skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but understanding what the thing is, that's part of the buying decision right? I have no clue what https://www.saltstack.com/ is about.

How do I get from this:

> Drive IT security into the 21st century. Amplify the impact of your entire SecOps team with global orchestration and automation that remediates security issues in minutes, not weeks.

to "it's a provisioning tool for servers, like ansible but faster"?
It's not a matter of intelligence or complacency. Humans are just obligate social animals. Most people can't voluntarily shut themselves away from the world, in the same way that a depressed person can't be happy or someone with ADHD can't sit down and focus.
> State is always the enemy in technology.

Except that state and its manipulation is usually the primary value in technology.

> I can't even imagine managing hundreds of servers whose state is unpredictable at any moment and they can't be terminated and replaced with a fresh instance for fear of losing something.

Yes, that sounds awful. That's why we have backups and, if necessary, redundancy and high availability.
Which would be the case even without a sales tax?

However, while no sales tax on hand sanitizers is hardly going to be of a measurable impact for an individual, when you're hoarding to squeeze people in crisis, no sales tax makes for a nice 'bulk discount'.
Setting a price on something is absolutely a form of speech, yes, in the sense that the whole point of free markets is communication / price discovery.

It's specifically a form of speech in which richer people can speak things that poorer people can't.
Agreed on both counts.

Experts had been warning about this. See for example Bryan Walsh’s article in TIME in 2017, very explicitly titled The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic [1]. That’s not really a black swan. It was just a question of when. Note also that some countries (eg Singapore, Taiwan) are reasonably well prepared.

Next, Taleb is smart, but overrated (most of all by himself). His books can be summarised in a few paragraphs. IIRC, someone said to Murray Gell-Mann once that “nobody is as smart as you think you are” - that applies to Taleb.

[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-n...
Even in cities like San Francisco[1] and Seattle[2] where all employees must receive paid sick leave, demand fell off a cliff (understandably!). There are great arguments for offering and/or legislating paid sick leave, but if it's made any impact on demand, the impact is too small to matter.

[1]: https://sfgov.org/olse/paid-sick-leave-ordinance-pslo
[2]: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/LaborStandards/...
>The argument that the threat of gouging increases the motivation to hoard is basic economics.

But the ability to increase price freely also decreases actual hoarding, because when stores see a massive increase in demand, they'll be incentivised to increase prices, which will deter unnecessary purchases.
The U.S. federal government had a significant amount of control and formerly had the sole resources to deal with issues like this. Ironic that the sole raison d'être one of those resources was in mitigating and coordinating responses to events just like the one we find ourselves in.

Destroying that resource is squarely on turmp.

We've been watching the tearing down of the federal government since the Reagan years. We've witnessed the slow evisceration of everything outside of the department of defense.

The federal government could have and should have led a coordinated response to this. But now that the conservative dream of having a federal government big enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub is in reach, it's nearly impossible to.

This is the consequence of forty years of coordinated effort to hollow out the federal government from within.

States have very limited resources at their disposal. There's simply no way that they can coordinate the kind of response needed for an epidemic that knows no borders.
Coronavirus-stats CLI has new summary command
Essentia+Mattress+Savings+20%+Off
The test kits from SK cannot be used because of supply, approval and logistical issues. So each country pretty much need to get them made in their own countries because of red tape
I have an MTV (manually triggered ventilator) in my O2 kit for a scuba diving emergencies. Of course my O2 supply is only good for about 15 minutes. Would this be of any assistance while waiting for an ENT to arrive?
Everyone serious knew it was coming in January. Once it's declared a pandemic, it's already arrived. People have to stop pretending that "no one could have known". Everybody knew. We were all yelling about it at the time.
PCR and high-throughput are two things, testing kits are for PCR and aren't very accurate.
I think the author ends up not using it on ChromeOS because "the android app just crashes for me on ChromeOS". Probably they end up using it on native Android or iOS?
That’s quite a different position, compared to your initial dismissal of dissent as a right wing conspiracy.

