skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The principle characteristic of epidemics is the collective and community risk and response tremendously outweigh individual aspects.

Measures taken do comparatively little to address any one individual's risk or concerns. Addressing individuals simply isn't viable or useful.

Taking measures to assure population health, dynamics, spread, total healthcare system load, etc., are what matter.

As someone who'se quite the champion of individual rights, for now: individual rights be damned in the interest of community health.

Please note that this statement has multiple elements, all critical:

- The overall interest is community health outcomes (CHO).

- Individual rights not associated with CHO are not affected. Rights suppressions not advancing or relating to CHO are inappropriate.

- The principle is temporary, for the duration of the epidemic, or until such time as any control is utterly futile.

Epidemiological response is about reducing vectors, contacts, reservoirs, and susceptibility, as well as second-order risks. Limiting movement, enhanced disease monitoring, contacts-tracing, quarantine, free treatment, mandatory vaccination (if available), financial aid and intervention to individuals, businesses, and the financial sector (in that order), rationing, if necessary, and measures taken against community-detrimental actions (a long list: disinformation, misinformation, hoarding, price-gouging, intentional contamination or spreading disease, flouting quarantine/curfew, requiring sick workers to work orfiring them, etc.)

That leaves a broad set of other rights, but is a substantial curtailment.
I'm not saying there are NO examples of people who don't value human life. I was just referring to the context of the story the OP told in the original post. That, to me, didn't seem to contain much support for the "human life isn't valued" sentiment.

Beyond that... all sorts of people have different moral/ethical systems. I suppose people who believe in some brands of utilitarianism can adopt the position you cite here, and feel that it's justified.
Buying puts on SPY. Realized gains (so far) are $30k from an initial "investment" of $1k about three weeks ago. Currently have about $10k riding with expirations in April and May. If the market shoots up because the Fed announces stimulus, I'll buy more. It's pretty clear that the virus is going to decimate the world economy for many months, maybe years. And watching the complete mismanagement by the US only increases my confidence.

I also moved $600k to cash, about 80% of it a month ago. Never done that in 20 years of investing, and probably wouldn't advise it to anyone now either. But when China locked down the whole country, I knew it was time to stand on the sidelines. Worst case, I'd lose out on a few percentage points of growth and jump back in once the threat had passed. I also still have significant indirect exposure through unvested employer stock.

To be clear, this is all fairly risky and ill-advised.
Well, according to a Harvard epidemiologist, 40-70% of humans will contract this virus, which implies 120-168 million people will die. That's going to impact economic activity and so will a Saudi / Russian oil price war. It's going to lead to the dreaded "R"-word and usually sinks whomever happens to be the current POTUS and their chances for re-election.
> It really is an incredible public utility provided you liberally mute/bloctk/unfollow all the petty fighting and find good people.

How do you find good people on Twitter? My interests are esoteric and as far as I can tell not represented on Twitter. I've read people assert that most every interest is covered on Twitter, but that's not even close to true as far as I can tell.

https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2012/10/25/social-media-as-s...

> virtually every topic is covered. The connection between butterfly wings and sea snails? Check. The latest trends in space law? Check. In fact, every niche has its Tweeters because of the long tail effect. And if you’re researching something really rare and unique, well, congrat­ulations—you get to be a pioneer as a first online news source on your topic!

I don't see a reason to be a "pioneer" on someone else's platform (with character limits, etc.) when I think publishing a website on my interests would better reach people with the same interests.
All of this advice is a bit too late.

If you're near retirement, you should have already had a large percentage of your allotment in bonds and cash. If you are not near retirement (> 5-10 years) then ride it out.

I am 30+ years from retirement and I don't think this is world ending, so my high-volatility mutual funds will stay right where they are.
I so hope you are right! :D
make sure you're someplace with a few quarters of runway and make yourself too valuable to lay off
Pleroma is mostly great except that you click follow and.... it doesn't work. The devs are mysteriously dismissive of this issue despite it being reported very, very consistently. I switched to running a ~single user Mastodon instance despite Pleroma being otherwise perfect for my needs (IT'S SO MUCH MORE RESOURCE-EFFICIENT). I was really hoping to see something about this issue in the release notes.
2% of humanity is absolutely, in no way, shape or form about to die. The Korean numbers are approaching 0.5% case fatality rate, and those numbers continue to fall. It's about the same as the flu, and no, the flu isn't killing 2% of humanity either. Y'all need to settle down and get back to work.
Modern tread blocks are designed to eject mud and snow. Back then though...
People telling you to hold off buying are idiots (the majority as always on here).

