skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s.

I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information.

The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.
Doesn't that fall into the "real but well handled" category then?

The OP can only be asking about comparisons to a hypothetical world where nobody dealt with it for critical systems.
As someone else said to another poster if your risk tolerance is low you probably shouldn't start a company anyway.
Protect your team with Cloudflare Gateway
> I don't know about now but it wouldn't shock me

We'll be up for a few Y2K bugs at the start of every decade because 'year += year < n ? 2000 : 1900' was such an easy workaround, for n=20,30,40,...

https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2020/new-years-b...
I find it incredibly ironic that the New Yorker doesn't let me read this article in incognito mode.
I know what you mean but you shouldn't forget that you can also find people painting the Mona Lisa in MS Paint on YouTube with stunning results.

Though it still remains a pretty impressive feat...
None really I'm afraid. I enjoy having notifications on my wrist sometimes but most days I just slap on a regular watch instead since they're more fashion than utility item for me honestly.
They also refused to implement WebP support. If they can't get their act together I'll still get my revenge by using a polyfill that decodes WebP images with Javascript (goodbye battery life!).
So you're saying that a total shut down of the economy which could cause a depression is whats needed to deal with this virus. And thats no reason to be worried ?

A lot of people are staring at economic ruin. We are staring at potentially multiple quarters of negative GDP growth. I don't think this has happened for a long time. And money printing won't fix it like it usually does.
Пісня про дощик – Звуки природи – Детские клипы Елены Молчановой
How do you know that they are being optimistic? Honestly, they know no more than any of us. Now is basically just as good of a time to buy as any time in the last 10 years.
Golang port scanner to expose open or closed ports
> only temporarily correct

FWIW this is not uncommon with pandemics. For example, WHO[0] says "During the post-peak period, pandemic disease levels in most countries with adequate surveillance will have dropped below peak observed levels. The post-peak period signifies that pandemic activity appears to be decreasing; however, it is uncertain if additional waves will occur and countries will need to be prepared for a second wave."

For example, during the spanish flu, the second wave was far deadlier than the first. But there were additional factors (WWI and a mutation that made it more dangerous to the young).

This can continue until enough of the population has been infected that we have herd immunity. This is why there's long-term estimates of 20-60% of population being infected[1][2]

[0] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/communicable-diseas...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/world/europe/coronavirus-...

[2] https://www.axios.com/congressional-physician-predicts-75-15...
It's hard to buy toilet paper at all!
How long can you go without touching your face?
Who gets to determine what is the fake COVID news? It's a slippery slope.
You're all describing Donald Trump, who is all too real.
The current administration in the US has been more proactive than any previous administration during any previous outbreak, despite the deluge of criticisms that were surprisingly absent during said previous outbreaks. The measures that have been taken thus far are more than aggressive enough, based on the information we currently have. We're just a few steps away from shutting everything down completely, which wouldn't be good for anything at this point. It doesn't get much more proactive than that.
My definition involves understanding how computers work to a decent degree outside of basic app usage.

Being mechanically efficient at using computers (and by this, I mean being efficient at using carefully- designed apps) does not count in my eyes. If any problem occurs, or if one has to do anything outside of the basic app flow, then people go blank.

I operate a car daily, does that make me car literate? I understand mechanically how to operate a car, but if anything out of the ordinary occurs I have no idea what to do. Except to call someone who is actually car literate to fix the problem. Usage does not correlate with literacy.

When a problem occurs, I've seen many people not even read the error messages or display basic critical thinking ability. I can't call this tech literacy.

> They can talk with their friends over the internet, create and layout documents, print posters, do research

This is a testament to programmers and UX designers making easy to use applications, not people being "tech literate".
Yes. It's like if you're on a ship and you see an iceberg in the distance. If you shout iceberg, and change the direction just a little, no crisis. Without that small change, big problem.

People were talking about Y2K years ahead of time. Lots of changes to code were made. A few little bugs slipped through, but not many, and everyone knew how to fix them. No crisis. Without the many code changes, big problem.
Detergents always work, unless organisms have a thick layer of stuff other than lipids just like human body. Btw, protein denaturants also work, such as bleach
Absolutely it was real!
Armies of developers fixed it so well, fools were able to think it wasn't real as a heart attack.
Really nice work!
I'm playing with the app currently. Is there a way to set the default browser used to open links?
Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if things don't work out you just spend more time and money, but there was no additional time that anyone could give.

The Y2K bug did not become a crisis only because people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it. And in the end, everything kept working, so a lot of people thought it wasn't a crisis at all. Complete nonsense.

