skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't quite get this part either -

> The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles — including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses ...

Are bacteria and viruses indeed electrically charged? This sounds strange.
A foot (~30cm) isn't too much for exterior walls, right? A brick wall with more traditional insulation would be about that thick, maybe more with concrete. Running cables is also a challenge with bricks or concrete, hopefully people building/renovating today will have enough sense to build in conduits.
Disclaimer : I have no competencies whatsoever on judging the matter but there are other studies that conclude to increased risk of some kind of cardiac failure, even for young people as a consequence of COVID (something the the first line of the article acknowledges). What possible mechanism could play in even more risk after vaccination ?

The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But I know biology can be incredibly complicated times. So, provided the results are statically significant since it seems to be the standard, what possible hypotheses can be made ?
It's a tough nut to crack. It only worked in Singapore. In my opinion the "homeopathic" land value tax in Baden-Württemberg is the only thing in recent history that was adopted without much violence or urgency.

The German property tax is very low, well under $1k for the vast majority of the country so the switch isn't that big of a deal but it also won't have much of an effect on anything other than abandoned buildings/land in city centers.

You gotta start small.
Haha, indeed. I can't think of an explanation for this one though:

> switdhing to Swift “feels like a Jedi who’s trying to switdh from a lightsaber to a blaster,”
This is an interesting article, and it is certainly useful to view things from a pessimist position.

I do think it mis-characterises the major problems we face though. Eg:

"It is all too easy to miss the fact that this generation – the first to grow up in a world where a climate emergency is not just on the horizon, but a stark reality – is haunted by a real sense of losing the future, as all the things they have been told give life meaning are rendered either pointless or problematic."

It emphasises climate change as the problem. This is a disempowering expression of a major problem, that leaves us wringing our hands and asking for help from the very agencies that have caused the problem - corporations and government.

But, for me, a more major problem is what people will do with their time, when do much automation will do away with jobs and they are less wealthy? When almost all wealth is funneled upwards to just a few corporations, with the assistance and blessing of the governments that are said to represent us, who can we scissor that pattern? When those some companies are able to run foundations, think tanks and NGOs to determine to future corporate and legal structure that we will have to exist in, who will people find a way to live naturally?

There are immediate governance issues that need to be dealt with, as the governance structure we have is only serving those who have the wealth already. That is something worth applying pessimistic analysis to, IMO. How can we live in a freer way, without the onerous, legislative, self-serving, gas-lighting governance structure being in our face?

PS

"The governance structure, is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, government, am the people.""
me channelling Nietzsche, a fan of Schopenhauer :)
if (dict != nil && dict.containsObjectForKey[@"a"]) { ... }
Can become this:
if (dict.containsObjectForKey[@"a"]) { ... }
This is probably the least-Swift thing ever, but, if you're used to coding in this style, it's fantastic

Why is this better than a language that can guarantee that dict is not null?
Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. And here's the reason why I thought of it:
at a previous job where we were stuck with a million lines of less-than-optimal perl code, and the original developers who only knew perl, we had to make a decision. Rewrite it in a more gentle language that suited our new developers too, or try to write better perl. Initially we went with better perl, we used a linter called perl critic that would refer you to specific sections of Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. We managed to write very nice code that pleased all the new FP enthousiasts present, and were able to onboard non perl developers (incl. myself) fairly easily. It didn't work out though. The problem? Our original perl developers were unable to work with our "flashy" new perl code. It might as well have been an entirely different language to them. As it often is, this was not a coding problem but a people problem.
Education systems were first designed to suppress dissent
This is not published in Nature. Scientific reports is much less prestigious and selective.
> And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. [...] e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales.

I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere.

As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.
He's also talked about solving the spambot problem. These two things are not in tension.

People seem to acting like Musk's position is full of gotcha's or some incredibly complex experiment that's never been tried before. It's not. That policy was and still is used by many different discussion forums for a very long time. It's actually the post-Trump Twitter approach that's the experiment here and it's been failing hard.
One thing is certain; employees are not going to be working out of AirBnbs, because they so rarely have a quality desk + chair!
ITT fish speculating about why birds fly and concluding that it’s because they don’t know how to swim.
Null is simple, straight-forward solution to the problem of missing values.
To be fair, they at least said “seems to be,” which is a bit better than many Europeans who say similar things about Europe on this site, which I find even less excusable and seem to see daily.

