skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Clorox, Charmin, Kleenex, etc are the ones jacking up the prices of supplies...

In a shortage situation, I suspect they dial-up the production of the higher-margin product lines.

The house-brand manufacturing line won't be the one that gets the extra shifts or equipment installed.
I agree with the points you are making. I will add that hoarding does increase the cost of producing goods. If the toilet paper manufacturer needs to produce at 10x normal capacity because people are filling their car with the stuff, they will need to increase staff, work more shifts and maybe even buy/rent/build more production equipment.

Does this double, triple or quadruple costs? Likely not. Yet costs do increase, unless the manufacturer does not increase production capacity to match demand. In which case supply dwindles to zero, with predictable consequences.

The point is: No factory or service provider operates with 10x production capacity they can turn on at a moments notice, that would bankrupt any business instantly.

Perhaps the law we need is one to control hoarding behavior or the rate of change. With that you avoid shocking businesses with unreasonable step changes in demand.
To be specific, the market+price gouging laws+Amazon blocking listings because of those laws is suboptimal. If Amazon hadn't blocked the listings, and more to the point, if Amazon had been known to act reasonably in prior instances, then there'd be more investment and people would accept lower returns. I know firsthand people told me they weren't buying these stuff wholesale to sell on Amazon because they expected Amazon to cause issues, and they were right.

I think if there'd be no price gouging laws and everyone expected to be allowed to sell on Amazon, people would end up pricing lower and there'd be more supply and competition.

There's also uncertainty because when Amazon was banning for price gouging they never made it clear what price level counted as gouging. Wholesale prices shot up, and it was unclear whether selling at a reasonable margin, but based on a higher cost, would be considered gouging.
Generational Names in the United States
> So I figure I can’t compete with pros and passive investing seems like a reasonable enough approximation in the long run.

It sounds like you’re conflating making good investment decisions with understanding the financial system. For me, understanding the financial system means understanding how banks, insurance companies, and pension funds work, how they interact with government (e.g. the central bank), and also knowing a bit about financial plumbing.

That’s not necessary or sufficient for making good investments!
Do you actually need clones in that scenario? I worked on a build system that grabbed source from several hundred repos at the starting point, and it turned out to be way faster to just grab it all as tarballs with aria2c.
Might company bosses just keep doing their job because they are decent people?
Well we'd need to get the government to pay them to ramp up production, otherwise they might go bankrupt producing more ventilators than end up being needed. Paying for "insurance" in the form of extra ventilators should probably be done by the government, not by a corporation.
the CEO is from China yes, its major shareholders include VCs are from China yes, but that does not prove it's "indirectly" owned by the Chinese government, it's likely but we need proofs for claims like this.
I think I'd rather mine used drugs socially (and infrequently) and had a social life....

Both of these answers are overly simplistic however.
> You read that as saying that we can only test how, not if. Now you read my comments as saying we can only test if not how.

The original sentence, "One could argue that..." is poorly worded and confusing. Maybe you could take this opportunity to clarify what you meant.

I'm not really interested in litigating who said what. I'd rather understand what you actually mean, rather than try and attack the wording that you happened to use.

To clarify what I'm saying: Testing "whether" can be science, without testing "how", and vice versa.
Fun fact: one term for the informal economy is "System D": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D
We've known for quite some time that globalization and air travel creates risks. Those who benefit from that model haven't been concerned; profits have been priority #1. The rest of have been complacent and complicit.

I'm surprised anyone is surprised.
"There is a significant increase in hoarding, and in many cases it is for the explicit purpose of creating artificial scarcity to increase the price of a product."

People hoarding aren't trying to create artificial scarcity. They are buying because they anticipate scarcity, and want to either (i) be prepared, or (ii) profit from resale.

Hoarding has caused shortages which, in turn, justify the original hoarding. This is a sad situation, but capping prices isn't a solution. If anything, I would expect higher prices would discourage hoarding, resulting in a more even allocation of TP/whatever between people.
running on Ubuntu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYLjpKafx_4
It'd be best if the hospital sold VIP bed insurance at some rate, and after you were a confirmed case with severe symptoms you then had priority access to a bed.
14.03.2020, 15:00
Tests: 7.467
Confirmed: 655
recovered: 6
dead: 1

Austria has approx. 8 Mio inhabitants

official source:
https://www.sozialministerium.at/Informationen-zum-Coronavir...
It's because the default mindset is that everyone is horrible and motivated solely by profit.
You were flagged because your post was inflammatory and content free. Plenty of peiple are expressing the same sort of view, but with actual arguments rather than simple minded sloganeering.

And I'm not sure what you mean about free speech... Perhaps you're in favor of the government compelling private citizens to not downvote you?
Running Istio 1.5 on Minikube
> This seems exceedingly worthy.

