skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article becomes much less edgy if you know what the authorities are actually saying. For example, the American CDC, in USA Today[1]:

"Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday that U.S. health officials are preparing for the coronavirus to become a pandemic."

"'We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States, yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” she said. “Our goal continues to be slowing the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.'"

Sooooo... today's edgy "the media and authorities are keeping us in the dark" blog post got scooped two days ago by the CDC and USA Today.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/21/coronav...
One of the most glaring flaws of the conspiracy theorists is that they assume authority are bad for bad sake, like they're some mindless evil that does bad thing for .. no apparent reason. Even though the priorities of authority might not be aligned with that of the people, it is still a set of rational priorities, for personal gain etc. Too many conspiracy theorist make no sense because the act they suspect authority do does not make any sense for anybody.
Travel stocks and travel related stocks down, health related stocks up would be my first guess.
There are many kinds of catalysts beyond materials surfaces. Organic chemists use metal complexes as catalysts in organic synthesis. This is especially important in asymmetric catalysis where you want to form high excesses of one isomer of a molecule, which can have drastically different effects in medicine for example. Catalysis also plays an important role in biology I believe.
There is a lot I can do for my family and friends about helping them not be _irrationally_ afraid.

Eliminating irrational fear is valuable. Spreading undue panic is reprehensible.

What are the numbers? What is the risk equation? If we avoid these, then we are not speaking from knowledge but simply guessing and editorializing. Which tends towards panic, not rationality.
Does it still have the issue of failing "open to the world" if the x-pack trial expires? See: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/ransom-attack-on-elasticsearch-...
No matter how complicated the tax code, the government know in advance how much you should pay.

(Imagine the code was so complicated that they didn’t know, and they relied on your honesty. How well would that work?)

In all the countries I’ve lived, the government simply tells you that number. You can dispute it if you think it wrong.

In the US, you have to tell them that number, and you had better have added it up right because they can trivially check. Oh, and you pay for this privilege?
I found Elastic Cloud on K8s to be the best way to deploy and manage Elastic clusters on Kubernetes so far.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud-on-k8s/current/index.h...
There's a lot of options between "ignoring it" and "declaring a global pandemic".
It came across to me as stereotyping to just assume certain people engaged in something very specific without any evidence in order to look down on them.

Furthermore, it's also impossible to prove where it didn't come, also without evidence, because you can't prove a negative.
To those commenting about infection rate going down:

Do you take into account that China relaxed the requirements for diagnosing a case many days ago, and then made them strict again a couple of days ago? That's one sucky move that makes thing seem like they're slowing down. Or so you just look at graph and think everything is fine? Or is everything actually improving even taking the reporting changes into account?
Infection rate in China is going down and the way they keep changing their criteria makes it hard to find continuity in the numbers. Elsewhere it is still rising.
What do you think would happen to the startup culture if the government made it harder for a company to be acquired?
> always acting in bad faith.

Not just that, they're always acting in bad faith and most of time even against their own interest! To cause harm to _$you_ specifically because $you're so important.
This thing shares some similarities with the navy tic tac ufo. The main interesting thing is that it seems to change orbit by going up?

I agree the source is terrible and we should get some original footage. Also Orbital mechanics are weird for the uninitiated. It might look like it goes up but that must not necessarily be true. It might look like its changing orbit but that must also not necessarily be true.

X37B might also be a good guess since that should roughly be able to reach that orbit and move in orbit. It's hard to tell the shape and color from those videos and the end looks zoomed in. Does anyone know of the unaltered original footage?
No matter how complicated the tax code, the government know in advance how much you should pay.

This is not true. Just as an example, I have various business expenses that I incurred while consulting last year. The government has no way of knowing in advance what those expenses are.
All I care about is that decentralized data projects somehow utilize our existing, real life, social networks.

I want a family to all be able to "friend" each other and seed each others' data. And just because you're seeding each others' data, that doesn't mean you necessarily have read or write permissions on that data.

People want to know whose data they are re-hosting and they should have an incentive to host it. Linking seeding to our existing relationships solves for both.
Doomsday prepping on the "densely populated island" requires a great deal more wealth than it does elsewhere (also, offshore speedboats and firearms!), but one needn't be a doomsday prepper to react to credible rumors of upcoming food shortages.
Supply chains have already started to break down in at least a few sectors. China, Japan, India and Korea are where lots of stuff is made, including electronic components and drugs and drug components. China at least slowed shipping way down over the last month.
Yep, I'm on a medication that is commonly abused so they only allow 30 day prescriptions, and you can't pay with cash, it has to go through insurance.
To paraphrase Jerry Pournelle: "Think of it as Creationism in action."
The company I worked for had a fairly strict policy for that kind of thing. Design Review was an integral part of their engineering culture. Involved lots of heavy-duty folks, going over your design with a fine-toothed comb.

