skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For employee, universal public healthcare is mandatory and paid to the state. Part is paid directly by your company (you don't see it on your wage slip) and part is paid by the company on your behalf (appears on your wage slip). The same goes for retirement.

Also taken from your salary, a complementary private healthcare plan chosen by your employer. I just literally learnt yesterday the mandatory part on the company private complementary plan. You can not reject the company plan if it does not suit you. But you can take another complementary plan on your own. BUT only one is eligible for reimbursement. So you basically loose part of your salary if you choose a better complementary health plan as recipient of your health bills.

Now, if you are a freelancer, well, you also have to pay all of that, all by yourself this time. The affiliation is different (RSI) but you still have to pay universal public healthcare. Then you are free to have a complementary private healthcare plan or not.

All critical health issue are covered by universal public healthcare. Less critical stuff like dental implants or ultra-thin glasses are not. You don't get a hole if you don't have complementary health insurance, you get a cheap dental plate.
Yes, but this is due to the fact that most jobs require your physical presence, Uber does not.
> It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about.

It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption.

I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.
Chrome and Firefox both vet browser plugins on their platforms. I've found Firefox to be much more thorough in this regard, to a fault. In some ways they are even more difficult to deal with than the Apple App Store, in my experience. For example, they sometimes decide to re-review your add-on, even if you haven't submitted a new version in months. At least with Apple, you can (mostly) control when your software is and is not reviewed.
Thank you, everyone in this thread! These are some helpful insights.
The situation is now so silly that some people are circumventing the system by copyright claiming their own videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo

This enable them to at least get some of the revenue of their video (by sharing with other (often bogus) claimants), and to monetize re-uploads (something normally available only to big channels).

Why Google doesn't do anything about this mess is beyond me.
artists rarely write their own descriptions, usually left up to the museum curator's interpretation.
Exceptions are basically sugar for that, since this kind of thing is done so commonly that it’s useful to have a construct for it.
Anecdotally, NTL (cable company) in the UK faced a similar issue, and took the worst way to resolve it.

Instead of looking at and understanding why customers were calling in, they decided to outsource management of support to a company that specialised in cutting down the costs.

The methods they employed had employees required to reduce the average support call duration, much like it suggests Expedia started out doing. Employees that didn't hit or beat their average call duration targets got put on a performance improvement plan, and then ultimately laid off.

That average call time was then steadily reduced in stages. It was a great success, the average call duration dropped rapidly. What was happening was employees would "accidentally" disconnect customers if they came close to the target call time. Or just randomly drop calls early on if they were worried their average was too high. Customer dissatisfaction was significantly higher. Call volume was higher (but not everyone bothered to call back). Average call duration was down though, so big success! Customer retention was getting worse, but that, of course, was tracked under a different silo by a different team who had nothing to do with the support org.

At one stage, they actually dropped the target average call duration to less time than it took to reboot a NTL router / set top box, which was the very first thing customers were advised to do by support agents. They did finally notice, then, but their only solution was to increase the time by 30 seconds or so.

Give the wrong people at the wrong level the goals, and you're going to get poor results.
Ask HN: Overbilling on Microsoft Azure
I'm hoping to get two things from this question

I want to find out if anyone else has had this issue, and if so, what did they do about it.

Our story:

In September 2019, a bug (I can only imagine that is what it was) caused Microsoft Azure to bill us double the amount we should be paying. Over $1k extra per month.

I contacted Azure, and they couldn't figure out the issue. It took until January for them to find the reason they were overcharging us. It was completely on their side. It was nothing we could ever see, or change, and nothing we ever did which caused the issue.

During this time, they had continued to overbill us, and never refunded the amount of overbilling.

Once the issue got all sorted out, I had assumed they would refund us the amount which we were overcharged.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. They actually want to overbill us one more time, because, as they say, they've already created that invoice, and they don't want to refund us at all, they want to apply the overcharges to our invoices going forward.

We need to make payroll, and have other bills to pay and having Microsoft hold thousands of dollars of ours for no reason is unacceptable.

Anybody else had similar experience? Any suggestions on what to do?

Most of our services are run on AWS, but there are a few things we need to keep on Azure for a little bit.
Also, if the person in their network they're offering the introduction to is actually a prospective customer, it's a useful way for them to validate a startup's value proposition to the end user.
Head-Related Transfer Function
In Germany the kind of work from your example is highly regulated.

