skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's disappointing to see how comments on this topic always center around whether masking worked or not and whether it was a lab leak or not. These just aren't that important in the grand scheme of things.

It's like we got in a car crash and instead of taking about how we can be safer drivers we're debating which brand of crutches is best.

I wish we'd zoom out a bit and look for some more impactful questions to ask. Questions like:

- How many fewer pandemics would we have if we stopped eating mammals?

- Does dwindling diversity among wild animals make for greater risk? (Presumably so, because the remaining ones start to look like a monoculture) How can we prioritize the types of conservation work that most effectively mitigate this?

- How much more effective could our vaccines be if we equipped people with the genes for CAS9? (Such that our vaccines could be CRISPR targeting RNA).

- How much better could our surveillance be if it were more common to sequence samples from sick people? How much cheaper does sequencing need to get before that can happen? Can we achieve that with policy alone or is there engineering work to do?
Is it not more likely the # of deaths are related to obesity for example, where US has 5-7 times as many obese as Japan for example. Which matches the % deaths statistic you have there quite well.

In other words: it's not easy. There are many factors at play.
>But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?

I am not sure if we are living in the same world.
No most people absolutely do not make rational choices like that.
No matter how you tell them.

Most importantly what you think is best for people is stil a perspective. Especially in the context of tv.
It's kind of mocking 'The Science' (to which Fauci equated himself) but also just how bastardized discourse has become in relation to it

Like yeah, science and censorship is completely natural... right?

This shouldn't be politicized
Feelie
Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up.

I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' - the kind of interesting work that I find on websites or blogs. It just throws out sensible looking code and nice sounding words that just don't quite work or misses out huge chunks of understanding / reasoning.

Despite not having done it in ages, I enjoy writing and publishing online info that I would have found useful when I was trying to build / learn something. If people want to pay a company to mash that up and serve them garbage instead, then more fool them.
Delaying any free active COVID presence until 99% of the state population had been double vaccinated and following COVID infections resulted in very few hospitalisations and one of the lowest per capita COVID death rates globally.

I suggest you read the articles, from the linked Wikipedia source:

Why are there so many Covid cases in Australia?

Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said Australia’s high reported infection rate may be the result of high “case ascertainment”.

Although PCR testing rates have dropped off in Australia, “we’re probably still doing it more so than anywhere else in the world”, Bennett said. “We still have free PCR testing. A lot of countries don’t.”

The number of confirmed Covid cases shouldn’t be relied on in isolation, Bennett said. “If you compare us to, say, the UK, they look much better for infection rates,” she said. “The UK’s confirmed case rate is 128 cases per million – less than a tenth of Australia’s 1,515 figure.

“Yet their hospitalisation rate per million is 209, and ours is 124. It suggests that they probably have twice as many [true] cases [as Australia].”

~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/07/explainer-why-...

In short, we paid attention to case numbers, when we had zero cases we had zero cases and when we had 1,500 mild infections post vaccnation we had 1,500 mild infections.

Other places seemed to run on guesswork and magical thinking.
I am using bitmap font with AA off in Terminal.app so this is incorrect
> You are asserting every ar-15 is a machine gun if those cards are. Is that really your position?

I don't know who do you think you're fooling, or if you think everyone around you is a utter moron. The guy was selling machine-gun conversion kits. More specifically, he was selling lightning links which turns a semi-automatic AR-15 into a fully automatic machine gun.
Do something positive for the environment, like supporting the development of cheap sustainable plant-based packaging.
Science has meant that for over a decade since it started deplatforming any scientist who studied the link between race and intelligence. And before anyone says "why does it matter, only racists would care about that", it matters because some social scientists are claiming that the disparity in outcomes for different races across society is due to society being unfair/biased, but such outcomes would be expected even in a perfectly fair society if the distribution of heritable traits correlated to economic success (e.g. IQ, time preference) was different across different races.
> ... Due to a paucity of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), observational studies were included in the analysis ...

I doubt that study will be conclusive, there are so many possible confounding factors that are hard to account for. Particularly the tactical problem where wearing a mask obviously can stop someone getting COVID in any given encounter, but it is much harder to check if it stops them getting COVID during the pandemic.

If we have a control that moves the world from someone gets COVID during the pandemic to ... someone still gets COVID during the pandemic but a month later then it is unclear what mandates are doing. It'd take more than a study abstract to determine that, it'd take a lot of reading through the specifics to see what is going on.