Yes, it's true that all software occasionally has bugs. But when all the software fails at the same time, a lot of the backup systems simultaneously fail, and you lose the infrastructure to fix things.
> real humans have more than one interest.

Sure, but plenty of social accounts only focus on a few of them -- people like to segment themselves into spaces. I'm a real person with multiple interests (or am I?) but at the moment my personal blog only has technical articles on it.

Which, to be fair, a blog is not Twitter. But I could easily see myself or someone similar to me picking up a Twitter/Facebook account and saying, "I'm just going to use this space to complain about the government. I need a space to rant."
Robinhood Down
Unilateral amateurism is not how things should be done.

Look at Singapore for how things _should_ be done.
What actually helps prevent this is poisoning the surveilance device population landscape with not just noise, but a accurate simulation of what happens.

Install a dozen cameras which tell lies from a choreographed simulation..
Add a thousand simulated cellphones, loging from cell to cell..
If you destroy the ground truth, you destroy surveilability.
Or use investing frameworks that help you preserve capital and also size up the market, like CAN SLIM or any of the hundreds or thousands of others.

You don't have to be a daredevil to be participating in the market right now, but study and practice are probably an essential, along with an allowance for the proverbial bop on the nose.
That's a question of definition. There are many who will passionately insist that yes, you absolutely need all of them. I hypothesize but can't prove that these are people simply regurgitating what they were taught in a classroom and who have not yet left Java/C++ to see what else is out there and what else can work. It is perfectly feasible to be educated that way and then spend your entire career in Java or C++ and come to conceptualize everything else as "that crazy minority stuff that isn't like Real Programming", and, in their defense, they are at least correct about the "minority" part. It's easy to forget if you read HN a lot, but inheritance + polymorphism + encapsulation remain the massively dominant paradigm, especially if you assume most C# is still basically written that way despite supporting other paradigms.

Personally I take the loosest possibly view, mostly just "associating data and methods to operate on that data fairly tightly together, where they all get passed around as a unit". Some ability to have "x.y()" result in multiple possible implementations of "y" is necessary, or you just have a weird way of spelling function calls. That's about all I'll require to call something "OO" nowadays.
The problem with the infuser is that there's only one of them, unlike regular mugs where I have a whole bunch of them because they're practically free (they're a common gift item, after all). The infuser set-up is expensive, so I'm not going to buy 5 of them so I make tea frequently with no cleaning, so I need to hand-wash it. Regular mugs aren't like this: I can just use them and toss them in the dishwasher and get another one when I want another hot drink. And you're right, it's not a huge amount of time to hand-wash, maybe about a minute or so, but it's still a lot more than the utterly trivial amount of time it takes to put a mug in a dishwasher.
And to be more specific, you can roughly model it with a Gompertz function:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function
so this explains why 20 seconds, if anyone would explain that at the first place and not just say out of the air wash for 20 seconds I would remember the motivation and understand and do that otherwise I forget what I do not understand. So typical of the shallow news not to explain.
The rally in April is pretty certain imo, that's the "dead cat bounce", but the "falling off a cliff" again part isn't. I don't think anyone sees this as another 50% correction... Or do they?
No, just giving the top search spots to updates from WHO, followed by the national, regional and local sources. Play with the search algorythm to push the more alarmist ones further down.

Help the above mentioned institutions to write their "content" in a social media optimized way. That would be agreat opportunity for these tech giants to gain trust they lost since 2016. Not doing anything right now moght very well have the opposite effect.
It's actually a very interesting contrast with what "fake" used to mean in digital media. You see models with flawless skin, perfect teeth, digitally sculpted curves, and the original photo didn't look that flawless.

Now somebody has asymmetric ears like I do, and that's a hint they're fake?
Not only was it real, some of the fixes were kludges put in place that would only last for 20 years. But that was fine, because surely we'd have done longer term fixes by then?

Except we didn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#On_1_January...
I have no idea what's your beef and why are you taking the discussion here so emotionally. It is a fun and informing place to exchange ideas and have conversations, not a battlefield.

My comment was actually exactly opposite to the way you read it. The point of the article was that treating your employees right isn't unique value proposition since everybody can do better. I was saying that actually it is.
I don't either. Almost always an arrow function (or just regular old function) does what I need. Plus, React Hooks!
85% of the world doesn't enjoy those iOS benefits, as per mobile OS market share.
VirtualBox requires a non-free compiler (Open Watcom) to build the BIOS, so it cannot be in Debian main (only contrib). IIRC there are also some non-free prebuilt guest utilities.
Yeah we need a nosecam model
The Y2K bug, in the public imagination, was premised on code like this existing somewhere in our computers:

const DATE_COMPUTERS_DID_NOT_EXIST = /* arbitrary */;

/* snip */

if (Date::now() < DATE_COMPUTERS_DID_NOT_EXIST) {
Computer::selfDestruct();
}

(See also: the Simpsons Y2K episode, which I think is a good representation of what many non-tech people believed would happen.)

