skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, lots of reasons and lots of what I believe is evidence, but nothing most people think makes sense.

The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat."

This was also basically what communism was supposed to be and that went spectacularly badly.

We do have a few places where people get their share of a local natural resource. Both Alaska and at least one Middle Eastern country give all residents a check from their oil wealth.

But it's tied to something in specific: Oil. So we have a good idea of how to make adjustments to the payout and under what conditions it would end. It isn't a promise of "forever."

Historically, we had nuclear families with one primary breadwinner and benefits for others through that person. That's largely dying out for various reasons. We need a new system that allows for some people to work (for pay) and some to not and more or less everyone to get access to housing, health care, etc.

We mostly aren't talking about that. UBI sounds like a rich persons fantasy of hush money. "We'll just cut a check and the problem will go away."

Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value.

I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea.

Maybe some kind of expanded earned income credit would make sense. In the US, we would benefit tremendously from fixing our health care system.

But I think just passing out money/resources to "everyone" has a long history of failing every time it has been tried in some fashion. It actively undermines a lot of social contracts that are the very basis for civilized life and replaces it with "You and all your friends just won the lottery and the rules don't apply to you anymore."

From what I gather, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt in five years. This is another piece of evidence that you can't fix life, the universe and everything by just throwing money at it.
Good idea! An app to create and manage these gift card/vouchers with specific window of expiration. By limiting the window of validity the shop can prevent too many gift cards to be valid at once (limit over sell of time slots for a service business). There could even be an insurance provider side business to insure the gift card in case the mom and pop ends up belly up.
This is fundamentally a problem with our society. I'm not sure what happened to workers in authoritarian countries that are locked down (ie. China), how are they supporting their workers that can't work?

We can't have a modern society where your choices are work and spread a deadly virus likely overwhelming hospital facilities or not work, fail to pay rent, become homeless and starve.
Stop the lynching, it's boring and pretty evil. That is what Reddit is for.

Why not ask the real question, sanitizer is vial, it's soap and a tap you can carry around in your pocket.

It's just alcohol and a jell AND a plastic bottle.

How can we as a society not be able to produce this, People will even pay for it, they will even pay extra for it.

We have failed. Stop blaming individuals. Nothing about C19 was unpredictable.
Mass amateurization
People with mild symptoms aren’t going to the ICU at all. And overall disease severity even in hospital cases is significantly lower in people < 50yrs .
The fact that publishers have declined to publish an author's work does not mean that the author is being "censored". Publishers turn down books all the time. Many well-known authors have stories about how a book of theirs was rejected by many publishers before being accepted -- or before they got the message and wrote something more worthy of publication.
Within my social circle it's not about being cocky it's about survival. Lots of them are living paycheck to paycheck. While San Francisco has moved to block evictions and the state is working to protect mortgage holders and tenants, there are other bills to pay.

A degree of separation or two and then we get the anti-vaxxers and maga tards and other mentally deficient folks who think the CDC is just putting out a giant hoax.

Edit: And if you look around HN you'll see plenty of horrific medical and dietary advice in general and so SARS-COV-2 is no exception. My favorite was the one guy promoting smoking and blood pressure meds as a way to stave off a coronavirus infection. Some people you just can't help.
yes, possible. it’s still called price gouging.
What are you basing that statement on? The worst case-scenario is based on a scenario where no effort is made to protect against the spread of Coronavirus and I'd imagine the CDC considered the impact of overwhelmed hospitals when doing their analysis.
> If he's buying to sell them at a markup, it MUST be because it's not getting replenished.

This is just false. People routinely pay more for the exact same item for so many reasons, from saving precious time looking for a better price, to laziness, to not even realizing there's a better price, to added convenience in some form, to so many other things. It's entirely believable he thought it would get restocked.
A good vs bad primary school math teacher can make your child hate the subject and completely change the trajectory of their career.

They teach ~100 students every day, so tens of millions in future earnings depend on them.

Does their pay reflect this? All the good teachers I've met, could be making more elsewhere.
This is incredibly uninformed. It doesn’t matter what happens “by and large”. There aren’t enough hospital beds for even a minority of them.
Crowdsourced List of where to get tested for Covid-19
Put another way: if you bought a flight from X to Y before covid-19, and then you canceled that flight and received a voucher -- that voucher will still only buy you a flight from X to Y, even though prices have dropped.

