dumb company.
https://www.bramadams.dev/

My goals with my site were:

- a site that is the HOME of all of my work as my interests evolve over time as a creative technologist

- have it be fast

- have it be minimal for writing with markdown + react (mdx)

- have it be maximum in fun (if you are on desktop check out https://www.bramadams.dev/projects/akuma-no-ko or https://www.bramadams.dev/projects/kh if you are on mobile check out https://www.bramadams.dev/stories)

- self host images and videos (cloudflare images + stream)

- a running dev log (https://www.bramadams.dev/projects/dev-log)
*decades
>There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives.

Not in the UK, the situation in Italy was all over our news.

Probably the biggest criticism I have of the UK media was their overemphasis on young people succumbing. The stats said that young people were unlikely to die but we were presented with cases of that almost daily.