A junior engineer would present the design from their team, and everyone would take turns picking up brickbats and having at it.

Not for the faint of heart.
This was very much a bipartisan issue. Both parties were swayed by lobbyists.
Because there was no emergency and people weren't starving. It just became very inconvenient to go shopping.
My favorite one that I usually keep to myself because it makes me sound like a loon since it's so far out of the Overton window (but quite popular with economists): abolish corporate income tax.

Corporate income tax is regressive, because AmaGooBookSoft is much better at not paying taxes than a mom and pop grocery store. But I think you've lost most of the constituents that think that's a good thing after saying you're gonna slash corporate taxes to literally zero.

I'd love to see land tax too, but I appreciate that the Constitution doesn't make that easy. But damnit, if we somehow outlawed liquor, we can outlaw inefficient tax strategies.
Probably the most surprising thing for you: Go is getting generics. No exact timeline, but it's happening for Go 2.0.

Rust is seeing production use in many places and its being accepted more as the sane alternative to C for modern development of high performance software. Ecosystem still not big or mature enough to make big waves, however, but that depends on how you interpret "big waves".

SPAs are used and abused, the tooling to make a performant progressive website with them has gotten better but the know-how is not widespread enough.

React has essentially won the mindshare battle and they are focusing more on functional components. But there are other things with their own healthy niche like Svelte compiling components that manage their own DOM, Elm is still around (and still not 1.0) and it has inspired other "Elmish" frameworks.

Desktop software quality has gone downhill and seemingly everyone is using Electron.

For many companies, Kubernetes is the new normal mode of operation. You should know it, but it's still far from "the way to do things" for industry in general, mostly due to its complexity and learning curve.
Practical question: where else can I check my credit score for free?
> Unless you live the life of a hermit.

Finally, my day has come. Who knew depression could be so beneficial?
I use Credit Karma but the “Fako Credit Score” has little to do with the credit score lenders use.
No longer a side project since I made the switch to work on it full time, but my stock option scanner SaaS [0] is profitable and my main source of income.

[0] https://omnieq.com
The way outlets such as The New York Post deal with this is absolutely irresponsible. They keep on re-posting total garbage that has been debunked multiple times and Google isn't helping by linking to it.

This is also worth keeping an eye on:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/locations-confirme...
Pretty sure you are kidding, but for the benefit of future readers:

> Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
In this case, the result seemed odd, so I checked it by stepping away from the spreadsheets and FEM software, and simplifying the problem down to a quick hand calc. But if I hadn’t done this exact exercise on dozens of buildings, I might not know what ‘odd’ looks like.

Luckily, in this field, you can usually come up with a quick check that gets you within +/- 20% of the more sophisticated answer. These kind of sanity checks should be baked into the design process, but unfortunately not everyone seems to do them.
HP adopts limited shareholder rights plan to fend off Xerox takeover attempt
I guess it isn't really any different from OEM bundling, other than that you now have two links in the supply chain (both Microsoft and the OEM) being paid by third parties for adulterating the product.

(I didn't say anything about tracking, but there's plenty of that in Windows already. There are settings, enabled by default, to let Microsoft track every application you launch and every website you visit.)
Study finds rejected advances – but not accepted ones – influence our r (cont)
To be fair the common flu has a fatality rate around 0.01%, sars-cov-2 is around 2%.

(Not sure there is much we can do in the long run though)
Elastic Cloud on K8s is an operator that uses CRDs to define Elastic resources. The operator manages and deploys the appropriate deployments and statefulsets for the resource. It handles upgrades of the Elastic services as well. The operator pattern creates a more declarative way of provisioning Elastic resources.
>What do you think makes this an exception?

Do you realize it's completely irrational to debate unknown unknowns? Any certainty comes from bias. So you think the doctor is the tip of the iceberg but you absolutely can't know how big the iceberg is. I think the doctor isn't and honestly I can't know that either. What I do have going for me is the biased perspective that on balance the world is being run adequately and if all of these subversive things were true that couldn't be the case. But I readily admit that that's circular and to the extent that it's not it's completely apriori.
The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
Very common in structural engineering, and I imagine that’s about it. Concrete is heavy.
This advice is coming from Australia where prescriptions are subsidized by government not insurance so this is possible.
Nobody is forcing anyone to pay for anything. If a paid product gains enough momentum to crush free products, then it is the free market in action yet again. Short of rough men threatening to do violence upon you, nobody is being "forced" to pay for anything.
It's probably the Cygnus NG-12 (commercial resupply) which was unberthed from the ISS on January 31st but is still in orbit close to the ISS until March 2nd when it will reenter the atmosphere. See https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/01/nasa-fcc-approve-cyg...