This is what every mug retail investor thinks. They always get hosed down. They are usually the people who were in cash until 2018...because they were waiting for the bottom.

If you are investing regularly, continue to do so. If you have cash, deploy it. This doesn't matter if you are young. You are getting a better price. It is good news.

If you aren't a mug, look at individual stocks. Do your analysis, and you will find out whether they are cheap or not. No-one who invested at the bottom in 2008 knew it was the bottom. They saw individual stocks were cheap, they bought.

But really do not try this last one unless you know what you are doing. Parts of the market are looking cheap right now, a minority of this is stuff that has sold off recently. If you can't work out where this value is, just buy an index fund and spend your time worrying about stuff you can control (I used to work in research at a financial adviser, I didn't work directly with clients but the biggest issue for most investors are their emotions...99.9% of people don't have the emotional equipment for this stuff...the harder you try, the worse you will do).
Because my google-fu is so bad ... has a major exchange ever actually stopped trading because it gained too much?
Again I don't want to attribute this to you or your company, but the number of right-wing dog whistles you have used in this discussion is alarming. Allowing insurance to be sold across state lines is generally a strategy desired by people who want to drive a stake in the heart of the Affordable Care Act. Interstate sales of health plans will have the same effect as interstate banking and lending: a race to the bottom in which insurers choose their regulators.

(The other dog whistle is "aligned incentives" where you subtly blame consumers of medical services for presumably squandering their insurers' money.)
This is a brilliant work by Jeremy and Rachel. While celebs like Elon Musk are calling this Covid-19 panic dumb, what we really needed is a scientific explanation for a common man which is what this post from FastAi delivers
Thank you. This was quite illuminating.
infamously the hong kong post office is/was a trusted CA

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373537
Yes, agreed -- will not trade. I'll go with Warren Buffet's refrain that trading is for losers.
> Those two numbers do not directly correlate

I think that's the point. Sometimes it's useful to point out the obvious.
It's going to affect all professions somewhat.

Personally, a long time ago I realized that stuff happens, and you have to both deal with an unpredictable world and change. You can't really prepare except in general terms, so you mostly make the best of the situation you're in. Keep an eye on where you want to go with your life, and do your best to make it happen, but accept that it may not and there may not be anything you can do about that.

Professionally, my skills will be in demand one way or another no matter what happens. Whether I'm cheaper to hire than the competition will depend on what I'm willing to do to earn a paycheck at various levels. I've always wanted to optimize that so I can spend more time living and less working, so I'm planning to cut my costs long term and live cheaper if I can.

Financially... there's not much I can start doing now that will insulate me against a recession other than the above. I don't have long term investments except in myself and my skills, and I don't expect to ever be able to retire. I will probably change careers at some point, however. In a recession economy I will still be able to find a job, just maybe not at the pay level I'd like or in an area I want to work in, but I'll survive.

If your hope is that you can prepare and thus insulate yourself from the effects of a bad economy... it's only partly true.
I'm much more worried about the virus than a recession. The latter... is going to suck, for a lot of people, but with the right policies in place, we can get through it. The virus is simply going to kill a lot of people if it's not checked.
Right now the US in a relatively short span of time has gone from having no testing (due almost exclusively to government regulation) to having broad testing availability (thanks to free markets).

> People will just get sick and die

People may get COVID-19, but in general I would anticipate the rate of severe outcomes to be lower than we've seen given both the physical distance between people in the US versus more dense areas and the higher distribution of healthcare - we just have a lot more hospitals per person than China does.

> Hospitals will experience shortages and we'll try to back-stop those shortages via capitalistic solutions

That may happen, but Hospitals are also free to invest heavily in having their own supplies and we've already seen companies start shipping supplies in bulk. We are better positioned to address shortages than most other nations.

> I wouldn't rule out the possibility of even stories of straight-up bribery for hospital access to come up some years after this is all over.

That is far fetched and not tied to reality.

> we won't try to contain it beyond perfunctory measures

It would be surprising to see a formal quarantine. It is more likely some areas will have recommended quarantines and in general social distancing will be heavily encouraged.
On the other hand, it's also possible that the CV will recede in the summer, and that will very likely make the markets bounce back. To quote Carl Sagan, prophecy is a lost art.
To be perfectly honest I’m not sure I find your argument coherent at all.

