skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand how people can keep saying this with a straight face. It's been months since the infections started in Wuhan, people keep predicting imminent doom within the next week, and it keeps not happening.

I think we need to acknowledge that the worst-cast predictions are laughably inaccurate, and a little bit of fear of the unknown is not worth losing our civil rights over.
For what it's worth, Reddit becomes equally curatable to Twitter once you unfollow the default subreddits and join niche ones. There are multiple lines of defense that lend themselves to curation: niche subreddits have moderators who can remove off-topic posts; users are further disincentivized from making off-topic posts as they would run the risk of losing karma; subreddits tend to fracture into X/XMemes/XMetaDiscussion/XGifs/XVideo/SeriousX etc. so you can fine-tune what part of a topic you want; Reddit's "Custom Feeds" feature allows you to further separate your subscriptions into topic-specific buckets, allowing you to focus on one set of interests at a time. And the suggestion algorithm is both more rudimentary and just a jumping-off point to spend time on a specific subreddit you like.

What Twitter does bring is the ability for one to say "this is a person I know or am familiar with; I can now trust what they say" - which Reddit eschews in favor of simple popularity. But since the "Hot" algorithm weights based on time-scaled popularity within each community, it's not quite as bad as one might think.
The point is that even pulling out at the worst possible time is still better than having never been in it.
just curious, which country?
CAA, which many CAs (including Let's Encrypt) already use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_Certification_Authority_Au...
That's bad in my book.

I write a line once for a 100 times I read it.
> boon for the economy

Maybe, but at best this means... buying a few more things, taking a few more trips.

Whereas

> elderly people,

Is my mom and dad.
The framing is weird here.

It makes it sound like the deal fell through but Sequoia still gave them $21M to be nice.

In reality, they had already given them the money in exchange for a board seat/equity/etc. When they realized they couldn't continue this relationship, the only option was to relinquish the half of the deal they could control. They probably couldn't get the money back even if they wanted to, and there's no way they'd attempt to and risk their reputation.

It makes sense for Sequoia and their LPs (Stanford, etc). They put $18 million into Stripe at a $100 million valuation, and Stripe is now worth $35Bn and growing. Sacrificing $21M to not hurt a relationship with Stripe is a rounding error for them.
You're not used to the exponential nature of the spread, which makes the numbers look disproportionate, but we aren't being hit much harder. We were only hit earlier, and not that much earlier even.

Most other European countries are now at 20-40 cases per million inhabitants, where Italy was 5-10 days ago[1]. They will be in our situation or worse in a week, since Italy had already started putting (mild) containment measures in place in the last week of February.

[1] https://twitter.com/fagiolinux/status/1237059898304847874/ph...
Because bulls and bears aren’t equal. The laws should be favored towards not destroying the economy needlessly.
I'd bet by the time we get definite scientific proof of the mechanisms, the every city in the country will have outbreaks.
> is anyone watching this carefully and trying to determine when things will bottom out (perhaps in a week or two), to buy stocks, ETFs, and such at the bottom of the dip

Yes, hedge funds do this. They hire a lot of smart people to dig full-time into all the same hunches you or I might have (plus some more things we haven't thought about), and make bets about what's going to rebound. What happens is that to the extent that the future is unpredictable, the hedge funds lose those bets (along with everyone else on average), and to the extent that their predictions are right, they make a profit.
No debt, enough savings, a house with a lot of land out in the boonies, a willingness to do any job. The 2008 recession did affect me, but I managed. Will manage this time, too. As long as you can learn and adapt, nothing's a problem.
Many other investment holding companies such as mutual funds own stock in competitors that are both trying to eat a single pie. It's not necessarily a problem as long as the investor maintains a "Chinese Wall" between their holdings and manages each one independently.
You don't have to stick to the S&P index. There are others that follow tech, or commodities, or the Canadian stock market, green energy or what have you. You can diversify yourself.
Do you really think you could not, even after taking a few weeks to study and practice?
What kind of fine do you think would be realistic? I'd be very interested to see Facebook bullied out of a couple billions, although I do think it would be protected somehow, too many people have their interests tied up in it.

Still, a precedent being set on this sort of scale would be a good thing, right?
I see several levels of compression:

1) First, as you mentioned, the limited symbol table for expressing all the moves.

2) But not every move is possible; you just need a way to order all the possible moves and then say the nth of those moves.

3) Even better: not all of those moves are equally likely. You can define (n cycles of) a chess playing engine that ranks all moves and reserves shorter symbols for the best moves (as judged within that time frame). Players tend to select higher ranked moves, so that’s another regularity to exploit.

Of course, 3) comes at the cost of compression/extraction time.
Vanguard retirement funds do exactly this for you, what are you talking about?
even the comments here. it looks like most people dismissed this without giving it a chance. the amount of "we cant tolerate this type of thinking here" really only enforces the point the article makes, despite its provocative title turning people off before they understand that.