(I say this as someone who is far to the left of V, FI and MP, and considers Nyheter Idag to be propaganda, but that doesn’t change the fact that Anders Tegnell actually gave that asinine answer about “jämlikhet” in an interview)
#testing2 ?
I would rather my teenager have a digital addiction than a drug addiction.
Price gouging is the free speech equivalent of yelling fire in a full movie theater. You are harming people for your own enjoyment.
It’s hard to tell if that’s a misinformed jab at plastic straw bans or you’re deliberately drawing attention to the misconception that the ban is due to global warming.

Either way, in a time of misinformation it’s worth clarifying:

“The main reason cited for eliminating plastic straws is their negative impact on our oceans and marine wildlife. Plastic in the ocean is a huge problem — look no further than trash island, or the viral video of a turtle suffering as a result of ocean pollution, to understand that. But of all the plastic that ends up in the ocean, straws make up only four percent of that waste.”

https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/why-plastic-straws-are...
I think anybody who worked in that area and was honest would have said the same thing.
The poster make a good point, bunch of papers is not actual progress, huge citation rings and mutual salary justifications is a big issue with these papers. An actual progress probably would be something like : effective cure for a disease found.
These might be good books, but I doubt they’ll answer OP’s questions.
Roche is a Swiss company [0]. My neighbor here in Canton Zürich works at a lab that uses these machines. She's been testing coronavirus, and she's having to go in on Saturdays now to deal with the backlog. Not Sundays though. Labor on Sundays cost an arm and a leg in Switzerland.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann-La_Roche
Full title:

Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We're not ready. (2015) [video]

Also watch: What Bill Gates is afraid of: https://youtu.be/9AEMKudv5p0
So, from a "does the market optimize for good outcomes" perspective, that seems even worse - goods (that are already produced) get hoarded and sometimes they don't even sell. This seems like it's not accomplishing the goals very well.
> Whatever domain you're in, whatever interests you have- having something of a model of the financial machinery that basically underlies all human activity, both in the small and in the large, I would argue is super valuable.

What’s strange is I’m generally in favor of “staying informed”. But I typically skip most financial news. For example, looking at last week’s issue of The Economist, there are several articles in the finance section. I summarized these below, but my reaction to most is “yup, sounds like the logic I saw in my first-year econ class”.

Maybe my issue is that I rarely feel like I learn anything from these articles; they mostly read as applications of basic theory that might work. In this case, my read on finance is there’s a set of basic principles that explain most of the decisions made and then just beyond that lies an enormous set of more complex but also controversial material.

In contrast, I think of other areas as having a lot of “basic information” that I don’t know, with the controversial bits much further out. So if I’m trying to accumulate useful and relatively uncontroversial info, finance is not the best place.

(Those summaries:

1. interest rate cuts may not suffice to avert recession, governments may add in spending, tax cuts, and credit to banks to increase liquidity

2. fear has led to price increases for safe haven assets like gold, bonds, and stable currencies and drops for economic activity trackers like oil and copper; share price changes have varied depending on debt levels and how different companies are expected to react to societal slowdowns

3. might be a good idea to pivot between stocks and bonds as market rises or falls; downturns can be opportunities if your horizon is long enough

4. if the economy slows, how should banks deal with reduced payment abilities, especially when they may be legally required to not have too many bad-looking liabilities?

5. something about corporate bond trading [this one was most confusing]

6. some special bonds offer yields to investors with the catch that if some defined disaster strikes the investors will not get money back; these bonds have not yet been useful to covid because of stringent conditions on duration and impact of the disaster before payout, and complications of prevention (countries who respond well may get paid less)

7. covid has particularly hurt commodities markets, and by extension economies that rely on commodities (like Saudi Arabia))
The price of an item is a very blunt instrument. It doesn't distinguish between producers and scalpers/hoarders.

Both of those parties are equally incentivized to produce stock and sell it if the price goes up. From the point of view of a potential buyer, toilet paper straight from the factory, and toilet paper from the guy next door who bought some ahead of time are equally good.

> This is a case of consumers attempting to create small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit.

To a very good approximation, the marginal impact of any hoarders on the scarcity of a product is zero. Hoarders are not trying to drive scarcity themselves, they are trying to buy a product now because they think the price will rise, but they're not trying to make the price rise by buying it. The distinction is important!

