LogDNA (YC W15) – Is Hiring Senior Engineer (Remote)
1 by chrisab | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Tuesday, 7 April 2020
Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien get real on video chat about how much they miss live audiences
Late night talk show hosts are like J.M. Barrie's fairies — they're born from laughter and feed off applause. Sadly, the coronavirus pandemic has displaced said hosts from their natural habitat, cutting them off from live studio audiences and removing their regular source of validation.
Fortunately they are a resilient species, and have now been observed working together to forage for praise in groups.
Conan O'Brien and Stephen Colbert compared notes on how home recording has been working for them on Tuesday, and it's fair to say both are feeling the social distance.
"I miss the laughter," said Conan. "I miss the joy that I bring others." Read more...
More about Conan O Brien, Stephen Colbert, Conan, Coronavirus, and Covid 19from Mashable https://mashable.com/video/conan-obrien-stephen-colbert-coronavirus-stay-at-home/
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Meet two adorable baby penguins in this aquarium livestream
Coronavirus social distancing has us sitting in front of screens a lot more than usual, which is rough considering that they're largely filled with terrible things. Fortunately, an Australian aquarium is doing its part to fight the despair with the power of baby penguins.
SEA LIFE Melbourne Aquarium recently welcomed two King penguin chicks to the world, and is showed them off on a livestream today. One has already been named Sparkie, born to proud parents Skipper and Nancy, while Hudson and Terry's chick will be named via a public competition on the aquarium's social media.
Suggesting a name will also put you in the draw to win a VIP Penguin Passport experience, which will let you meet the chicks in real life once the aquarium reopens. Like many businesses in Australia, SEA LIFE Melbourne Aquarium is temporarily closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic. Happily, since we cannot go to the penguins, the penguins are coming to us. Read more...
More about Animals, Livestream, Baby Animals, Aquarium, and Penguinsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/baby-penguin-livestream-sea-life-melbourne-aquarium/
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Monday, 6 April 2020
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?
Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?
11 by jppope | 9 comments on Hacker News.
Looking for awesome new places to read things written by actual human beings. So where can I find your blog? why is it awesome? And why should I (and everyone else) read it?
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11 by jppope | 9 comments on Hacker News.
Looking for awesome new places to read things written by actual human beings. So where can I find your blog? why is it awesome? And why should I (and everyone else) read it?
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New top story on Hacker News: Write your own Virtual CPU in C++ (2014)
Write your own Virtual CPU in C++ (2014)
9 by andreygrehov | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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9 by andreygrehov | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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Unpacking the controversial 'mugshot challenge' makeup trend
James Charles is facing backlash for participating in a popular TikTok trend that imitates mugshots.
The "mugshot challenge" originated on TikTok, which began idealizing mugshots long before users started mimicking them. In early March, users posted videos of mugshots they thought were attractive.
"Last girl looks like she knows how to have a gooooood time," one user captioned their video, which now has 226,700 likes.
In another video, the TikTok user added thirst emojis before launching into a slideshow of nameless, incarcerated faces.
The trend bore the mugshot challenge, in which users recorded themselves applying smudged eyeliner and messing up their hair before posing in front of blank, white walls. Some took the trend further by adding makeup to appear bruised and bloody. In one version, TikTok user nehvjones applied a temporary tattoo to her neck. In another, TikTok user thehumankind appeared scratched, adding that she "aint going down without a fight." Read more...
More about James Charles, Tiktok, Culture, and Web Culturefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/james-charles-tiktok-mugshot-challenge/
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The Supreme Court’s disturbing order to effectively disenfranchise thousands of Wisconsin voters
President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh looks on ahead of the State of the Union address on February 4. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
American democracy is in deep trouble.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in a case that is literally titled Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, handed down a decision that will effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters. It did so at the urging of the GOP.
The case arises out of Wisconsin’s decision to hold its spring election during the coronavirus pandemic, even as nearly a dozen other states have chosen to postpone similar elections in order to protect the safety of voters. Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order that allowed absentee ballots to be counted so long as they arrived at the designated polling place by April 13, an extension granted by a judge to account for the brewing coronavirus-sparked chaos on Election Day, April 7. Republicans successfully asked the Court to require these ballots to be postmarked by April 7.