That seems... totally fair? Why should you be able to buy two flights from X to Y when you canceled only one? I get that prices are now lower, but your price is the same as when you originally bought the flight.
* Your first issue is resolved lately.

* I get your frustration. I personally just open up krunner and type 'reboot' or 'sleep' and press enter.
We're talking self survival, and resilience...they're talking insensitive and dispassionate. Not sure a bridge can be built here. Same movie, different takeaways on the ending.
I don't think proper competition exists in certain areas where people spend a decent chunk of paycheck: telecommunications/internet providers and rent (any others? Healthcare?). I think UBI would be a handout to these industries, maybe it would do some good too, I don't know.
This is the answer. NPR Planet Money did an episode on this a while ago, long before there were any real or perceived shortages of any goods. Even in good times, this strategy tends to work:

> Sam Cohen's business works like this: He walks into a big retail store and buys a bunch of stuff. Then he sells it on Amazon for more. It's straightforward and surprisingly lucrative.

> This is a multimillion-dollar business for Sam — and for lots of other people who do the same thing. It's called retail arbitrage...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/epis...
They’re just referencing the commerce clause. Can the commerce clause supercede the bill of rights?
As it happens, my main inspiration for writing this plugin was primarily due to the extensive support Emacs provides for performing structural edits in lisp. After having experienced the ease and speed at which you can naturally transform lisp programs by using the expression-level movement and editing commands, it was rather annoying to find myself frequently relying on character level movements to account for small issues with tuareg/merlin's movement commands.

Also, after actually setting this whole thing up, I now believe ocaml has the potential to provide an even better editing experience than lisp if structural editing is properly implemented, as the comparative lack of delimiters means that ocaml is quite quick to type in (and structural support should mean that this doesn't come at the cost of movement speed). Hopefully I've got the ball rolling with regards to structural editing of ocaml code, and I'm eager to see how this area progresses.
He didn't just start doing this last week. '

Yes, he did. Previously he had been reselling non-essential things that weren't in particularly high demand. Selling something that people are panicked about is new.

Hell, in one breath he talks about the insane prices he was getting for hand sanitizer and in the next he talks about how his markup is justified. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Geez. He’s an Indian immigrant running a small restaurant which serves about 30. I’m concerned for him, but more concerned for the people that work for him.
Author here. Didn't realize this blew up on HN...

We don't know the cause of the difference in price, but we're comparing two basic economy tickets here so if there's any fare difference, United should at least clarify to the user why...

United and other airlines are running ads [0] on how users can book w/ confidence and get free changes so IMO, it's just irresponsible to have things like this slip through the cracks-- intentional or not.

Overall, United has been consistently being anti-user with their policies related to coronavirus. For example, making users wait 12 months to get a cash refund [1] if your flight is delayed by them. Not a great look.

[0]: https://twitter.com/tejasmanohar/status/1239332916070473728

[1]: https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/united/unit...
Curative Inc, a CDC certified Lab in LA is working to spin up faster testing through "raw material" test kits that can be crowdsourced. They mean the kits can be assmebled by non-tech folks to allow greater self-sourcing of test kits; the testing will be only conducted in certified labs.

https://www.curativeinc.com
https://www.covid19-response.com/projects
plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish papers on it (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5). And the retractions from this journal is increasing (https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...).

The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as "In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-p...), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands, gives a shout out to “the Creator” as early as the abstract, which contains this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process, any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to say in public whose group published on plos one.
कोरोना संक्रमणबाट इटालीमा मेयरको मृत्यु घण्टमात्रै ३६८को मृत्यु – Tee TV Online
I think this is for people who already know Python, and just need a quick memory aid. I agree for a complete and correct reference I would recommend the documentation, as you said.

A proper cheatsheet takes liberties for the sake of achieving both brevity and comprehensiveness at the same time.
This is touched on in the Wikipedia article, but it's interesting that the onion market is well known for being significantly more volatile (and thus, bad for farmers) than other normal markets for vegetables.

It is a literally textbook example in why banning derivatives is unlikely to be the easy fix some imagine for market failures.
Perhaps pre-designated "price-gouging" companies could be allowed to price-gouge (and might be forbidden to buy up remaining traditional supply once an impending disaster is apparent?), but the person on the street could not?

