1kGarand

I will just leave this here.

http://kirkmcd.princeton.edu/JEMcDonald/mcdonald_aaas_69.pdf

I think the winning countries in this pandemic would be the ones who were able to collectively wait for a vaccine while maintaining low death rates.

Sadly US will not be one of those.

Simple math below.

NY has 1,300 deaths per million, and NJ has 1,800 deaths per million currently. Let's take the average and say that they reached herd immunity with 1,500 deaths per million.

Great.

For the entire US (320 million), that implies 480,000 deaths before reaching herd immunity.

Does 480,000 deaths sound good to anyone?

As long as you and others _choose_ to define value of a person only for their economic value (work output), we will always have poverty, no matter how enormous our total economic output (humans+machines) will become.

My first Debian install was 2.0. I ordered the CD's (there were 2, as I remember) from an on-line shop that sold burned CDRs with linux images. I wish I could remember their name...

Over the last 10-15 years or so, I’ve tried so many of these new fonts but always just end up back to DejaVu Sans Mono Bold. Now that my eyes are getting older, it works even better.

On a Mac, Menlo looks nearly identical.

I have been using a text file (actually an org mode file) since 2009. Before that I used a plain text file.

It doesn't handle video/bookmark/pdf. If I have to save those, I put them in a separate directory and make a note of it in the text file.

It's pretty well organized, thanks to org mode. It has a section that is by date, like journal entries, and a section that's by topic. Since it's just a single file, it's very easily searchable. It will never "go down". I don't need to run a database (I tried using wiki software for the same purpose). I can even "link" different sections, by having plain text labels. For example, I can refer to "ZFS Setup 2009-01-01" which is another place in the document I can search for.

I can "jump" to sections by using the orgmode annotation. Searching for "* Computers" will go to that top level section.

I liked this system so much that I also use it at work. People are very impressed that I can find things in my "notebook" so quickly. It's just text search.

Websites disappear. Web apps disappear. Apps disappear. My text file, does not.

perhaps only the DNA-based life survived some early period in Earth's history.

There is a theory that early life was RNA based. The mechanims are simpler, and it's easier to create "spontaneously appearing" RNA "life".

But as soon as this RNA life evolved and produced DNA based encoding system, the DNA based life evolved to wiped them out. Right now earth is full of RNAses, which are proteins that destroy RNA, made by DNA based life.

Evolution works in non-intuitive (mysterious) ways.

This article is strange enough that I suspect astroturfing.

The reason 5G is being deployed in 24GHz is because we don’t have wide enough blocks elsewhere. The 800MHz and 1.9 GHz spectrums have existing services cellular services, and putting 5G there would have to block off spectrum that would otherwise be used by older technologies. This would increase congestion for existing users while very few people would be on 5G.

Unlike other countries, US govt does not force phase out of services—we still have 2G service in many parts of the rural us, and cell companies aren’t going to upgrade them voluntarily.

Eventually most of the handsets would be compatible with 5G, then 800MHz-2GHz bands will be converted over to 5G. This happened with LTE and 3G before that.

Maybe this article is being pushed by telcos, who wants the current TV frequency reallocated to them. Of course the broadcasters want to hang on to those to provide 4K TV over the air service.

This [0] is an excellent resource for ergonomic keyboards.

The common myth is that programmers type a lot. We do not. We spend a lot of time in front of keyboards, but most of that time is spent thinking.

People who write a lot of emails type way more characters per day than programmers.

Still, ergonomic keyboards are nice. I think Microsoft wireless one is quite good and affordable. I would love me a kinesis, but never managed to pull the trigger.

[0] http://xahlee.info/kbd/ergonomic_keyboards_index.html

This is such an awesome answer.

There is so much misinformation even in HN about audio. Rigorous double blind tests, scientific methods, and laboratory measurements do make a difference in producing high quality audio.

Also, here is more research done about headphones:

https://www.listeninc.com/wp/media/Perception_and_-Measureme...

False.

Rigorous double blind a/b/c/d tests using real listeners has been performed, and the research has been published in peer reviewed journals since the 80's.

What has happened is that most of the audiophile community saw research as a threat to their revenue streams and actively FUD around it. And the audio engineering community has simply moved on.

Here is a talk that could be very informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM

His book is worth a read as well.

It looks quite similar to golang font: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts

It has serifs and true italics. Might be an interesting free alternative.

Verdana used to be my go to proportional font when I was doing Java. Helped with long variable names and long horizontal lines. My buddies thought I was nuts, but I found it very legible.

These days my eyes are dimming, so I dislike skinny fonts. Now I use DejaVu Sans Mono in _bold_ exclusively. Every now and then when HN does a programming font post, I try out different ones, but I always end up going back to DejaVu Sans Mono Bold.

Sqlite.

Most encrypted backup solutions are really bad with protecting keys. Fixed ivs are ok for one file. Not ok for possibly millions of small files. Basically exposed your private key along with your backup.

I see some terrible backup strategies here.

1. Backups should not be on a single drive. 2. Backups without checksums will result in corruption. 3. Offsite is a must. 4. Unencrypted off site backup means someone already copied your data. 5. Encrypted offsite backups should have forward secrecy. So different keys for each file and keys file gets backed up encrypted.

My backup strategy: File server runs zfs raidz with Daily/weekly/monthly snapshots on disk.

Snapshots get copied to 2 external drives, zfs mirrored.

Files get encrypted and uploaded to backblaze using my custom software. Nothing fancy, just standard authenticated encryption (chacha20poly-poly1306) but with per file key management and argon2.