Can you define what you mean by free market? Is two parties freely coming to a mutually beneficial agreement that they are then constrained by (i.e. a contract) consistent with that definition?
> - A government and a system that propped up an insolvent banking system that likely extended the downturn significantly

Very true. "Extend and pretend" was the rule of thumb on debt. By failing to let firms go bankrupt, you ended up with tremendous capital (and labor) resources in enterprises which do not create value.
Most people aren't getting paid for running their instances, and are doing it for the kind of goodwill that is only amplified by enabling features.
It does not.

Democracy does not mean doing whatever one wants with no possibility of restrictions in exceptional circumstances.

I have seen several articles lately that try to paint quarantines, lock-downs, or other temporary restrictions as anti-democratic. This is a fallacy and it is not helpful at all.
I always thought he was one of the greatest actors ever to grace the screen. Truly a shock to see the headline.
You're right. I read a chart wrong.
Do you mean President Trump has threatened a specific individual with violence? Can you give me an example? What part of my reply do you consider childish?
Yeah blazor seems to be a re implementation of the same ideas with webassembly and a newer version of .net. I have a feeling it will have the same security holes eventually.
I'm in the camp of more preparedness is better, and actions need to be taken. For me it's about studying recession histories, stay calm, keep investing.

Sharing what I posted in another thread: my look into the 2008 Great Recession was very helpful with my pattern matching. 98 out of 100 stocks lost money during that recession, but most of them did super well during the longest recovery period in U.S. history. Even AIG made people a bunch of money.

Here's the full dataset of 1363 mid cap + stocks that traded during the 2008 recession, and their performances: https://shan.io/writing/learnings-from-the-2008-great-recess...
Learning rust is great (I am too) but I'm skeptical that it is in any way a recession-proof skill. If anything, recessions cause corporations to become more conservative, including technically, favoring the older "boring" languages with a long track record.
> Our database runs on 3 servers (1 primary, 2 secondaries), each with two 480GB SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration

Algorithmically cool, but quite a lot of work to save <$500/yr in hardware for a handful of 1TB SSDs.

Converting the data to the new format cost more than upgrading disks.
Brave is a really tough sell on mobile. It doesn't have mobile extension support like Kiwi and Firefox on Android, or a horizontal tab switcher like Bromite. On top of that, the adblocker is worse than uBO and there's this shady cryptocurrency stuff.
While you're right in that a higher VAT __can__ reduce the effective purchasing power, it doesn't have to. 1) Yang's VAT was at 10% which is under half the rate of most of the European countries. So I'd feel confident that we could follow similar procedures, which would halve the deficit spending (if the carbon tax was doubled to $40/ton, there'd be a surplus). 2) VATs don't have to be applied uniformly. I'm also not opposed to a wealth tax. But from my understanding, it is harder to avoid a VAT. This is probably an easier loophole to close (and Republicans like consumption taxes, so easier to pass). But you are right in that things would need to be reformed dramatically to actually capture a wealth tax.

I still do not buy the argument that a UBI will be shouldered by the middle class. I have yet to see evidence that it will be shouldered by anyone but the 1% (really the 0.01%).
The exchange does. Exchanges are companies too.
As an employee whose has been on the receiving end of this, I won't work anyplace that does it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
My company made my official title “Blockchain Architect” despite my repeated written and verbal declarations that I don’t want the title as it doesn’t fit the work I do and frankly belittles the work I actually do.

Politics and antiquated org structures play a big part in determining someone’s job title.
- Older population

- lot of heavy smokers

- the typical european old people attitude (and i'm saying that as a european too): "you don't take me anywhere". My grandparents passed away long ago but they never went to doctor only in the very last minute all the time. It's a kind of mentality and you can see that in the Italy cases. When they take people to the hospital and they die the next day it means they had a heavy fever for a week or more already. They have been sick for a long time but no, we don't go to the hospital. That's why what South Korea does is important, 20k tests daily, and they have done 200k already.
Tips to speed up your Linux command line navigation
When China put 10% of the worlds population on travel restrictions, a put on SPY with a strike of 300 expiring this Friday was 29 cents.

The optimism is frankly unbelievable.
Not for me, subscription only site.
South Korea's timeline is very likely to be atypical, because a majority of the cases in the country are linked with one particular religious group.
As long as the process for getting refunds is frictionless and well-implemented (perhaps similar to Prime Now), then if you can afford holding the charge on your credit card for a few days, this doesn't really seem like a problem. The process becomes: go to the store, pick up what you want, and then at some later point take a quick look at the "receipt" for verification, quickly flagging anything that seems off.