I think it's a great lesson in the failings of the public imagination and should serve as a warning to not give into moral panics.
It means I definitely don't feel like shelling out money for a subsription to Fortune right now just to read an article.
Corona Pandemic Prepping
If you thought postscript was bad, welcome the world’s most terrible vector image format.
Well, seeing as this is the first US Census in history where we expect the vast majority of the responses to come via a website rather than manual counting, it's an excellent coincidence.

Of course NRFU (Non-Response Follow Up) is still a manual process.

We can all help by filling out the census online when we get our letters in the mail. Note: they start arriving today (March 12, 2020)!
Neither the current pandemic nor Y2K really fit the definition of a black swan event, since they were completely predictable (and predicted).
If they had to lie, they won't release 80,000 cases. It is coming to an end for them. There is very little point in covering anything now.

I wish the U.S. would test more people like South Korea did.
Merkel Gives Germans a Hard Truth About the Coronavirus
Yeah, I get that. But I mean the plural version should be exclusive to cryptocurrencies since I've never seen the plural form of cryptography in use. It seems it's fairly unambiguous in that "cryptos" as a plural term has never been used to refer to cryptography(ies).
I was not working on fixing Y2K issues, but I did notice the impact it had on systems that hadn't been patched. It's the typical IT conundrum, when you do a good job no one notices and you don't get rewarded for doing a good job; the only recognition comes when things fail.

Some historians seem to think that it was a real crisis in which the US pioneered solutions that were used across the world:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/30/lessons-yk...
I disagree with assumption that year length has stayed constant the past 70 million years. The Earth experiences tidal friction from the Sun just like the Moon and Earth affect each other. I am guessing the year lengthening effect slower than month & day lengthening because Suns tidal force is a third of Moons.

In addition Earth year may have changed during the Great Solar System Reconfiguration Event when Jupiter and the other gaseous planets hypothesized to have migrated outwards from orbits closed to the Sun. This may have happened 3.8 billion years ago causing increase of craters on the terrestrial planets at that time.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/young-jupit...
If you just want to tell time:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000GB0G7A/?coliid=IM29FNJPX2F5S&c...
That right there is your problem. Go learn about how US elections work. Try reading the Constitution.
Be careful here with an opinion like that, it doesn't fare well most of the time unfortunately.
In 1998 we tested the new computers we sold and many failed or gave odd results when the date was changed to 2000. By mid 1999 almost none of the computers had any problems if you advanced the date.

Also one of the major results of the Y2K bug, IT department finally got the budgets to upgrade their hardware. If they had not gotten newer hardware I am sure there would have been more problems.

Finally, in my area the main reason companies failed from IT problems is because of problems with their database, but it turns out their backup are not good or have not been done recently. Many companies tried to be cheap and never updated their backup software, so even if they did backup their data the backup software could really mess things up if it used 2 digit dates to track which files to update.

Things go very bad if you lose Payroll, Accounts Payable or Accounts Receive-able.
Should You Clean Your Phone to Combat Coronavirus? Definitely Maybe
Unless I’m missing something, none of KaiOS’s UI is there. I see Gecko, the kernel, some hardware enablement bits, and sample apps.
What does the science say? I have seen exactly zero studies which claim that the y2k bug would have led to disastrous consequences if action had not been taken.

Compare that to the CFC situation in the 80's. Scientists agree that the mitigating actions we took saved the ozone layer. Or compare it to the current global warming crisis. Scientists tell us that if we do nothing, we will suffer catastrophic climate change.

Media never tells you the truth, but the scientists usually do. So you listen to them.
You’re not “all set yourself” if you have little in the way of savings and are resorting to derivatives trading to make your mortgage payments.

Defer your donations until you have a year of payments in a rainy day account. You can’t donate if you’re homeless.
Rust 1.42
The market hates uncertainty the most and nothing about this pandemic or the economic impacts are certain. There is definitely no good news anytime soon for there to be a serious uptrend.
Shout out to one of my favorite projects, Luakit [^], the only chromeless browser that lets me resize the window to a single pixel.