Personally, "its (author|publication) is biased in a way I dont agree with" seems like MORE reason to read it, not less.

Aldaily chose it as its Essay & Opinion of the day today. https://aldaily.com/ (After today, this link will work - https://aldaily.com/archives/2020-03-08/ )
The reason their numbers are lower than elsewhere is the widespread testing is catching the low-grade infections, the asymptomatic and the so on. Those cases are not reflected in, for instance, US numbers as there hasn't been any wide-scale testing. In a huge quantity of people you wind up with sniffles, a cough or mild flu-like symptoms. They don't go in, they don't get tested, so they're left out of the denominator.
> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.

In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).

So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.
Why would it be taking much longer for the virus to spread in Germany than it is in Italy, when Italy is implementing much stricter quarantine measures than Germany?

"Just wait a week" is the refrain of everyone who is panicking right now, as it has been for the past few weeks.
Etiquette expert on how to properly refuse a handshake
Yes, but I think a week or two is laughably naive. I think we could easily drop another 20-30%, maybe more. The market dropped ~50% for the great recession and I'm unconvinced that this isn't going to be worse.

But I got out almost at the all time high, so as long as I get back in before that, I'm good with sitting on the sidelines. I don't need to call the exact bottom. I'll likely buy back in once I can see that there's some kind of realistic path forward with COVID-19 that doesn't destroy the economies in its wake.
Personally, I like the WHO stuff. Especially since it's more or less the primary source. They suck so hard on messaging so. They don't explain the way how there numbers are calculated, they don't educate on the assumptions and the methodology. They aren't using online channels to get their information out. I would have thought they learned these lessons during SARS, MERS, bird and swine flu, Ebola. Apparently not.

And in that absence of hard facts all kind of theories strive. Usually entertained by amateurs in the particular field. The WHO should be out there, every day, every hour. With all experts on cable news, I think the slots would be there.

And thanks for sharing these links!
> That way I'm not having to pull money out of the market when the market is down.

If your money had been in the market, it would have gone up and then down. You might end up with more money in the end than if you had never invested.
I know it's not the same regulations but I'm pretty sure the next FDA auditor would have a heart attack if we slipped "rewrote the whole product" into one of our patch notes at work.
My guess is you would do it like most employers do, provide a small menu of options, have a default choice, and if you don't make a choice by a due date, enroll the employee in the default choice.
Honest question as someone who's never worked at a place that does this -- what left you feeling negative about it?

Are the marketplace plans substantially worse than the employee plans, or are there extra caveats that come along with QSEHRA, or was it something else?
Yes indeed, it is too late to prepare for a recession when a recession is at the door. You have to have been preparing when times were good - by saving up the excess. Sure you can (and probably should) cut expenses now, but that's not going to get you through if you don't have a solid emergency fund already saved up.
So you say in 1 week Germany will turn into Italy? With multiple hundreds of deaths and states closed down?
These experts are looking for the biochemical proof of why it's so contagious.

That's not needed to make judgements on why this virus could be spread easily.
No he just dampens his returns by protecting against extreme downside black swan events
Not too be too glib but this reminds me of one of my pet truisms:

"If things were different, then things would be different."

Japan is way more insular than the US [1]. You can theorize about what might happen if we didn't have net immigration but it's largely irrelevant because we do.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/world/insular-japan-needs...
Unless you have a source of cash that can only be accessed when markets are declining, that's still timing the market.
Short squeezes, sure. But they're not pessimists. More like cynics. In fact, today's most famous short seller, Jim Chanos, runs a firm called "Kynikos" (Greek for "cynic").

Apart from short squeezes, markets generally grind higher and crash lower. The left tail of the distribution is usually the thicker, meatier, juicier one. But the mode is usually slightly positive. So it's not usually the blood of cynics, but rather the patience of optimists and the persistence of hard workers, that brings markets higher.
Not really. I have a good emergency fund - something every good financial guru has been preaching since before I was born. Beyond that, so long as I have my job I'll keep living. If I lose my job - it won't be the first time - I'll just cut my expenses and in the worst case I can flip burgers for something to live on until this blows over.
I'm learning Elixir & Vim this year. I hope to become productive with vim and make it my primary editor by replacing PyCharm, Sublime Text 3 & nano by the end of this year :)

I am also taking notes of all the resources that I'm finding useful and have some plans to utilize my spare time to publish those as a series of blog articles(hopefully).
Merely to share my vim & elixir journey on my personal blog[0] :)

[0] https://wasi0013.com/blog/
They could give back $21m of their carry.
Thanks, that looks cool.
actually it was reported on Jan 22, marked as resolved on Jan 23 and was disclosed on Jan 31.