That said, if you put an ad to build a shed for £100, expect a low quality result. Of course you can put all kinds of criteria but at some point you will either get screwed over or nobody will answer the ad. I also doubt that there are many people working on such gigs in a sustainable manner, even if the criteria are proportionate to the price.
> Actually a performance piece of a public domain work counts as its own copyrighted work. So the least true option would be claiming that the song is your work.
reply

Since this was the reply, which explains how "this is my work" is the most true option, I'm not sure why you feel the need to post your question. Both sides have been explained and you can decide on your own.
I don't use git; years ago I chose mercurial and have stuck with it. And I'm by no means a power user. But I've always wondered why git "won".
REST is often used as a very, very limited transport model for a two-bit, buggy, incomplete and incoherent clone of SOAP, yes.

Unfortunately, neither REST nor SOAP are understood by majority of developers writing code for them (to this day, I insist that the real issue with SOAP was people using IDE code generation without ever studying how SOAP works)
I have friends who are (modestly) successful fine artists, and they uniformly hate having to write that dreck. But you wanna pay the bills, you pick up a pen and write.
> The WHO and CDC are lying to you. You can verify all of this for yourself.

In a case like this, where you're basically saying that two massive government organizations are broken, and one of which is an international organization which is _designed_ to transcend national borders (and thus includes different member countries, including China), the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim.

As a general response: of course the WHO is going to use China's numbers. If you don't establish some baseline for reporting then what are you going to do? Guess? The WHO does not have people to drop into China and start testing everyone. If China is under-reporting numbers then that's a great shame the world needs to deal with, but in typical situations involving bad data, you exclude the bad data entirely. Are we to exclude all of the numbers reported by China? Multiply by a scale factor to adjust? Pick a random number?

There are many problems in the world and the WHO is not free of problems. Every director of every organization has some random set of things people don't like about them. In cases like this, again, it's important to provide evidence to support your claims (even if that's just basic links to overviews by reputable sources). From there, people can make informed decisions and judgement calls. I don't particularly think you're lying or telling the truth, I just think that not making evidence backed decisions is dangerous, especially in times like these.
>usually specific for their classification e.g. Taxi Driver insurance, or VTC insurance
perhaps its just coincidence but could the "28 day incubation period" somehow resonate with the movie "28 days later" ?

it seems like a way to take advantage of priming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
Stoosbahn Funicular, world's steepest, has a maximum gradient of 47.7 degrees
This virus isn't airborne. It's spread through respiratory droplets.
Analysis shows there might be two subtypes from the very early days: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...

If the theory is correct, the L type is more aggressive and may be causing explosive outbreaks as in Wuhan, while the S type is less aggressive but harder to block from transmission. Interestingly, the S type is the ancestor. It would be interesting to see what is more prevalent in the outbreaks of South Korea, Italy and Iran.
Please don't trust WHO, obviously they got heavily influence from Chinese government.

Remember when COVID-19 out-broken in China, the WHO told us

"The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available. "

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...

Then we saw China locked down all major city themselves. Now you tell me it's fine not to ban flights from China?

And they also keep mentioning it's not a big deal. Obviously they don't want to hurt Chinese economy. I won't trust anything they say, as their interest is China government's interest, not people's health.
The case fatality rate is in the tens of times higher for the novel coronavirus, when compared with common seasonal influenza.
I don’t see it. Pandemics are objectively defined. The bonds’ principal pays for relief in the event of a pandemic, meaning a venal WHO would lean towards categorising non-pandemics as pandemics.
Typo in the first paragraph: undergrarduate
In that sense, not losing money isn't an achievement, because how could it be lost? If you literally burn your cash, you have just transferred wealth to everyone else.

"All that was lost was time and energy" but that's all that can be lost, so where's the consolation?

Your logic seems to me exactly like justifications I've seen of why bitcoin's proof of work mechanism is worthwhile and sane.
I think git is pretty good. However there are a lot of random/bad blog posts giving supposedly expert advice about how to use it.
Anxiety has a lot to do with Uncertainty.

Kirk Douglas recently died. One of the things he said it that he did not fear poverty, loosing all his wealth, because he was raised in poverty as a child.

He probably was happy in lots of ways, even being poor.

One of the things I love to do is going out and living in a cavin in the woods with all the inconvenience it brings you. No computer, no phone,alone, wild animals, very simple food and you could die from simple things, like running off a hillside.