Best part is the vim interface,

:open hacker news
[ddg results]
/Hack
Enter
:tabopen github top lua questions
[Github search results]
:bookmark

^ https://github.com/luakit/luakit
People may sell their crypto to cover their shorts in the stock market.
Another neat-looking project. I spend much of my time in FreeCAD which has a very high learning curve, but is fully scriptable in Python. It's effectively a UI over a programmatic interface to construct multicomponent documents which include surfaces, CSG, etc, etc.
How well do you know your framework
Considering the statement:
"we do not need to know how a car works inside to be able to drive it",

what are the opposing views on "knowing how a Framework works inside"?

how well do you know your frameworks?
The main benefit of classes is as a way to define custom types. Otherwise you are stuck with the types built into the language, which are not designed to help ensure correct program state, logic, and behavior. When you use classes in this way, I call it type oriented programming (TOP). Why would I compare classes to types? Just pass in the initial value at construction time, define the "operations" on that type by creating methods for your class, and define which other types those operations work with by setting the types of parameters those methods work with. Make the class immutable, always returning a new instance with the new updated value passed into the constructor. Why did I mention these types helping the program be more correct? This should be used as the primary form of contracts. But these contracts are very simple to use, you just specify the relevant type in the parameters and return values, and you are done defining the contract for any given method. For example, let's say a method should only work with integers larger than zero, instead of either accepting an Int or an UnsignedInt, which would allow 0, you could define your own class called PositiveInt. It would be designed to throw an exception if you pass anything smaller than 0 into the constructor. Then instead of writing code inside the method that makes sure the user of the method is following the contract, you just specify PositiveInt as the parameter type. If the contract is violated, the exception will be thrown as early as possible, before the method is even called, helping programmers catch the original source of the problem. This also makes your code more readable, because you can see exactly what each method accepts and returns just by looking at the method signature. When you start thinking this way, you will notice many core types are missing from the language, that should have been there from the beginning. Fortunately you now know how to build them yourself.
"It's a bear market. That means, pay us money to read more than the first paragraph." Pass.
You have a mortgage and donate most of your income ... why?
Shiller PE Ratio from 1880 to Today
How to Release as a Bootstrapper: Often, Early, and Safely
Ironically, prices are higher if growth is expected to be lower.

Population Growth worldwide is expected to be lower. And most people think productivity growth is also going to be lower (harder to predict, this jumps with major new inventions).

As long as interest rates sit at 0, the P/E ratio is not returning to historical norms.

Prices are still 50% above historical norms. They're not falling that far. Retirees and home owners would riot in the streets.
Surely the ultimate example of this phenomenon is OCaml.

It's wearing OOP right on its sleeve in the name of the language, but its users inevitably say "Oh, we never (or hardly ever) use that part".
My point is there’s no reason to defend them, people have a right to use grammar in any way that lets the communicate effectively.
If it helps people, I'm glad; but to say that the people that it doesn't help "just don't get it" is pretty disingenuous. And since this was in response to my interest in correlation between the higher power and improved outcomes, I'm sure you've got a study lying around that I could take a look at; anecdata is nice, but group therapy on its own has also been shown to be helpful, and none of the studies that I've seen so far use general group therapy as a control group over an Anonymous group (Gaming, Marijuana, Alcoholics, Gamblers, etc).
There's less cause to use small data sizes for timestamps and date codes now. Storage has grown by orders of magnitude, the idea that a numeric data type would only be large enough to store a 2-digit year or that you would want to save disk space by abbreviating an extra 2 letters is foreign to a lot of new developers. And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing...
US Travel Ban: Most Impacted Airlines and Hubs
EU leaders: 'Trump's coronavirus travel ban makes no sense'
What ways are they possibly helping?

Not to doubt the venture but at this stage I'm not sure what can be done.
In my opinion (emphasis opinion), "black swan" includes the concept of timing... that a pandemic would occur is inevitable, but you have no idea on the timing. Market crashes are inevitable, but you have no idea on the timing. Volcanic eruptions are inevitable, but you have no idea on the timing. etc.

Things that are inevitable only when you encompass time spans longer than a human life (it has been approximately one and a half average human lifespans since the previous pandemic) may be predictable at that large aggregate scale, but on useful scales they are not. Or, to put it another way, if you've been shorting the market since 1918 for the next pandemic crash, you went bankrupt a long time ago.

Y2K is only a black swan for those not in the industry, since that one is obviously intrinsically timing based. The UNIX timestamp equivalent is also equally predictable to you and I, but to the rest of the world will seem even more arbitrary if it's still a problem by then. (At least Y2K was visibly obviously special on the normal human calendar.) But I wouldn't claim the term for that; call it a bit of sloppiness in my writing.
I would add a domain that is needed in bad economic times. Even better, one you can provide value other can't. then you are rather safe, I think.
He also posted a video of the work being created. Wondering what tools he used to make it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUCVBNNyjC4
I think that this is a personal choice, not an objective "it is wise" choice.