Well, perhaps, though running several jet turbines... aside from the amazingly loud noise, that seems a lot of maintenance and fuel? EZ-fly's 5 engines, 280 lb payload, and 12 minutes duration, suggests something vaguely like JetCat P400-PRO 89 lb thrust engines. So say $3/min fuel. Running near max, so maybe low/mid-order 100hrs for minor/major teardowns? A $10k engine. So about the same cost/min for maintenance? Swap out an engine each shift. So several hundred dollars per hour operating cost? So like a light helicopter? But louder.

A similar but jetpack form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh1x6q21-HU

Thus all the attention on electric and hybrid, and winged VTOL.
wsb is about speculation, not investing. This straw man doesn't diminish my argument.
Mitochondrial Proton Leak Regulated by Cyclophilin D Elevates Insulin Secretion
Then he’s definitely repeating an idea that has been around for a long time.
Underpinning brain growth in a planarian flatworm.

DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0809-9 since it doesn't seem to be linked in TFA.
Exposure to “grocery store air” this week is 4x less risky than exposure in two weeks. 16x less risky than exposure a month from now. 64x less risky than six weeks from now.

It has nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with limiting social contact. Every day, being out in public is more dangerous.

As you pointed out, there is no scarcity issue, nor is there likely to be.
The labor market for truckers has been absolutely horrible for a few years now. Thousands and thousands of truckers have lost their jobs. We won't run out of truckers in this country any time soon.
Thanks for your honesty. I'm not from academia but I have made similar conclusions in my own area. I'm trying to find what I can pass on to my children to save them some time, but it's awfully hard.
There's this trial where chloroquine worked well for treatment. (4.4 days to negative tests) http://news.southcn.com/nfplus/gdjktt/content/2020-03/09/con...

Tocilizumab seems good for the later stages
http://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/03/11...

Prophylaxis, taking the drugs before catching the virus, remains a bit untested.
Price gouging is the supply side artificially raising prices significantly above normal to take advantage of a temporary imbalance in the anxiety vs actual threat being experienced by the demand side.

The day congress declares war on Iran, if you significantly raise fuel prices at your gas station but the wholesale supply hasn't changed, you're generally trying to take advantage of the consumer's fear.

We're for some reason cool with this in the financial markets, but for tangible consumer goods like food and fuel it's (rightly) considered predatory and criminally anti-social. Unchecked gouging can lead to real and dangerous social destabilization.
Do you think a simple design like the Manley would pass muster today?

Seriously thinking about putting together a group of people to start producing these locally. Around campus we have a significant capacity in manufacturing precision mechanical devices.
That would be much more effective at increasing supply than price caps.
You're running an LTS with latest packages & latest Zoom client?

Has worked out of the box on Ubuntu 18.04 for the last four months with screen recording, as host, as attendee, background replacement, chat, seminar mode, etc.

Yesterday I found one issue, the whiteboard share collab mode doesn't work but the app continues to function fine.

FYI: Get rid of unity if you're using that. It'll crash on it's own, not zoom. I'm using i3wm as a tile manager and everything just works as expected.
I didn't downvote, but I can see why others did.

If you have an idea to share, share it. Don't make people jump through the hoop of sending email.

If you are concerned about others stealing your idea, then your comment is essentially spam, because you're using HN as a recruiting tool to build your team. Only YC companies can do that here.

Your motivation might be something other than either of these possibilities. It's easier to downvote and stop thinking about it than to figure out your true intentions.
Please consider that you're a principal engineer with a BS and a Master's. And you've achieved all those things quite quickly! You're on the far end of a bell curve.

A full programming language is the natural choice for people who are full programmers. But for people who aren't, they're intimidating and add a lot of complexity. Templating systems are much more approachable for people who have a lot of experience configuring things via big blobs of text.

As a programmer, I would personally rather express everything in a programming language, so I get your perspective here. But it isn't an accident that there are so many ops-focused systems that are different takes on just automating the things people were previously doing manually.
If it's crowdsourced GPU compute you want, why not hit up crypto miners too? Maybe slightly less altruistic than gamers, but still.
Generating Collision Resistant Fast Unique IDs with TypeScript Support
Ask HN: How do you manage your demo env?
Hey all, we're in the process of scaling our sales org. Since we rely on demos we're exploring the best practices in managing demo environments.
Our current thoughts are:
- We can simply use production, but that seems risky - New features might surprise AEs in the demos, A/B tests, production data? data reset between demos
- We could clone a branch of production and create a dedicated demo env, almost the same problems as above minus the features surprises.
- We can simply use PowerPoint which solves most of the problems above but feels like we'll lose a lot of the wow factor of our app.