On topic, it is quite common in a few other European countries, such as Switzerland and I believe Germany, so I imagine it’s at least much more common in Europe overall given that it’s relatively unheard of in the US.
While this paper looks scary, keep in mind that the journal isn't particularly reputable and that the vast majority of studies find that mRNA vaccines are safe. It's certainly worth studying this (and many more researchers will continue to do so) but not really anything to merit not getting vaccinated.

If you want to confirm any pre-existing belief you may have, you can find fringe papers to support essentially anything.
Hah, of course, the ads! It's not just building a brand, or copyright, it's the income stream from advertising. I really am shockingly naive sometimes :)
Conclusions

> While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.
One can pay with rare Pokémons; it doesn’t make them cash. Rubles aren’t real money, because they’re not exchangeable.

Try buying a car from a dealer that insists on paying for it in cocaine.
The one sentence summary: “These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.“

Should this source be trusted or not? If it’s trusted, does that mean that our efforts to mask were basically a waste of time, or not?
Yes, you can accomplish that using proxies and/or using the Wine libs.
> I’d probably also reverse the consent requirement, so that presumptively there would be unlimited liability, but the guest could consent in writing to the reduced liability.

That’s not meaningfully different from what we have now. With no specified minimum, the contract for every hotel will simply specify that the hotel has _no_ liability at all. If you specify a minimum, then every contract will specify that they have the minimum liability. Unless the hotel can make the amount of liability that they accept legible to potential customers (ie, it becomes something that they brag about in their advertising and that customers shop around for), then there is no financial incentive to do more than the minimum. Which is exactly the situation we are already in.

One alternative would be to leave the hotel’s liability uncapped but then allow them to decline to rent rooms to guests with expensive belongings, or require their guests to have separate insurance, or whatever. Realistically the only difference between this and our current situation is that we don’t have to answer so many impertinent questions during check–in; the hotel just assumes that you have either insured your belongings or kept them to a minimum.
> Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod, and camera phones sucked until the iPhone.

What is this, alternate history?
But this is potentially dangerous. E.g.:

dict.setObjectForKey(@"b", @"a");
assert(dict.containsObjectForKey[@"a"]);

A bit tangential related to the article:

In Python, I often found that it is helpful to also have a separate "None"-like type despite None, which I called NotSpecified. Often in functions you have sth like:

def func(opt: int = None):
if opt is None:
opt = get_default_opt()
...

This works fine when you now that opt should not be None here. However, if None is allowed for opt and causes some other specific behavior, I now do:

def func(opt: Optional[int] = NotSpecified):
if opt is NotSpecified:
opt = get_default_opt()
...

This is also useful for dicts:

my_dict.get("foo", NotSpecified)
Oh thanks my mind just hopped over it without even trying. It's nice to see it was no knowledge gap but an well known word
This one is really good. I no longer work with Perl but it's one of the books that had the most impact on me. There are many things to take away from it no matter the language you code in.
I'd be happy to help solve that - email mdk@shadowcat.co.uk to get an NDÀ signed and I'd be delighted to spend a few hours gratis helping your team not have that problem anymore.
Maybe it has something to do with a new virus going around, there was also an increase in 2020... There's a reason why they're comparing 2021 to 2018/2019 and not to 2020.
The captain was asleep. Maybe there were no clear consensus on chain of command in the cockpit.
When politicians want more money they often raise taxes because passing good policies is difficult and the relationship between their policy and tax revenue is not obvious. With a land value tax politicians have a very easy way of increasing tax revenue, do something productive.

The countless times a government has cut important services and investments to get a short term cash influx have always lead to misery. Greece ended its public healthcare for the sake of austerity and now they are further in debt. Operating a hospital should be something that is a revenue stream for the government (through land value taxes), not a burden to be distributed across people through taxes.
> 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

Not one of them being "edit your writing".
Yes, but GC and object re-use aren't mutually exclusive.