It just seems like there should be some middle ground between, "Price-gouging should be banned!", and "My kingdom for an N95 mask!".
Self isolation on the part of the at-risk population.
If colleges why not schools
That may be true, but humans tend to get lax once the immediate crisis is over.
lockdown of at risk populations
You’re still only talking about 700,000 beds for a disease that will likely cause 1,000,000 deaths and put huge numbers in the ICU and even more in hospital care.

A bed in Maine does no good if the patient is in LA and the doctor is in North Dakota.
I saw an actor get stabbed for real on stage in a production of Julius Caesar at the Stratford theater (Ontario, Canada). It was a long time ago, and not googleable. IIRC the retractable knife was broken. It happens.
He finished his scene, and returned as a corpse (acting!), before leaving for medical care.
Some people were never in a financial position to create 3-6 months of savings. Being poor is expensive. You buy in smaller quantities are pay more per unit. Poor people don't have money lying around: they are poor. "Too bad" is an unacceptable policy solution. When these folks can't pay their rent/mortgage/bills, it will have follow-on effects and rip the economy.
Of course it matters. If a disease is not particularly dangerous to a certain demographic, then that demographic by definition cannot overwhelm scarce ICU resources.
Duo Security (Cisco) has the Duo Network Gateway also.
Because there was clearly no sort of distribution infrastructure to get hand sanitizer to people without having to go into the stores. Right.

NPR's talked about retail arbitrage before and sure there are all sorts of crazy reasons people buy stuff at inflated prices through Amazon and eBay. What's missing though is that typically the sellers are capitalizing on things that are difficult-to-impossible to find elsewhere (e.g. Trader Joe's products, none of which are otherwise available from other vendors or online from TJs) or to capitalize on sale pricing.

Neither of those things are true here with the guy hoarding hand sanitizer. Whether or not he donated his stockpile to charity under duress or not he still deserves to be punished.
He might've done wrong, but he made a public apology, and gave it for free. It's tempting to make this mistake. Give him another chance. Certain leaders should take example from this guy.
> Why should you be able to buy two flights from X to Y when you canceled only one?

Not all flights from X to Y are created equal. Some are direct, some connect. Some are at more convenient times. Some are on nicer aircraft. Some have more empty seats.
> Mortality rate in Italy was high only for people 65 and up.

Part of the reason mortality rates are so high among the elderly, though, is the fact that they are de-prioritized in cases when there is a scarcity of beds, ventilators, or other stuff. Doctors are forced to concentrate efforts on people with better survival chances, which are typically the youngest.

> home confinement has increased a lot once they understood not everyone was in need of medical attention

This is a double-edged sword though. My father has some contacts in the health service near Bergamo (he was a nurse himself etc etc), and he was told some cases don't even make it to the hospital - they go from cough to full-on pneumonia in less than two hours, and die on the ambulance. They now refer to late afternoon as the critical shift, when the stream of intakes spikes and ensuring they are all treated becomes extremely hard. A lot of these cases might have been saved had they been monitored full-time in a hospital.
Train is probably no better although they could add more cars to seat people farther apart
Norway have done a similar thing, except they reinvested their oil income and use that to find social services for the population, prevents the money being pissed up the wall by one or two generations. I think there will be free loaders, but those exist now. Anywhere a welfare scheme exists someone will want to take advantage of it. but not the majority. I don't know the solution but I think it's worth investigating.
Great read! I agree, 7-zip is amazing. You can open all kinds of files for exploration using it.
"This is what always happens in a free market"

Non market mechanisms dominate the world, and they aren't just government regulation.

People go into teaching and nursing out of altruism, not because it pays well. People preserve historic collections because they love them.

Nepotism is rife in many organisations, connections and 'who you know' is hugely important, half of Russia's GDP is in corruption, and so are most countries in the world.

In most markets consumers don't actually understand the product they are buying, whether that's technology or consultancy, and cannot competently compare two products and tell which one is better.

Efficient market is a dream, and you should not be dogmatic about it.
People should also be reminded that nobody forces them to buy any product for a price that they personally find to be unreasonable.
I hate to be that guy but you're probably referring to the Hippocratic oath, although I wonder what a Socratic oath would entail :-P
He didn't just share facts, he expressed an extreme personal opinion.
People in China tend to save more than living paycheck to paycheck like Americans.
Apple did this with tiny rotating hard drives before they announced the first iPod. The essentially bought the next 1.5 years worth. This helped the iPod from having serious competition while they ramped marketing.
From the first article about this he was selling it on Amazon for $8 to $70 per bottle.