Any ideas?
What are the current best practices to create/manage/update a demo environment?
Share your wisdom guys!
For a moment I was wondering that the Irish Republican Army was doing in Ghana ! It should say RIRA not IRA
Out of curiosity I just looked up the year 1592 on Wikipedia, to see if anything interesting happened on 3.14. that year. It is marked "Ultimate Pi Day".
Higher prices may encourage hoarding, as people might see the higher prices as a sign of scarcity and want to buy as much as possible before prices increase further or stores run out.
I agree. I wish we could just use EDN and Clojure,
but your DevOps guy is not writing Go or Clojure code.

They are also not doing code reviews to enforce security policies.

If you have DevOps guys who are also software developers, more power to you, but if I approach my DevOps team with:

Hey just code your scripts in this turing-complete languages, they will ask me "what's your username again?" BOFH-style ;)
> The boundaries aren’t arbitrary; they reflect ethnic differences between groups.

> Homogenizing people is an abhorrent suggestion

Ok, just for the sake of throwing gasoline onto the fire, why do you think that boundaries are a natural thing, and why do you find the mixing of ethnic groups abhorrent?
Harris’ Trading and Exchanges is about types of traders and market microstructure - it has very little to do with what OP asked for (“… how money works in our society. Fiat currency, the federal reserve, the stock market, etc.“)
I don't what is worse, the Russophobia, the bad choice of acronym (Irish Republican Army is what most poeple attribute to IRA), or the flat out ignorance to other countries doing the same operations (Israeli groups, British groups -remember a company called Cambridge Analytica).
Believing that the US somehow isn't a part of the international community is definitely a strange take that I haven't heard before. I don't really see the advantage to the US taking action completely separate from the rest of the world.
Having people line up around the block to be first when the pharmacy opens is perhaps politically optimal but it is not epidemiologically optimal. Except from the point of view of the virus.
>Perhaps the law we need is one to control hoarding behavior or the rate of change.

Aside from an authoritarian system of governance where all purchases are tracked, and one must only purchase their "allotted" amount of goods, how exactly would one control hoarding?

i hope you are not proposing such a dystopian future.
Agreed, the only reason I was after the hand sanitiser was that it would be useful the use when I get off public transport + am not going somewhere I can easily wash my hands with soap and water.
> All models are wrong, but some are useful.

A slogan usually trotted out in defence of bad modelling.

Some models are useful. Some are dangerous. Do you have the means to tell the difference?
So, only the level editor works currently, but the game itself does not?
You neglected to mention that when people see fake headlines about toilet paper scarcity, there's a nontrivial percentage of people who see that as an opportunity for said arbitrage.

There's two kinds of hoarding happening here: fear-alleviating and profit-seeking, which allows the profit seeking form of acquisition to be possible. Several weeks ago, it wouldn't have been feasible for someone to scoop up the entire market. Profit-seeking acquisition is however both a self fulfilling prophecy for the fake headlines about insufficient production, and a means by which the people seeking these products to alleviate fear have their fears justified.

So is your solution "good on them, they're taking advantage of people's fears to help make the rumors true?" Just what price do you think toilet paper should be right now in stores?
Capitalism in America: A History by Alan Greenspan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38712616-capitalism-in-a...
https://www.ghsindex.org/
No, you're being intellectually dishonest.
> The higher price means that those who demonstrate a higher desire for an item (by their willingness to pay) end up getting it. The hoarding profits are a charge to the rest of society for a more efficient distribution of the item compared to 0.

> What bothers people here primarily is that hoarders made money while everyone else is suffering.

No, what bothers me is the assumption that "higher desire" means "more willingness [and ability] to pay," and that "more efficient" means "assigned to the people with higher desire." For reasons of life and death (which I, personally, find more important than the principle of a free market), I think a "more efficient" tool should be one that distributes to people with higher need, and need is generally not correlated with ability to pay. It may even be inversely correlated: I as a tech worker can just stay home for weeks, and I haven't needed a drop of hand sanitizer. Someone who drives buses or makes hamburgers can't do that and must be out in the world for their job, and their jobs pay them a lot less than my job does.

So, government rationing would be an "efficient" solution in my definition, yes, but there's a milder option here: use the government's influence to artificially prevent the price of the product from rising. Then there's no incentive for people to buy large quantities with the purpose of reselling it, and it's more likely that everyone will buy the small amount that they need.
Specifically about the stock market, Flash Boys by Michael Lewis is a fun read and taught me a lot about what the stock market is. It's not the densest book. It's more of a narrative than a teaching tool, but for what it is I found it very informative.
As someone who chose a worse school and didn’t take out loans (and came from a family that had zero savings to help me), it’s sickening that people pretend there were no other options.
YouTube video playback fails in firefox
This would seem more fair if they said the price couldn’t be raised by more than 50% or 100% during an emergency. So toilet paper that was $10 would become $20. Not a major problem, and yet it gives producers the margins to keep staff working longer hours to produce more goods.