Last comment was on Aug 29.
You're wrong, but primarily because you insist on treating human life so trivially. Get to work eh? A best case scenario, one where the actual CFR is half what the evidence shows now is 0.25%. 30% of the population gets the flu in a regular year, so, for America that ends up being a flu season that kills 10 times more people than in an average year.

But you're focus on people hacking and wheezing their way to death. You're ignoring upwards of 5-15% of those people who will have to be on a ventilator OR WORSE. This is NOTHING like the flu.

You would do yourself a favor also to examine what it is that Italy, Wuhan and South Korea are going through to try and stop it. They certainly aren't "GOING BACK TO WORK."
Copycating is based on who gets their brandname favorably mentioned first in Techcrunch/Buzzfeed/Vox etc, then the rest become copycats.
Markets are not wiggly lines.
Can't tell if sarcastic.
Uber and Lyft: Fine, We'll Pay Workers Quarantined with Coronavirus
i'll add one of my favorites slightly modified: "a great way to make a small fortune timing the markets is to start with a large fortune".
The more experienced programmers in this thread can answer this better, but I believe top-level functions tend to get longer names.
There is naming but that is not the point. The point is that you turn functions into (serializable) data. Nothing fancy happening here.
> Without supply and strong backend infrastructure, panic will only cause situation to worsen as people crowd up to get supplies, find them out of stock and blow themselves up over it.

If you do not give people social permission to take reasonable precautions when things are still good, the panic that happens when things get bad will be worse.

> Panic will also cause a shortage of human resources which are required to handle the situation. People will line up over small issues and displace those who truly need the help like what happened with masks and hand sanitizers. Hospitals won't be able to keep up. The staff will have other problems to deal with as their toddlers or family members are in panic at home due to schools, offices etc everything shutting down.

The more people are able to take reasonable precautions that involve social distancing and self-isolation, the more drastically we can reduce the number of people infected, and the less impacted the healthcare system will be.

> Mortality rate for people under 40s is not high.

It's still higher than the flu, and the risk of hospitalization is still pretty high.

"Healthy people under 40" are not the only demographic that should be considered when responding to a pandemic. Many people are not "healthy people under 40". Many of us have dependents who would be at grave risk if they were to be infected with the virus. The danger to them is significantly higher than the flu.

There are no vaccines, and no treatments for this disease. Our only recourse is to reduce spread through social distancing. Fortunately, unlike with the seasonal flu, it may still be possible to stamp out this disease.
Is that why American society declined in the early 20th century when there were effectively open borders? Oh wait, no it didn’t.
How was the sentiment in the public before it hit the fan? Do you have politicians or celebrities who peddle the "It's only a flu" argument?
It seems unlikely that will happen in the US due to the executive branch messaging very much being "Everything is fine folks - oh please don't stop going to work!"
Assuming you mean Phoenix Project, I highly recommend reading Goldratt's books: The Goal, It's Not Luck, and Critical Chain. They're the inspiration for Phoenix Project and cover a good bit more material. I can't say they're great novels, they're no worse than Phoenix Project with regard to their prose, but they aren't stellar either. But if you really want to see where Theory of Constraints and Critical Chain Management come from, read those and it'll help make parts of Phoenix Project make more sense (at least it did for me).
I agree, there is really no palatable option than for the government than to run inflation high, much higher than the 2% target. The next downturn will see some extraordinary measures, maybe it’s already starting with the 10-year treasury at .5%.

Really the only other option is a deflationary bust and nobody’s political career will survive that.
>If you haven't already, put your retirement into bonds and hold on.

Good lord is this terrible advice. Please nobody do this.
Again: This is my emergency fund. This is my "the shit has hit the fan and it's all gone to hell" (like with a global pandemic, for example) fund. I'm not gonna gamble with the emergency fund. You may. I do not. We have no idea how bad this could get. As I mentioned above, I have other money that I do invest in the market, but I keep a year's worth of expenses in cash (edit: and some in iBonds, but most of that was put in years ago when the yields were higher.)
Actually, i think it is symmetrical. The fear of missing out on making a ton of money is just as scary for a trader.
Your paragraph was a lot more annoying than his sentence.
Imagine if they instead invested $100K in 210 startups that have been working their ass off :)

I realize, of course, that they couldn’t do that in this case. But anyone who says governments have waste versus the private market never considered the sheer amount of waste in large corporations :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386&p=2
count me into that bucket. I know of many other too. :-(
>Not if they come in as integers that have to be coerced at some point.

In which case you can calculate the determinant exactly with your own roll, but a library will likely force you to convert everything to doubles.

>Compare ad to bc instead of ad - bc to zero, for one.