Changing an exponential process that doubles every week to every 2 weeks is basically doing nothing. Half the population will still be infected in the last step. If spreading the infections over 2 weeks instead of one is important then that might be a win, but everyone seemed to abandon flattening the curve pretty quickly as a strategy.
I've noticed this too. I assumed it’s because they see experience as leading to higher wage expectations.

Ageism is a significant issue in tech as well. I've had friends with decades of experience who were turned away with comments like the employer wanting someone to "grow with the company" or that they had "too much" experience. These phrases often serve as code for ageism, which is incredibly hard to prove.

Zuckerberg famously said something like "younger people are smarter," which was a mistake to say out loud, but many employers unfortunately believe it. Even millennials are starting to age out.
My grandma has same problem when her only cow died. Now I understand why elderly women meditate.
There is no circular dependency.

Notifications and prompts are going to show up on your old iPhone, and you got some 2FA backup codes when enabling your 2FA authenticator.
> Safely writing to /tmp/ was solved in 1986

If you RTFA you'll read (under "What is the issue?")

> This file, /tmp/framer.txt, may be readable by other users on the remote host.

This is EXACTLY a non-safe writing to /tmp

Yes, there are safe ways to write to /tmp, as described in the systemd link I provided, but no, it is not safe to naively write to /tmp. Same issue as the "Many Perils of /tmp" link I provided.

A solution that no one uses is not a solution.

If you're gonna be arrogant, you better also be right.
I enjoyed his recent conversation with Lex, but I lost quite a bit of respect for his opinion on politics when he called the Cambridge Analytica scandal nonsense.
So this is a blog stating to be an owner and not a renter, and then proceeds to talk about how to rent hosting.. Sorry, but if it's not your hardware, on your property, then you're renting.

Regulations have been waay too lose on, especially, american ISPs where I understand they are allowed to not only refuse you a public routable IP but also dictate what kind of traffic you're allowed to send and receive (for example, whether the traffic flowing is of "commercial" character and therefore should be on on a different subscription), this insanity should be illegal. Internet is a utility, and everyone should have the right to the same type of access, regardless of their need (those who do not need/want, can simply chose not to use it, but ISPs should not be allowed to differentiate).

I've hosted my own web, and other servers on my own hardware since I was 13 years old, when I bought my first domain, I had to use a fax machine for the first time in my life, and fax my request form, along with my passport, to the agency responsible for the top level domain of my country. It was kind of convoluted back then, but everyone were helpful, and it was not that difficult, the technology was well understood, supporters were competent, and it was expected that people were going to use the internet for internet things.
Today is my 39th birthday, and while the server hosting my stuff is mostly still located 3 meters from me, the path to having it online has nothing but degenerated, it's an uphill battle just to be on the internet these days.. The mail stuff is the easier part (dkim, dmarc, spf, certificates).. But the simple act of getting your f..king computer connected to the f..king internet like it was 1999, that's the real hassle.. ISP NAT, supporters beyond incompetent, blocked ports, missing (or unknown) relay hosts.. It's a joke.
It’s funny because a few of the comments are fairly tame and completely apolitical, but they get flagged anyway because someone reads, “I still want to know what the science is on masks…” and interprets that as “fuck masks!!!”
Wild times
Yes this is indeed exactly why I moved from Mac to KDE and why I donate to them. They still understand that in this day and age of opinionated design. I have KDE very heavily customised, but the cool thing is that unlike Gnome I didn't have to use a single plugin to do it (which always causes issues upgrading). Everything I wanted to change was available as a setting somewere.

And yeah I use Konsole, it's great! <3

MacOS wasn't so bad in the beginning, it used to be a Unix with good UI, but over the years Apple has been very busy replacing extensive settings with annoying on/off sliders (or nothing at all). Especially on macOS Server (if that's still a thing).
It sounds like the author is just trying to aimlessly find something to lose themself in, as if what they need to do has to be the most important thing ever done.