But no increase over 10%? That gives producers very little margin to work with. (10% is the rate set in the law. See the link.)
Really? Regardless of the consequences? What becomes of that toilet paper when this fear has subsided? What becomes of the companies that had to scale production, create new factories, hire new workers etc... when the existing glut of supply is not only so much that those new facilities are hurting them, but also that it has decreased the demand for their product even with normal production capabilities?
The economics only works out for rational actors. People are temporarily acting irrational. Desire to gouge and fear of being gouged are causing a run on goods because people are in a panic. Hopefully this will stem temporary silliness.

And this is an order on gouging, not price fixing.
In a free-market, sellers and buyers will find an equilibrium price at which goods can be exchanged for money. When an outsider such as a government artificially sets the price (or forces the price to stay constant), there will be shortages or overproduction.
Even with #2, I worry that people who are short of money would sell their allocated hand sanitizer to pay for more urgent needs (rent, food, fuel), so we'd end up with an allocation similar to #1, but with higher transaction cost.
Anecdotally:

My mother is a retired RN with an "inactive" license in Washington state. She does elder care as a side gig for individual clients.

She recently had to turn someone down because the patient was intubated; it's not legal for her to care for such a patient. If anything went wrong she could be both at risk of a lawsuit and in trouble with the state for practicing medicine without a license.

(She's also in her seventies herself, putting her in the high-risk category, but that's a different issue.)

I'm at a loss as to how our legal and licensing institutions can be adapted to allow for a quick increase in the number of personnel who can care for intubated patients.
"No, you can't have more pie. You have had enough already."

Literally any exasperated parent who has to deal with little children having a tantrum because they can't get what they want.

Yes, that sounds harsh, but it's exactly how this works. Your statement is simply saying that society - you, me and everyone - should obediently and without criticizing enable those who can't cater to their own emotional needs; those who don't know how to deal with their own drive towards self-gratification; those who haven't learned to not indulge in their own irrational fears.

People don't need toilet paper, they need to talk and understand that hoarding is a dysfunctional way of approaching their own fears about the future. And that hoarding - ultimately - is a self fulfilling prophecy as it puts unnecessary pressure on supply chains and creates even more unrest and fear.

That's why your comment is not constructive nor even remotely funny.
Ethereum Smart Contract Ponzi Schemes Part 4: Handover Schemes
use a phone on drone for camera, how about its zoom functions? can it record far distance contents? per my understanding phone-camera is only good for relatively short distance objects which is not the use case for drones? Thanks.
> The fuck are we going to do with that much toilet paper.

It's not like it goes bad (on a meaningful timescale); it'll get used eventually.
Yeah, the government is great at stopping price gouging. You know - like in Medicare or DOD contracts.
Sea turtles think plastic smells like food
While the data might not be ‘just’ caused by random variance, it provides little evidence that there is something more going on than just randomness.

You have no particular reason to study those cases more than anything else, since the data we have does not suggest that there is anything actually going on.
How did South Korea manage to ramp up the testing so quickly? They did a vast amount of tests, and test results constantly came back quickly. What is needed to do the same?
Did the same thing, but in my mind, 50% of knowing a language is muscle memory, you type without even thinking about it because there is zero doubt or ambiguity about the syntax, even anticipating the reaction of the IDE as you type.

That’s why when I switched from vb.net to c# (when microsoft announced they were deinvesting in it 2-3y ago), I stopped writing vb completely. It is hard to fit two languages in muscle memory (unless the syntax is pretty close).
Life as I understand it seems to require complex molecules or other structures that can store and process information. Are there such things that are stable at temperatures where it rains iron? I don't know of any candidates.
It really drives home to me, again, how prevalent right-wing libertarianism is in the computing community.
I suppose depending on who you are and what you find convincing a lot of things could be included/excluded from this table: i.e. individualism, freedom, all schools of economics, behavioral psychology, rationality itself, all cultural practices and traditions, social darwinism, all political parties, ethics, essentialism, ... and so forth. A lot of people think only highly of what they did well at in school, and what a different person does make them look like fool.
You’re overdoing the “priority of governments is to survive”-shtick. Any number of administrations have lost elections, for example. Very few tried to stay in power.

There is absolutely zero risk of a violent overthrow of the California state government right now. Even if politicians were as craven as you suggest, you have already noticed how lame your argument is with regards to age groups: old people have far more power on Election Day.
Are you sure you two are talking about the same thing?

My understanding of immutable infrastructure is the same as immutable data structures: once you create something, you don't mess with it. If you need a different something, you create a new one and destroy the old one.

That doesn't mean that the whole picture isn't changing all the time. Indeed, I think immutability makes systems overall more fluid, because it's easier to reason about changes. Mutability adds a lot of complexity, and when mutable things interact, the number of corner cases grows very quickly. In those circumstances, people can easily learn to fear change, which drastically reduces fluidity.