Sometimes people argue as if they are, which is understandable because the overlap between semi-FP programming styles and GCd languages is fairly strong, and the FP world pushes immutable state as almost a matter of moral principle. If you tried to do functional programming with purely manual memory management you'd see high overheads too simply because there'd be so many small allocations and copies. In practice though, people tend to think harder about in-place mutation when they don't have a GC to clean up after them.
"These approaches are widely used in high performance audio equipment, but I hadn't found too many clear examples to use when writing my code." - nice to see an example in Rust!
> Ingredient highlights in recipe text

Does this mean the recipe instructions actually say the quantity of the item when they mention it in the recipe? I've really wanted that, I hate having to go back and forth between the instructions and the ingredients just because I didn't feel like doing mise en place (not every recipe requires that, and I'm not about to dirty a bunch more dishes just to get things ready).
The great VC pullback of 2022
This is good data, and as the paper states, it is important that vaccine recipients are aware of possible side effects so that they know to seek medical attention if such arise. That said, it's important to note the scale of the effect observed. Looking at the cardiac arrest calls for instance, we're looking at an increase from roughly 7 to 10 per week, while hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses were being administered per week. Likewise ACS calls went from 30-35 per week up to a peak of around 45. These are obviously very significant increases, but still remained unlikely events. That said, unvaccinated case fatality rate from covid in that age range is also very low:

> Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

But of course we can't directly compare the two, as we'd need to know the fatality rate from these CA and ACS calls, not to mention looking at other negative outcomes short of death. Regardless, it certainly appears to me that vaccination still makes sense for all ages, but if you assume the risk of these side effects is the same for each booster, whereas the impacts on serious covid outcomes are diminishing, I guess there would be a point at which the risk of the side effects would outweigh the marginal benefit of additional / more frequent boosters for young people.
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
It’s not a UK cultural thing - never in my life or any friends who I asked have attached a photo - but it’s often done by applicants who might be UK residents when it’s considered the norm in their country of origin.

Personally I hate it, as I know subconsciously having seen their photo, I _will_ use it as part of my evaluation which is unfair to other candidates.
Not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing.

> Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (80004004)
> https://maya.land/assets/opml.xsl
Repairing vessels with a slime of hard-radioactive salt over it is rather different from what people need to do in PWRs.
You basically just said, "I don't care about the planet or any of the people that live on it, as long as I can get my work done slightly faster".

The power requirements of the machine you describe would easily be more than double that of the Mac, but you probably aren't getting anywhere close to double the performance.
I worked with a manager who refused to hire a man who had, as his Facebook profile pic, a photo of himself holding a shotgun and deer. He was a hunter.
Ask HN: Specification gaming examples in employee reward systems
Some of you may remember the list of "Specification gaming examples in AI"

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml

I've heard stories of employee reward system misuse, so I was wondering if there exists a similar list of ways people have devised to misuse reward systems.

If not, share your story or stories.
I get it, if you continuously have to keep the servers running. For download and install types I also dislike it.

For Android apps I'm torn. It's actually a continuous effort to keep your app workable on new versions, but Android keeps my purchases from phone to phone.
Very verbose, but at least it's not Java.
I worked with plenty of family people (and been the family person) who could find two weeks per year in exchange of complete WFH flexibility the rest of 50 weeks of the year. Especially since steps were taken to accomodate them and not schedule things in the middle of "parent-teacher conferences" and "school plays".

I also did notice that there are plenty of parents who will blame their children for things they themselves don't want to do and not be honest about it. It's not the children that are at fault there though.

In the end, there are plenty of WFH jobs that don't need on-site time at all so you can pick and choose. It's a great market for an engineer to be in now.
Sure, and I do read food articles with lots of character sometimes, particularly from chefs or reviewers/critics on fairly mainstream/large sites like the guardian.

But I do that when I want to read something whimsical, informative or entertaining. 99% of the time, if I've found someone's cooking-blog it's because I want to cook something specific, right now!

I guess the annoyance is someone trying to sell me on one thing when I really want the other :)
It could be the vaccine.

It could be the novel virus and degradation of healthcare services due to overloading.

It could be an interaction of both and unknown external factors.
I just checked and my Ape Index is -1";
i'm 1 inch taller than my "wingspan".

Apparently this nomenclature is popular in the climbing community, where relatively long wingspan is an advantage.
Sometime a "generic self-help" wisdom strikes you and stays in you forever.

When I was a young teenager my dad told me "If you a give a no, always give a yes after". He meant you always have to propose an alternative after you rejected a proposition.