So yeah, apology not accepted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.
> Those retailers aren't going to pull it themselves and shove it backwards up the distribution chain to be redistributed to storm country -- that's just not how distribution works.

Cross docking is exactly this and is common in supply-chain logistics, most famously at WalMart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-docking
> at zero risk of dying from COVID

You're conflating the recorded fatality rate with the actual possibility for fatality, which is much higher.

The fatality rate is low among people 60 and under because the ones who suffer severe cases can reliably survive it with the aid of ventilators and round-the-clock medical care.

However, if the virus spreads enough to have a huge number of infections all at once, many of those severe cases that would have otherwise survived will die, because there's just not enough medical equipment or doctors for them.

See Italy, where the fatality rate is at a whopping 7.3% percent (much higher than even the 4.9% at the heart of the outbreak in Wuhan), because no measures were taken to control the spread until too late and so parts of the country have completely run out of ICU beds.
Bag your own stuff? Pay with a card? Use self-checkout? Have your groceries delivered?
How is this virus related? Can anyone confirm this is new behavior or that there is not an explanation?
He's selling things retail, he's a retailer, the fact he doesn't have a license for the retail business adds to the charges.
This is a problem that the city already faces during every school vacation and for 2.5 months every summer. Surely there must already be some functioning solutions. (For example, many NYC schools serve breakfast and lunch to children under 18 throughout the summer. I'm not sure how the lack of childcare is handled during the summers.)
Will they still require you to move to SF?

If not, and if it works out well, I can imagine this being a nail in the coffin for the Bay Area bubble.
I've got a friend who's been profitably running a small business for a couple years who's pretty concerned. If they can't open, without relief for rent and loan payments, the place probably goes under in short order. (And it's a bummer to me because the business is unique for the area and has built up a nice community of regular patrons who won't have any real alternatives.)
He's speculating on a commodity, it's just not corn or potash.

Nobody expects that there's going to be an acute, worldwide shortage of wheat and that it will be unavailable anywhere.

Demand goes up, prices go up, same as anything.

Now - this kind of arbitrage has very, very limited value for society (there's an economic argument for price clearing), so we can think of it as 'gouging', but sometimes this is not the case.

I think at this scale, price arbitraging for normal household goods provides zero net value (in fact negative value because it involves work and effort without net value creation). Amazon, Wallmart etc. should probably clamp down on this because it's their customers who pay by having middlemen in between.
Because that's what they're worth. Live by the market, die by the market.
I'm shocked at how this forum has changed its mind on COVID-19 in the past week. This makes me happy that y'all are taking this more seriously.
I wonder how this will affect the level of candor at the famous dinner discussions?

I imagine that the risk of being caught secretly recording them would be higher in person than sitting at home on a video call.
> “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

Oops.

I'd love a follow-up. "What, exactly, did you think talking to a reporter would result in?
Isopropyl is one of the simplest chemicals in the universe and a big bottle is 1.88 at Walmart. They will never, ever run out of this stuff, even if people start hosing off their cars with it.

The whole thing is a joke. This guy was exploiting idiots and the irredeemably lazy. Big deal.

But what a fool for him to talk to the media. Maybe he thought he'd get sympathy for losing money because Amazon shut him down...?
While I agree the notation is a bit weird, I disagree that there is any standard notation for types. The Python docs in particular fail for exactly one of the things I like about TFA - it tells you the type of the output of each function in its angle-bracketed style.

Take, for example, the definition of the operation s[i:j] in the Python docs: the result is "slice of s from i to j". Is that the same type as the input? Is it an iterator? No information.

I doubt most people are confused about the output, but a reference is specifically for people who are uncertain about how a function works.
What about price gouging by drug manufacturers? When will the government investigate that? Why is one type of price gouging accepted as capitalism and another type not?

"In 2001, Acthar sold for about $40 a vial. Today: more than $40,000. An increase of 100,000 percent."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-problem-with-prescription-d...
In the story it mentions that. Older trees are better then younger trees.
It's also ignoring the fact that no one can be sick from any other cause during the next nine months because hospitals will be at capacity.