This makes you feel alive like nothing else, makes you feel gratitude for what you have(your family, your work, your computers, your car) and also gives you psychological safety, that whatever happens you can deal with it.

It was a known technique by Seneca, 2000 years ago.
Ah, I thought they just took a cut like most platforms. Kinda like Appstore or Steam.
The Diamond Princess is a pretty small sample size to be extrapolating the mortality rate.
sounds like a job for thismuseumcuratordoesnotexist.com.
It's categorically false that it didn't stop the virus from spreading within China. Those measures shifted an exponential growth curve to a sublinear one.
Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml
That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.
I'm inclined to agree in this case, but it may also depend on the particular author... I've read some enjoyably deep yet accessible pieces on quanta before.
> I understand that if you run an app store, you get to review code and refuse to distribute apps/addons that don't meet your standards.

I think that you lose the moral right to curate your app store when you make it impossible for users to switch to alternative app stores.

Curation or no-sideloading: there should be a law that says a company should get to choose only one.
"First, COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza, from the data we have so far."

Ok let's look at the data he summarizes in the next sentences:

"With influenza, people who are infected but not yet sick are major drivers of transmission, which does not appear to be the case for COVID-19. Evidence from China is that only 1% of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within 2 days."

That's 1% of reported cases. But evidence shows there are many more unreported cases, and these cases tend to be asymptomatic, or very mild. Peer-reviewed research has estimated there are 11x to 38x more cases than detected:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/419

Another study estimates there are 19x to 26x more cases than detected: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

These 3 studies are all the studies I know of that try to estimate the rate of underascertainment. I did not cherry-pick these to make a point.

Anyway, this suggests the vast majority of cases might be, in fact, just like influenza: asymptomatic or very mild. And there are no reason to believe they are not major drivers of transmission.

"Some countries are looking for cases of COVID-19 using surveillance systems for influenza and other respiratory diseases. Countries such as China, Ghana, Singapore and elsewhere have found very few cases of COVID-19 among such samples – or no cases at all."

China: the only reason they find so few new cases in March (only 100-200 new cases per day) is not because COVID-19 is less contagious than the flu, but because they implemented extreme response measures including the complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public events, closing all schools nationwide, prohibition of attendance at work, etc. So of course COVID-19 is spreading slower than the influenza. If China implemented these measures during influenza season, they would likely drastically reduce the number of influenza cases.

Singapore: COVID-19 has, so far, been contained (less than 110 cases country-wide) with strict isolation procedures for patients. I am not sure this is evidence that COVID-19 is less contagious than influenza.

Ghana: it is not even a country rated "high risk" by https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... but just "moderate risk". And there are no known cases of COVID-19. So in my opinion, it is insufficient evidence to suggest COVID-19 is less contagious than the flu.

"The only way to be sure is by looking for COVID-19 antibodies in large numbers of people, and several countries are now doing those studies. This will give us further insight into the extent of infection in populations over time."

That's the only statement from the WHO Director-General that makes sense: we need more evidence to be sure we can correctly quantify COVID-19's contagiousness.
Where do you think that the concept of computation comes from? The entire idea of computers, and of algorithms that can be executed mechanically, came from an attempt to generalize what human reasoning is capable of proving and constructing.

Similarly, the concept of cybernetics predates the naming of the field by a few centuries, considering tools like eyeglasses, and possibly millennia, if we include dentures, canes, or wheelchairs.

While we're on analogies that irritate you but have reasonable historical and scientific contexts, I'd like to remind you of the idea of humans as colonies of trillions of cells. A human isn't one thing, but trillions of things, much smaller and more autonomous than one might think.
This was about regulations. I never commented on the uber drivers. Tbh, I have not enough insight to know if they should be protected.

I am merely pointing out, that is is easy to forget what regulations do for you. And yes, 9 year old have worked in mines before working age was regulated.
Yes, your point? You need different insurance if you're going to be driving 10 hours per day instead of just to work, and from work. Who would have guessed?
Know more about IP addresses
Regarding your #3: Wouldn't WHO gain that $425MM if they triggered the default on those bonds?

> If certain criteria are met, the bonds' principal is transferred to the World Bank's Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) to fund containment and relief efforts.

To me, that seems like quite the incentive to declare this a pandemic. If doing so would unlock that funding.