The Express got the video from Scott Waring's Youtube channel ET Data Base. There are a few informative comments in the noise there, and they point to Cygnus 11 instead of Cygnus 12 but I don't think that's right: AFAICS Cygnus 11 re-entered in december.
You're absolutely correct on these IMHO. There is, at least, a multi decade trend of reducing corporate income taxes. Unfortunately all the complexity is still there even if the bills being paid are smaller.

And yes, Georgist taxes on the value of unimproved land would have so many benefits.

Can we get a carbon tax & dividend while we're at it? Dare to dream!
Utrecht Station Bicycle Parking Facilty [video]
The whole idea that companies like Facebook, Google or Credit Karma “sell user data” is a misnomer. Companies don’t sell user data, they sell access to you based on the data they have. The distinction is important. They don’t give third parties a list of users that meet a certain criteria, companies tell them that they want to advertise to users who meet a certain criteria.

User data is far too important to sell.
I’m about to switch to self hosting so the font will load in mainland China.
In terms of the statistical learning framework, the Bayesian optimal classifiers are NP hard to find under distribution free conditions. The models have rather large confidence intervals to compare with each other. Scientific methods can only lead you to a certain level of certainty, the rest are purely subjective.
What the article expresses is what I have also gone thru in my personal journey as an entrepreneur as well.

I used to be in love with technology and built stuff in my own bubble. None of it gained traction. Then, I put less emphasis on tech and more on product-market fit and the let the two play off of each other. Obtained much better results!
Interestingly enough, most information/speculation about the viruses origins are actively suppressed by google/twitter/reddit.
I love VS Code but I wouldnt go that far. Sublime Text is far snappier - but I use VS Code anyway.

The real lesson is that performance matters but its not the only criteria for a successful app.
Not the author, but I'd prefer rewriting the code as the requirements become clear rather than building something unspecific. In my experience the benifits to code reuse are vastly overstated and the costs of added complexity vastly understated.
Neat.

Amish use compressed air for power within a building.

Nowadays, I wonder why we don't have a hydrogen grid instead of an electrical one to eliminate transmission losses.
that is a pretty good explanation, especially since nasa having all necessary data could actually confirm it. I don't understand why it looks like its shooting "up" at the end of the video but it would explain why the cameras were tracking it.

edit: it isn't going up, with better footage its obviously just heating up from reentry
Climate change is drying up the Colorado River
Xpack's basic features come builtin in latest Elasticsearch - trial is for a separate set of features.
UK tech policy after Brexit
> Do not tell people to stock up on food. This is how you create runs on supermarkets and panic.

No. Runs on supplies generally happen well after it becomes desperately obvious that the people advising preparation measures be taken were correct. The Costcos and Walmarts of the world, and their suppliers, can very easily absorb the bump in food demand from the very few who actually plan ahead.

> If the situation becomes severe enough for this to become a problem, this will be organised by authorities.

That's adorable.
Unsecured Elasticsearch servers have been implicated in multiple breaches in recent months [1][2]. Since this post is an "In depth guide to running Elasticsearch in production,” it should prominently include information related to security and configuration. With tools like these where there is a learning curve for new users, security can end up treated as an afterthought, leading to these kinds of breaches.

1. https://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/news/billion-consu...

2. https://thedefenceworks.com/blog/250-million-microsoft-recor...

Edited for clarity
That was another planet in another time. We (Earth) are the descendants of the B arc.
There is yearly purges in any studio past its profit zenith.

Source: Industry and multi times EA veteran
> there is a percentage of the population who have drifted from a healthy skepticism into paranoidTown where they assume good faith people/humanity are out to get them

And how big is that percentage? I’m starting to believe, sincerely, that views like the one you expressed are more paranoid and driven by fear-mongering than the views described in your comment. I call these people flat eartherers, e.g. those who believe there are many flat earthers all over the place who are a problem.
Almost every VC backed startup’s goal is to get acquired. Any company that wanted to acquire it would still be considered “anti-trust” by HN “standards”.
Two major differences:

The battery will be charged to 100% constantly.

The battery will be much older and has worse capacity than most consider even usable.
> If the situation becomes severe enough for this to become a problem, this will be organised by authorities.