All five of the Court’s Republicans voted for the Republican Party’s position. All four of the Court’s Democrats voted for the Democratic Party’s position.
The decision carries grave repercussions for the state of Wisconsin — and democracy more broadly. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes in her dissent, “the presidential primaries, a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions” are at stake in the Wisconsin election, which will be held tomorrow. Of all these seats, the state Supreme Court race, between incumbent conservative Justice Daniel Kelly and challenger Judge Jill Karofsky, is the most hotly contested.
The April 7 election is shaping up to be a trainwreck. Most poll workers have refused to work the election, out of fear of catching the coronavirus, which forced Gov. Tony Evers (D) to call up the National Guard in order to keep polls open. But even this measure appears woefully inadequate. In Milwaukee, election officials announced that the state only has enough election workers to open five poll locations — when the city would normally have 180 polling places.
Meanwhile, the state has received a crush of absentee ballot requests — about 1.2 million, when it typically receives less than 250,000 in a spring election. That’s left state officials scrambling to send ballots to voters in time for Tuesday’s election. And on top of all of these complications, a state law required all ballots to be received by election officials by 8 pm on April 7, or else those ballots would not be counted.
Tens of thousands of voters are not expected to even receive their ballots until after Election Day, effectively disenfranchising them through no fault of their own.
In response to this brewing catastrophe, Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee to a federal court in Wisconsin, ordered the deadline for receiving ballots to be extended to 4 pm on April 13. In response to this order, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to modify Conley’s decision to require all ballots to be postmarked by April 7 or they will not be counted.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority granted the GOP this very specific request.
Again, many voters are not expected to receive their ballots until after this April 7 deadline. As Justice Ginsburg notes, “as of Sunday morning, 12,000 ballots reportedly had not yet been mailed out,” so the number of voters disenfranchised by the Court’s order in Republican is likely to be vast. The Court’s decision in Republican, moreover, is the culmination of a weeks-long effort by Republicans to thwart various efforts by Democrats to accommodate voters who might be disenfranchised by coronavirus.
The majority relied upon one of the most destructive voting rights decisions of the modern era
The majority opinion, which is unsigned, relies heavily on the Court’s previous decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006). Purcell is by no means a famous decision. It received far fewer headlines that the Court’s decisions striking down much of the Voting Rights Act or permitting partisan gerrymandering. But it’s proved to be one of the greatest thorns in the side of voting rights advocates. And the Court’s decision in Republican cements Purcell’s status as one of the greatest obstacles facing a voting right litigator.
Briefly, Purcell held that courts should be reluctant to hand down orders impacting a state’s election procedures as Election Day draws nigh. “Court orders affecting elections,” the Court warned in Purcell, “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”
There is some wisdom to this vague guideline. Voters may, indeed, be quite confused if a wave of court orders are handed down close to an election. For example, if the Supreme Court of the United States were to declare, well after sunset on the eve of an election, that voters must mail their ballots by April 7 or be disenfranchised, such an order is likely to confuse some voters and lead to them being unable to vote.
In any event, there are good reasons why Purcell’s warning about courts deciding voting rights cases too close to an election should not be read as an inexorable command. For one thing, the consequences of a new voting law may not become apparent until that law is actually operating close to an Election Day. Voting rights advocates may not learn that voters are struggling to obtain absentee ballots, for example, until an election is close and many voters are complaining that they haven’t received ballots. If courts cannot intervene under these circumstances, many impediments to the right to vote will go unaddressed.
Similarly, as the Democratic Party unsuccessfully argued in its brief in the Republican case, court orders are not the only thing that can “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” In Republican, voter confusion and an incentive to remain away from the polls arose from “the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘voter confusion and electoral chaos’ it is causing.”
Until recently, the Democratic brief explained, “Wisconsin voters reasonably expected they would be able either to vote safely in person on election day or through a reliable, well-functioning absentee ballot system.” Those voters learned very close to the election that this reasonable expectation was wrong. And Judge Conley’s order was an attempt to alleviate the disruption caused by the pandemic.