With Prime Now, you get your groceries delivered and pay for them in advance. Once in a while, you don't get an item, get the wrong item, a rotten piece of fruit, or an expired bottle of milk. When this happens, you simply go to the app where every item is listed, and follow the quick prompts to get a refund. You can optionally give a reason for asking, but in my experience they don't actually seem to care; in fact, whenever I've left a comment that, for example, one of the ten oranges I ordered was bad, they've always refunded me for _all_ the oranges on my order. I assume this is because the number of refunds is low enough relative to the number of purchases that they can afford to just always refund, keeping the customer happy enough.

If this is how it ends up working, then I'd gladly trade standing in long lines at the store for just walking out and reviewing my purchases later. The tracking part is still a bit creepy, though.
Italy has the second oldest (on average) population after Japan. I saw a statistic today that said that the average age of Italian victims is currently 81.
This is neat to read. The README for the Ember.js repo (github.com/emberjs/ember.js) was updated recently too, and I feel like there's a lot more specific clarity about what Ember really has to offer, especially for folks who might not have considered it an option yet.
Keeping my network strong, keeping my skills in tune with the local market, and keeping my fixed expenses low.

Companies were still hiring contractors during the last recession, but they could be more picky and you had to be able to hit the ground running.

As far as benefits, my wife works for the state education department doing an “essential service”. We can switch to her insurance if necessary.
Maybe you really are more clever than the rest've us, and have beat the market. Or maybe you got lucky. Or maybe we're only hearing about the winning trades, and you've got some losers we're not hearing about... I suspect it's option 2 or 3. Regardless, this is bad advice.
A bit less than 10x, an order of magnitude, every week.

It's been really is very easy to see the future up until now. There's 9000 cases in Italy now; by the 16th of March, factoring in the containment measures, they could be 60-80k.

About 10% need intensive care; there's probably 3000 IC beds available now. Very simple.
>Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc.

I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by smart working and cultural businesses?
Raul Julia in Street Fighter.
It's funny - not in the "haha" way.

I don't want others to suffer; who really does? But no one willfully gives up power.

We're so very close to being technically capable in terms of eliminating poverty or feeding all people. Hopefully, the upcoming recession will push over the edge towards total solidarity.
It's unfortunate to ignore the sentimental nature of markets. In the history of market there has always been either a discount or a premium over fair value. As if by coincidence, I'm reading the intelligent investor and a lot of what Graham said remains true to this date. There's almost always a premium/discount to the fair value of the stock market as a whole. The last few years have been extraordinarily good. Everyone knew a correction was coming. That's happening now. It's impossible to time the market but it's possible to differentiate between a correction to a fair value and a huge discount on price. In any case, the investor should be willing to wait for a while before the market realizes the value that they think the stock is worth.

Similar to how the last few years felt like everything was getting more and more expensive, the current downturn also seems like an over-correction (time will tell if I'm wrong). But what I'm sure is this - if the markets are down for a prolonged period - over 5 years - we have way bigger problems than the rate of return.

Here are the tips that I stick to:
- DO NOT try to time the market. Exception: when you strongly feel the market went into an over-correction or you feel the market is highly over-valued. (Graham uses a range between 25% - 75% for stocks vs bonds.)
- DO NOT invest money that you need in the short term in the market. Corollary: keep a buffer in cash/high-interest savings account + Treasury bonds for short term needs.
- DO NOT PANIC - it's really hard to resist the urge to buy when the markets are going up (FOMO) and the urge to sell when it's crashing. Of all the strategies, this one (buy high, sell low) is guaranteed to return a loss.
- For most passive investors, index funds + dollar cost averaging is the best way to go. These days robot managers do a good job of also expanding this into stocks + bonds + international coverage covering more scenarios - for example, a hedge against the US market or one's home market not doing well (enough) in the long run.
- Hold individual stocks only if you think you'll hold it even if there's no ticker for it with up-to-date price info.

I split my portfolio into 1) Cash/short term funds 2) Long term retirement fund and 3) Speculative investment. All the money on (3) is money I'm willing to lose (not that I want to lose). That's the only account where I buy riskier bets which are pretty much most individual shares. I keep completely separate accounts to make this assumption explicit and clear.
Indeed. I've been earning FANG-ish money for the past ~10 years and saving/investing more than half of my take-home pay. That means my expenses are low enough that I'd do fine if I have to take a lower-paying job and that I have enough savings to live for quite a while if I can't find any job.
What would you say is a significant problem with Twitter? I'm interested in what you think would make Twitter a better service for its users.
Interactive Coronavirus live tracking map in the US with news articles
You should really adjust for dividends, in which case it is still down, but only -7.5%. [1]

[1] https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator-dividend-reinvest... (I did Dec 1989 - Jan 2020. They don't have data latter than that)