Ummm... FEMA’s track record handling extremely localized emergencies doesn’t fill me with confidence at their ability to handle a nation-wide incident.

Maybe it has something to do with growing up on a farm, but I can recall snowstorms that left us without power for 5 days and the roads totally plugged for 3 or 4 days. The government didn’t help milk the cows then, and I don’t expect they will today, either.

If your Plan A for emergency situations is to sit on your ass waiting for someone to save you, then I fear to see what you are thinking you can improvise as a Plan B.
[assumed bad faith]
The common flu has a total case fatality rate of ~<10% to 0.1% that of 2019-nCoV, based on still-evolving data.

A key point of actions to date has been an attempt to prevent 2019-nCoV from achieving pandemic status, so that it doesn't recur on an annual basis.

If sufficiently widespread, and affecting a quarter to half the globe's population, we're looking at tens of millions of deaths. Contrast 12,000 - 61,000 deaths in the US from influenza (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html), and 291,000 - 641,000 worldwide (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/cdc-global-ann...). That's with effective vaccines and antivirual treatments, neither of which exist presently for 2019-nCoV.

Preventing this coronavirus from becoming "just another flu" would be a Very Good Thing.
Original footage: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/125816356

I haven't checked it completely but the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmbBJS89J_0 seems to be an unaltered extract from it (if you can stand all the UFO and conspiracy stuff in that Youtube channel).
Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
With the recent posts on successful/profitable side projects, I figure it'd be good to learn about some failed ones. Let's stick to "launched" projects instead of those that never happened.

What was the project and why did it fail (best to your knowledge)? Or what's a side-project of yours that's actively losing money?
They sell access to you. They don’t sell your data.
fwiw, the default refresh interval is 1 second. You should manually increase it if your application allows it. For bulk-indexing you can think about disabling it outright. Source: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...
Exploding streets, thunderstorms, whoops there went the dog.

And friction still gives you transmission losses.
to grep specific repos locally, I use a tool called Hound, https://github.com/hound-search/hound developed by a couple of engineers at Etsy while I was there, but never released officially.
The market for and cost of healthcare in the USA [audio]
Was literally going to do a ShowHN later this week for a side-project I've been working on that hits roughly the same use-cases: https://chewcam.com (just finishing up some last minor bugs).

Major difference looks to be broad vs narrow feature scope (haven looks very in-depth, with lots of sensor options, etc), native app vs browser based, and long-running (security camera) vs short-lived sessions (hour or two here or there).

Not sure if its appropriate to tack on-to this thread or if I should make a separate one, but figured its closely enough related that someone interested in Haven might be interested in chewcam as well.
This is awesome!

@danfox, sent you an email though commenting here too.

I'm the CTO @ GitHub. Would love to talk to you about this and other things we are building in this area at GitHub.

Feel free to email direct to jason at github.com
Right but that’s not what’s happening on google fonts.
I had not realised it was in Android proper, I have only seen it in Cyanogenmod. I wonder if it wasn't used more because people didn't know about it, and didn't realise how much safer it was. Sad that they removed it.
My point is, in case that isn't clear: the people on the front lines of this outbreak are telling a different story than the one that you seem to favor and that up to some point (right up until it became untenable) was still held by the Chinese authorities. So I'm a little skeptical about numbers and stories coming in from Chinese official channels taking them as a baseline with the mental note that things might be much worse.

The data points that we have from outside of China: Iran, the cruise ships, South Korea and several other regions where the virus has established a relatively strong foothold should give anybody pause at this point, any comparisons with the flu are pointless and noise.

Whether or not we are calling a pandemic is semantics, in all but name it is here today.

The doctor was the tip of the iceberg, he is no longer. But there are other people in charge of the messaging for other countries and it seems as though the dreaded pandemic word is now also used by the CDC and similar organizations, internally and with qualifiers ('preparing for a pandemic') it is more a matter of time when they will feel comfortable in using it publicly.
Nature doesn't compute random numbers, it has underlying processes either random or so opaque as to be effectively random.
Two observations:

1. There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints)

2. And they're not insane, editors and social media algorithms are rational and reacting to reader incentives (but it is "insane" to mistake media sources for a rational human, because most media is about covering extreme events[1])

More in my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

[1] The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
Is ignoring errors really a problem in practice? I’ve been using this language since before 1.0 and I don’t think I’ve ever been burned by this. I’m sure it happens once in a while (albeit at very low frequency), but people in this thread act like you can’t build software in Go because the compiler doesn’t catch every ignored error.