Nevertheless, Republican treats Purcell’s warning about last-minute election orders as something very close to mandatory. “By changing the election rules so close to the election date,” the Court’s Republican majority claims, “the District Court contravened this Court’s precedents and erred by ordering such relief.”
“This Court,” the majority opinion added, “has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
This conversion of Purcell from guideline to something close to a mandatory decree is likely to have sweeping consequences for future elections. It means that, if voting rights advocates discover in the final days before an election that a new state law is disenfranchising African American voters — or a pandemic keeps away most voters — federal courts most likely may not intervene. It means that many problems that are unlikely to be discovered until Election Day itself will go unaddressed.
Republicans have fought tooth and nail to make it hard to vote in Tuesday’s election
The Supreme Court’s decision in Republican is the capstone of a weeks-long effort by the Republican Party to make it difficult for voters to actually cast a ballot in Wisconsin. Last week, Gov. Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s supreme court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.
The background here is that Republicans hope to hold onto a seat on the state Supreme Court, which is up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. As law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen recently noted, “only 38% of voters who had requested an absentee ballot in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County had returned one, compared with over 56% of absentee voters in nearby Republican-leaning Waukesha County.” So there’s at least some evidence that, if additional voters are unable to return their ballots, Republicans will be over-represented in the ballots that are counted.
It’s also worth noting that, if Wisconsin had free and fair elections to choose its state lawmakers, Evers would most likely have been able to work with a Democratic legislature to ensure that Tuesday’s election would be conducted fairly. In 2018, 54 percent of voters chose a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly. But Republicans have so completely gerrymandered the state that they prevailed in 63 of the state’s 99 Assembly races.
There is far more at stake in Wisconsin, moreover, than one state Supreme Court seat. Wisconsin could very well be the pivotal swing state that decides the 2020 presidential election. The question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden occupies the White House next year could easily be determined by which man receives Wisconsin’s electoral votes.
And the Court’s decision in Republican suggests that the Supreme Court will give the GOP broad leeway when it comes to how US elections should be conducted.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21211378/supreme-court-coronavirus-voting-rights-disenfranchise-rnc-dnc
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How the Coronavirus Pandemic Intensifies the Fight Over Voting Rights
Jelani Cobb writes about how the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated voting-rights issues like voter suppression and how that can affect the upcoming 2020 election.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-the-coronavirus-pandemic-intensifies-the-fight-over-voting-rights
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-the-coronavirus-pandemic-intensifies-the-fight-over-voting-rights
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This toilet recognizes your butthole and uploads photos to the cloud. For science.
Stanford scientists want you to boldly go where no one has gone before. Specifically, that would be into a camera-laden toilet that scans and recognizes your analprint.
According to a paper published today in the journal Nature, researchers at the storied university have devised a system for tracking defecation and urination by specific individuals over time, sending that data to the cloud, and analyzing it for the purposes of public health. It's the latest addition to a long line of smart toilets, although this may be the first one to take a picture of your asshole.
The so-called Precision Health Toilet is equipped with four cameras: the stool camera, anus camera, and two uroflow cameras. Combined, they allow the toilet to analyze users' urine and "[classify] stool according to the Bristol stool form scale using deep learning[.]" Read more...
More about Smart Toilet, Tech, and Otherfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/smart-toilet-analprint-scan/
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“You’re a third-rate reporter”: Trump lashes out in response to questions about damning IG report
Trump during an exchange with ABC’s Jon Karl on Monday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“What you just said is a disgrace.”
President Donald Trump was asked repeatedly during Monday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing about a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general report detailing the federal government’s failure to provide hospitals with the testing and equipment resources they need. His contemptuous responses spoke volumes about his disdain for oversight, as well as for any reporter who has the gall to ask him questions he doesn’t like.
The HHS IG report was released on Monday, two days after Trump fired intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for not doing his political bidding with a whistleblower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine. Trump’s initial response on Monday to a question about the HHS IG report referenced his reflexive distaste for the oversight position.
“It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word ‘inspector general?’” Trump said. “Could politics be entered into that?”