Maybe satisfaction comes to those who can make a difference with others more directly. Author should consider volunteer work, or working for a non-profit. Maybe just be a regular worker, and not the boss for a change. Learn to listen and be OK with following orders for once.
COVID is in a group of viruses with not dissimilar characteristics. It wasn't a completely unknown virus.
"Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed." - Paul Kalanithi
It's probably impossible to counter-act the aggressive reactions here on the "NPC" term. But the way people interpret his phrase, and how I read it, seem very different?
People seem to read it as him saying "colleagues are NPCs".
I read it as 'in your life, you will come across co-workers who appear to approach their jobs as though they were NPCs'. IE, you will experience some colleagues who act as if they were controlled by bad game AI.
The point then is: If you are one of those who care about "the ball/the game", it can be very aggravating to "play the game", when some of your coworkers act with an "NPC attitude" ("I can't go into that other room, there is an obstacle blocking my path").

So I read it as him saying "staying at the company where I am no longer in control, would drive me nuts having to tolerate groups of colleagues who insist on behaving like NPC's / show up to work on auto-pilot".

As an example, the company where I work recently had an AI hackathon event, where we could work together on AI prototypes on company time.
Some of us were thrilled to be given these tools and opportunities. And then there were some other colleagues, whose enthusiasm could be summed up as "Whatever, I'm out the door at 15:30 afternoon, I'm not paid after that".

In short, being annoyed at NPC coworkers is not the same as believing "coworkers are only NPCs".
It's pretty much a no-brainer. Do masks reduce emissions of airborne infectants? Yup. Can you tell, at any point in time, if you are asymptomatic but contagious and emitting infectants? Not without testing frequently, which I'll venture you don't. Can you tell who around you is immuno-depressed and might suffer debilitating consequences from being infected? Nope. And finally, is wearing a mask when you're out in public onerous? Nope!

So there you have it. At very little cost to yourself, you can help protect strangers around you. I promise you those strangers to whom it makes a difference will notice, and you will have their gratitude.

Mind you, if you are only asking from the angle of your own personal well-being, and making a difference to strangers at very little cost to yourself is not something that you can find much interest for, then it's a different question entirely.
A proof of concept became much easier with C11 unicode identifiers, and email patch review. You can trivially hide Cyrillic chars eg. between whitespace changes or other trivial "optimizations". Even without collisions.

And with the current surge of GPU's even collisions are realistic now. The H100's are not doing much when not in training.
And you bet your ass I'd rather be in the hospital with covid in 2022 than 2020.
That sounds like the opposite of an npc. Someone with a personal life. One of the reasons its a stupid insult. If you want to rag on people for being shitty or minimumn effort workers then do so. NPC implies you cant tell the difference if they were replaced by a shitty program that repeats the same lines over and over.
> only in direct democracy,

I thought far-left is typically vanguardist and doesn’t believe in any type of [real] democracy? Dictatorship of the proletariat and all that stuff..
Yeah, that tiny blurb was all I could find, which doesn't really tell me anything.

> The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.

I don't get this, if Amazon really thought that Honey was "trampling on Amazon's TOS" surely they would just ban Honeys affiliate status? If anything this implies to me that someone had a grudge.
I wrote some FoxPro thing for a long-distance reselling operation circa 1994. It had to handle agent commissions on a multi-level scheme and whatnot, import call detail records from telco equipment and such.
True. I usually only star projects that "cool. I wanna try this sometime but not cool enough to try now"
> since you can use other markers

Yesh, surely I can, but how about https://github.com/trending ?

It still uses "stars" are a sole marker, no? I don't think it's "good enough"?
By too many you mean 2 ? Also in a week gap ? Also because of major updates ?
clears throat

fuck you.
>We probably kept it all going too far for too long.

That's where I've landed looking back on it. The first month or so of staying home, being overly cautious, and "flattening the curve" made sense given the unknowns. But limiting outdoor gatherings in some contexts but not others (no-go on outdoor parties, but George Floyd protests are fine), keeping kids in Zoom school through 2021, and continued neuroticism even after vaccines were widely available---all that left a sour taste in my mouth.
I won't disclose names.

But thinking from the first principles, do you really think that all this phonetic keyword spotting[1] IP developed for defense tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was abandoned once recording entire phone conversations and doing full speech to text on them became technologically possible?

I still remember lots of startups who did this stuff openly a decade ago, before Cambridge Analytica scandal[2]. After that it became impossible to get funding or get acquired, so the few that stayed in this field became very secretive.