That is the same thing, a compare instruction is basically just a subtract that doesn't write the output, so you get zero/equality in exactly the same cases. Most compilers will probably turn your code into doing just one subtract and then check the flags, no matter which version you write.
People who say your emergency fund should be in the markets don't have any realistic life experiences. You're doing the right thing by leaving it in cash.
We did during the first week, i.e. 10 days ago approximately, including the opposition pandering to their base about how the government was incompetent. They have since backtracked, and the opposition leader (Salvini) has never been so silent.
Because outside of the bubble of the top 1% of the top 1% of security teams actual software engineering knowledge is barely existent
I mean, what would happen is simply that Facebook would shutdown operations in Australia (Making Facebook Australia declare bankruptcy), pay whatever couple millions is in Facebook Australia's coffers, and the rest of the fine would simply go unpaid. It's not like Australia can fine a foreign company - they can only fine the local branch of the company. There's exactly no way for facebook to pay a fine that's equal to 7 times its annual revenue...
I just gave him an upvote because that rule is stupid and should be changed. No, you SHOULD call people out for this BS
Why not? Isn't Australia free to not allow Facebook to operate in their country if they don't pay a fine? And if the US prevents them from doing so by retaliation or sanctions, that would actually be closer to warfare.
The only people who lose money are selling in a panic (or buying during a rut). CV has been with us (in the western world) for months now, and people haven't been dropping dead. So unless you believe 2% of the world will die then sure, buy your bunker and your guns and ammo and wait it out. If you are a bit more level headed, you can't go wrong with buying and holding now (and when times were/are/will be) good again.

^For entertainment purposes only, this is not financial advice.
I don’t have all of the answers but my guess is they have something in their deal with one or both parties that doesn’t allow this. My guess is it is with Stripe and, after learning of the investment, Stripe immediately reached out with a “hey guys, WTF” email and this is Sequoia’s way of exiting the mistake quickly.
Thanks for a detailed response, it's quite informative and educational.
I'm assuming this is a typo for powdered milk, given that cows aren't usually plugged into mains voltage.
> You're wrong, but primarily because you insist on treating human life so trivially.

No, it's because I'm not overweighting risks that are trivial for the vast, vast majority of people. Of course if you're over 80 and have 3 pre-existing comorbid conditions (as is in Italy) you should be careful. If you're under 10, nobody's died. In fact nCoV-19 doesn't really even spread between children. If you're under 40 the mortality rate is 0.2%, and that's a worse-case number including folks with co-morbid conditions.

Risk exists, and we should be comfortable with it. I recommend reading Schneier's essay on our decreasing tolerance for risk [1] and how it can often lead to us doing ourselves more harm than good.

You have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. You've got a 2% lifetime risk of dying of an opioid overdose.

> But you're focus on people hacking and wheezing their way to death. You're ignoring upwards of 5-15% of those people who will have to be on a ventilator OR WORSE. This is NOTHING like the flu.

Yes, it is like the flu. H1N1 Influenza A has a ~10% mortality rate in the elderly, similar to nCoV-19.

> You would do yourself a favor also to examine what it is that Italy, Wuhan and South Korea are going through to try and stop it. They certainly aren't "GOING BACK TO WORK."

Really the economic and individual harm and impact there has a lot to do with what they're doing to try and stop the spread. The cure is worse than the disease here.

They probably should go back to work, though, and in China, they already are. They should wash their hands and stay home if they're sick, and get back to work.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
> With a backdoor for governments... So meh!

Well, maybe see my comment below for more, but backdoor implies a backdoor was required. With no encryption, as was the case with iOS and Android, no backdoor was required for communication intercepts or device, and you're only referring to BlackBerry Messenger. Users could install their own messaging apps and larger customers could opt for BES.
I'm guessing most people who say the emergency fund should be in the market are under 40.

I say this because it's been over 10 years now since the last recession and a lot of folks under 30 haven't experienced one since they've been out on their own. They haven't experienced a prolonged bear market. Folks over 40 can remember the tech wreck (2001-2003ish) the housing bubble implosion (2008-2012ish). Folks over about 55 can recall how bad the late 70s, early 80s were.

And then there's just stuff that's not related to the economy. Life happens. Emergency appendectomies. A family member gets diagnosed with cancer. You burn out on your profession. The longer you live the more of this kind of stuff you've experienced.
I mean, bubonic has been been around for a while, and as far as threats go it's not exactly the highest on the list. Cholera, malaria, influenza, etc are all quite a bit more dangerous to society, as is coronavirus while it's actively spreading.
Have you worked in a tech company where the engineer's have some sort of licensure? I haven't experienced that. I'm not doubting you just curious.
Pensions are fantastically unsustainable. 401(k)s are much more responsible -- it's your money, you don't have to depend on a new crop of people funding your pension.
I understand it's rarer in VC, but at least one case comes to mind: SoftBank's investment in both Uber and Didi (and maybe another I'm not recalling?)