I have no idea why but this simple sentence became a strong principle for me. It influenced hundreds of decisions I made and my behavior in general.

There can be true actionnable value in those wisdom pieces.
It doesn't and I guess it will never get one, as it is apparently considered good practice that clone() calls are explicit, as in the developer is painfully made aware of the performance cost of reference counting.

So then we land in Rust code golf, where one tries to make the code as much as possible with bare bones borrow checker.
They don't care if you are visiting for a week, but for 90+ day stays they definitely care.
the use of the word catapult now got me - bravo!
Greedily hoarding your $10mil while your children struggle to make ends meet before inheriting it all at 65 (because you are probably going to live to your 90's) is not really a very good solution.

Family offices, directed by the patriarch / matriarch should be a bigger thing.
True, especially using ML to determine the size/layout of the components. That could be very easy assessed by varying the sizes in a consistent, linear way, and measuring the effectiveness in subsequent tests, rather than throwing it into the black box of ML.
Kotlin kind of got away with it, in the sense that I (massive statically) don’t hear people complain about null on the Java interoperability calls
This makes me happy to read. It's not perfect (location-based pay), but it seems like a really great setup overall. Over the pandemic I have learned that I _love_ remote work and now work remotely full time. It's been a game changer in terms of my overall life satisfaction, happiness, and productivity. It doesn't work for everyone, but it does for me. I'm very glad there are more opportunities to work like this now.
The Physics of Gluttony (2004)
On the other hand, normally you want to try and broaden the pool you hire from, not narrow it.
How does the system authenticate with the vault? Why not use that same system to authenticate the database connection? A vault is only useful at scale or with additional compliance requirements. Otherwise, keep it simple. Very few systems actually need that additional level of indirection.
Was researching flatbuffers a lot recently. Do you have any updates on thoughts about it.

Capnproto has a just a blurb about it. It looks more widely supported, crazy fast, and quite flexible. I played around with it recently, needs more development but the small amount of additional disk usage is a fair trade off to even faster (basically non existent) encode/decode times.
1. It's a publication with post-publication peer review. Meaning: It's not been peer reviewed before publication. That's not invalidating its findings, but it's evidence one should rate as potentially of lower quality until other experts have reviewed it.

2. You should never look at one study, but at all the evidence. It is generally difficult to study the effects of something like mask wearing, as you can't easily do something like an RCT (or if you try it may not tell you what you wanted to learn, i.e. it's even harder to test if others are protected by mask wearing). There are no easy answers, but it's been my impression that experts reviewing all the evidence in the past came to the conclusion that mask wearing likely works quite well.
I'm not near a computer to check, but a 256 entry look up table, would have 1.4 degrees resolution, so using this I believe the difference between sin of 0 and sin of 1.4 is about 2%, so the error would be +/- 1%. Using a quarter wave table reduces the error. By approx 4, but this still. Means 0.25% error. Or am I way off?
Well, the pauses are somewhat predictable in that they may appear when the count of an object reaches zero. I had a very expensive closing brace in (admittedly not well-written) C++ code once.
While this is a very interesting study, it absolutely cannot show that masks are or are not effective at reducing covid transmission. There are so many confounding factors, the results are basically meaningless.

The most obvious confounding factor is of course that as covid rates rise, people are more likely to wear a mask. This by itself explains the positive correlation between mask compliance and covid rates.

The paper says that the positive correlation is surprising. It is not.
It's really hard to make conclusion based on mask usage not accounting for many other factors such as population density.

You have places like Finland with 5 mil people and minimum contact vs. Netherlands with 1/8 of the area and 4 times the population. Then you have France, Italy where all people kiss to greet each other and Germany where they barely shake hands etc.

So don't think this is very productive study and I'm generally not in favour of mask mandates (sentiment-wise for we have yet to see reliable data) especially for recent variants.
I know someone who became mentally ill when the bootcamp switched from in-person to remote and had enough stress to develop schizophrenia from the stresses of trying to apply for jobs remotely and alone in 2020.
Do it in whatever you have fun with but KISS
The magic bytes sequence in zip files is 4 bytes long, one can probably use this to compute the probability that a file of size N randomly contains these bytes.
It's a nature journal so it's been reviewed.
oh huh? :-/ thanks for the heads up