Trump dismisses HHS IG report critical of federal coronavirus response: "It's just wrong. Did I hear the word 'inspector general'? Really ... what's his name? ... could politics be entered into that?" pic.twitter.com/SMsHlgKMI4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020
When he was asked about the report for a second time, Trump suggested it couldn’t be trusted because he wasn’t sure whether the HHS official who put it together — Principal Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm — was appointed by him. Grimm, however, has experience in the federal government under both Republican and Democratic presidents dating back to the Clinton administration. Moreover, the IG report is based on direct conversations with hospital administrators.
Later, when Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher attempted to ask Trump specifically about the report’s finding that hospitals are working with a “severe shortage” of testing materials, Trump unloaded on her.
“You should say ‘congratulations, great job,’ instead of being so horrid in the way you ask a question,” he said.
Trump castigates a female reporter who asked him about testing failures: "You should say 'congratulations, great job,' instead of being so horrid in the way you ask a question." pic.twitter.com/PCYGlkZ2au
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020
Fisher wasn’t alone in being on the receiving end of Trump’s abuse. Trump also bashed ABC’s Jon Karl because Karl didn’t tell Trump that Grimm had served under President Obama when he asked a question about the IG report — as though Grimm’s experience under a previous administration destroyed her credibility.
“You’re a third-rate reporter. What you just said is a disgrace,” Trump said to Karl. “You will never make it.”
You're a third-rate reporter. What you just said is a disgrace ... you will never make it" -- Trump attacks @jonkarl pic.twitter.com/uEO9zB25nK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020
The HHS IG report, which is based on a random sample of administrators from 323 hospitals across the country conducted March 23-27 — a period of time before the worst of the coronavirus pandemic hit the US — details a lack of testing supplies and medical gear that’s making things difficult for hospitals, and alludes to the disorganized nature of the federal response.
One administrator told HHS the supplies they received from the federal government “won’t even last a day.’” Another detailed how their staff had resorted to jury-rigging ventilators from anesthesia machine.
A third administrator, referring to shortages of surgical masks that the federal government hasn’t been able to address, said, “we are throwing all of our PPE best practices out the window.” And a fourth lamented “instances of receiving conflicting guidance from different Federal, State, and local authorities.”
Instead of engaging with that reality, however, Trump on Monday characteristically deflected from it with ad hominem attacks. You can’t solve problems if you don’t even recognize they exist.
The IG report comes days after the Associated Press broke news that the federal government waited until mid-March to try and replenish the national stockpile of medical gear. By that time, “hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” the AP reported.
When asked about his administration’s tardy response, Trump’s standard line is that states should be doing more on their own and should be grateful for any federal help they’re fortunate enough to receive.
“The people that you’re looking at — FEMA, the military — what they’ve done is a miracle,” Trump said during the White House briefing on Sunday, referring to the AP report.
In a move he’d repeat again on Monday, Trump then went on the attack against the reporter who dared to ask him a question that reflected poorly upon him.
"You should be thanking them for what they have done, not always asking wise guy questions" -- Trump ends the press briefing by berating an Associated Press reporter who dared to ask him about the government's slow response to coronavirus pic.twitter.com/EUq6SG42aN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020
“What they’ve done for states is incredible, and you should be thanking them for what they’ve done and not always asking wise-guy questions,” he said.
The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21211345/trump-coronavirus-briefing-hhs-ig-report-jon-karl-kristin-fisher
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Zoom is different on your phone, so here’s when to use it
With the novel coronavirus keeping most of us stuck inside, Zoom video calls have become the new way to conduct business and socialize with family and friends.
Last week, for example, I played a virtual game of trivia with over 130 participants from around the world; listened in on a work meeting with 12 others; had a family check-in with my cousins and sister; and enjoyed a DJ livestream — all through Zoom.
For different activities different devices work best. But not everything works on the Zoom mobile or iPad app as it does on your laptop. As Zoom explains on its website as well as on its Google Play and Apple App stores, different mobile devices have different capabilities. Though the company doesn't state it explicitly, the Zoom experience on your phone or tablet is not as robust as the desktop version for Windows or Mac. Just look at the chat or screensharing features on mobile – they aren't the same. Read more...
More about Zoom, Video Conferencing, Tech, and Consumer Techfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/zoom-mobile-desktop-video-calls/
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