—-

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_A...
that only happened because everybody else fucked up - which is of course predictable, you can't assume 192 countries will do the exact right thing all at the same time. so I agree, they just delayed the inevitable.
Honestly I think the best advice is to assume masks don't do anything. The point isn't to suggest people run around having parties during a pandemic. The point is to suggest people use distancing as their primary mode of protection. Being outdoors is an excellent defense, as is shown in the data generated by the NFL during the pandemic.
this should be standard for every human being not just techies

the LOE to self hosting and adding infra on demand should also be push button easy

the good news is that it seems to get easier and cheaper as time passes, which makes it feel inevitable but obstacles remain because of corporate business interests of course
Hypso-2 satellite monitors harmful algae from space
Depends which is more valuable, the phone or the potential scams. With no hardware security you'd just have a standard USB stick to root it and get the same access to the logins and contacts, or you'd take it right to an underground shop that did. And you could sell the hardware on top of that, making theft that much better.
I’m glad that worked for them and that there are various states worldwide to compare in that way.

China’s surprise loosening was a disaster, as their vaccines were not the same and didnt have comparable efficacy.
Isn't Wi-Fi Sensing built-in in next-gen Wi-Fi specs? It doesn't even need to interact with your own phone, so no luck with turning it off.
One of the issues that came out of the covid outbreak was there was not enough masks for medical staff.

They initially said masks wouldn't help so that the public wouldn't buy them up.

This is covered in the documentary "Totally under control".
Yeah, the "I dumped my girlfriend of two years as soon as things got a little bit hard for me, why is my life boring and meaningless?" thing also stood out to me. As well as this:

"Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups."

DOGE is run on Signal, and his conclusion is "so smart," not "that seems like a huge red flag." This guy sounds like he's in line to be the next George Papadopoulos, the guy who gets thrown under the bus when everything goes sideways.
I feel like delaying it isn't a bad move. There were no vaccines or known effective treatments available in early 2020, health services were unprepared and became overwhelmed, and no one knew even simple things about the virus, like how it was transmitted.

In 2022, I'm sure pretty much any region would be much better prepared to get hit by COVID-19 for the "first" time.
If you recall high school history, rapid, exponential "progress" happened once the knowledge was 1) written down (printing press) 2) archived for the future (libraries) 3) systematized (textbook/encyclopaedia) 4) proactively shared (public education), all on a massive scale.

The fact that some knowledge exists and is even accessible does not really matter if takes a highly trained in a very narrow field scholar to find that piece of information. You need a well established knowledge creation and distribution funnel in operation for humanity as a whole to reap the benefits of knowledge.

There is undoubtedly a lot of useful knowledge on internet platforms, however, most of that knowledge remains unsystematized and largely undiscoverable, meaning that contribution to the totality of human knowledge by these platforms is infinitesimal, which is further drowned by cat and porn videos.
Not really true, when you consider how many died of Spanish flu in the early 20th century. We now understand so much more, and despite our shitty ha fling of it, we had a vaccine in a couple of years, and lockdowns and testing regimes likely saved tens of millions of lives. Reality doesn't support your pessimism.
Have a look at the actual posts to realize why they were flagged. Had they not been, this page would be less than 5% non-cranks.

Even as it is, it's hard to break 10%. Sadly, this seems to have become a flamebait/trollbait/crankbait topic.
I know the usual Iranian nationalist narrative but it's weird to see it here.

Especially considering that the Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on the Persian variant of the Arabic script also didn't map all the sounds that are required in Turkish. They also probably didn't pick the arabo-persian script because of those commonly found sounds in Indo-Aryan(European?) languages considering that Turkish isn't an indo-european language and is in a family of its own... So there's a very loose link here.

And while I'm not sure about the circumstances of the adoption of the Arabic script in Iran, the Turks were conquerors basically from the beginning and chose the Arabic script entirely willingly. There's no colonial or imperialist implications to calling Turkish arabic script... arabic.

(Not that it wouldn't even really matter, the letters in question are unquestionably arabic script anyways. The Romans sure did subjugate Britain and france, and brutally repressed them, but that doesn't make the script they use any less Latin!)
Delimarsky sounds more than just a bit Czech/Slovak :)
> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists)

I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most populations in Europe have created their own states. And the few tribal populations in Northern Europe generally were and certainly are today treated at least as fairly as anything in Canada. So who are they talking about? Would the Basques feel that they would be treated better as First Nations people in Canada than they are today in Spain?

Note that the treatment of immigrants is a completely separate topic in the article, so I don't think they could be referring to, say, the treatment of Syrian refugees with that sentence above.