But, there's details. Just declaring "pandemic" isn't enough. The bonds have numerical thresholds that must be met. (e.g. 20 deaths in 2 or countries).
That says they get kicked off for canceling too many rides. Accepting a ride and then canceling it is different than not accepting it to begin with.
They didn't go that route with Oracle/java.

Whoever is in charge of this situation dropped the ball out of fear. It cost Google plenty because all videos should have ads unless you are on a paid account.
They started out with that, but I can't think of any other reason they changed it to the current model, except greed. And AFAIK this is only how it is in some US cities, like cities in California.

In Europe they still operate at a standard of 25% cut.
AI tool for business naming and logo design
It's interesting that the notes regarding transmission efficiency are not present in the similar speach given on the 4th of March (as opposed to the article link, which is the 3rd of March).

I'm not sure what to make of it. It might be pure paranoia on my part - but it is an interesting change in the welcome statements that are otherwise generally similar.

https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
Bio-inspired arrayed camera is only 740μm thick
Uber limits the amount of rides you can deny, i.e. you deny 5 rides in 30min they log you off the platform after awhile you get penalized. They want high acceptance rate.
What you describe is not what “Gitflow” proscribes though - you don’t have a separate “develop” and “master” branch.
One large difference is that a lot of people hold back from theft purely because there's a human involved. Doing illegal things to human beings is a whole higher tier of scary, compared to doing those same illegal things to robots.

Consider the difference between robbery and shoplifting. One is the domain of rare sociopaths; the other is common-enough to be almost a subculture among teenagers in certain areas.

Robbing a robot is, in some sense, just shoplifting (or, more accurately, warehouse theft) performed against a moving target. It's not "the plot of an action movie"; it's some unethical people's lazy Sunday afternoon. I'd expect it to be far more commonplace, once it is possible at all.

And, as well, keep in mind that, the more predictable something is, the more you can automate attacks on it. It's a lot easier to have a worm going around stealing Bitcoin out of people's digital wallets on their PCs, than it is to steal real wallets. Likewise, it's a lot easier to create some kind of drone that steals from other robots, than it is to create a drone that steals from human-driven vehicles. In combination with the property of people feeling much less compunction against attacking robots in the first place, I'd bet that you'll see e.g. delivery drones having their cargos hijacked by pirate drones, with increasing frequency. Autonomous trucks are just a larger-scale variant of the same.
FamilyLink says our family lives in different countries
My team uses git flow as the basis for our branching strategy. We’ve streamlined things a bit over the years as we’ve found we didn’t need all the flexibility/complexity in that model, but we’re still using a develop branch, feature branches, release branches, tagging our releases, etc.

It works fine for us, and we spend very little effort on branching or merging. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend git flow as a starting point to any team. Just make sure you don’t follow it dogmatically... if there are tweaks that you can identify to better serve your team, go ahead and make them.
Italy orders closure of all schools and universities until March 15
We use several branching strategies - all depends on the size of the codebase and the number of teams involved. Some work just fine with a trunk based workflow, some need that extra bit of layers.

What I don't get is the infatuation with GitOps, where someone insists on replacing a process with a source code repository and webhooks. Starting to see excessive scripting/bots to talk with GIT bots...and it is so kludgy.
You don't need to catch everyone. You just need to bring R0 to below 1. If R0 is a little over 2 in the first place you just need to catch a little over 50% of the infected with all your actions (in addition to temperature checking) to eventually control the epidemic. The better you do the sooner you get it under control.
Writing feels fluid to me when I think I know what I am talking about and I can imagine someone what parts of my writing someone wants to pay attention to.

When writing documentation, you often either:

1) Know the system very well -- So it is hard to know what the reader needs to know.

2) Don't know the system well at all -- so WTF do you write?

Documentation is better written as a pair between an engineer familiar with the system and an engineer who has self-confidence, passing familiarity with the languages, and no knowledge of the system.

Product idea: As two engineers pair-writing documentation, I want to turn on a product that records what we say and where the senior engineer navigates in the codebase into a very-rough first draft of documentation. Look at the Otter.ai API.
I don't understand people downplaying this by saying it's only as bad as the flu. The flu is really fucking bad!

Before widespread flu vaccination, it killed 50 million people in just one outbreak (Spanish flu). That's more than have been killed by HIV/AIDS combined in history. And we have no vaccine against COVID-19.

Even nowadays, it still kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Why are you being so rude? You've been disrespectful since your first comment in this thread.

My point is even the French classify rideshare drivers and taxi drivers differently, per your own admission.