> The price gouging law is not bringing toilet paper to levels where the producer of the product is taking some kind of operating loss or even reduction in profit of any kind.

This completely ignores the fact that the cost to produce a product is not a fixed amount, but rather that higher prices induce producers to make more product sooner.

Here's the crux of the issue: when supply is judged to be sufficient, nobody will hoard. When the supply of an item in the short term is in doubt, one of three things happen:

0) The price does not change, but the item goes out of stock. Some proportion of people are unable to procure the item, independently of their need for it.

1) Hoarders step in and cause the price of an item to rise. 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.

2) The government steps in and does the distribution directly, e.g. via rationing. Here, the government decides who needs the item the most.
Half the problem was a lack of tests, you can't declare a pandemic until people have tested positive so waiting for that is rather self-defeating.
> There is not a significant decrease in production.

And if there are, it's too soon to feel the impacts.

And who knows how long it takes for TP to switch from commercial/industrial sales to residential sales. People are spending far more time at home instead of work/school/malls/restaurants/vacations.

But if Chinese pollution studies are to be believed, we could be feeling a lot of shortages over the coming months.

I'm not worried TP, but I am about pharma APIs.
The WHO did declare it a “Global Health Emergency” in January: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-51319967/coronavirus-decla...

The “Pandemic” designation wasn’t appropriate back then because it just wasn’t a pandemic at that time. They very clearly said it was on its way to becoming one.

I’m starting to suspect this griping about the WHO is somehow motivated. People tend not to be this willfully stupid unless politics are involved.
How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction
This isn't even the same thing. Roche Cobas machines are industrial scale equipment used at hospitals to identify pathogens.

If a hospital is equipped with a Cobas and they have a Cobas test reagent/plan for a given virus, they can automate the testing process.

Other vendors in this space are doing the same thing. Abbott, Siemens, Biomerieux, etc. These companies are the backbone of clinical labs, not just in the US but globally.
what's your website? and what's your advantage to twilio?
Right. Thanks for clarifying.

To clarify further, it doesn't actually test for the virus. It tests for DNA / RNA presence. It's a proxy.

Not being critical, etc. Simply nailing down loose ends.
I work in tech support, and this advice directly makes my job harder. Making error states impossible is good, but you can't always do this. Please continue to log.

For problems that are difficult or impossible to reproduce, logs are all I have. Tracing and metrics and structured error reporting only get set up in places where errors are expected.
>We would be doing our entire society a severe disservice if our solution to this problem is simply "create so much toilet paper that people can't hoard it." The fuck are we going to do with that much toilet paper.

If people want that much toilet paper, the only solution that's going to satisfy them is producing all the toilet paper they want. Society is just an aggregate of people, and if enough of them want for whatever reason a shit-tonne of toilet paper, it would be doing them a disservice to stop the market from giving them what they want.
The WHO is a coordination organization. They don't do health policy directly. And FWIW: Roche is a Swiss multinational.

This test is probably good. It's certainly good that it got rapid approval and reflects the fact that the US executive branch has turned the corner and is now taking things seriously (seven weeks later than it should have, but at this point recriminations will have to wait -- we have more serious problems).

Whether more testing should have been available much earlier (obviously it should have) isn't really relevant to this particular test product.
"In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning – a wake-up call – to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic"

He said this in 2015. No one listened.
Excessive and unjustified seem quite subjective.

Not subjective is exporting to Japan.
This is applicable to any language with a sufficiently big ecosystem, but the thought is sound.
And that eBay btch az couple that is buying up Lyso wipes and reselling them on eBay for 3x
Reading this thread would indicate that some people still don't realize it now.
There are many RT-PCR LDTs. It does not take very much to create a real-time RT-PCR LDT for COVID-19; two weeks ago the CDC posted a comprehensive description of the process on their website, but it was not a secret before then. All you need is a clinical-grade RT-PCR machine, synthesized primer/probe DNA (which many labs are equipped to do), and quality reagents.

The difference here is that the Roche instrument is pre-approved for clinical use both (1) in the US and (2) outside "high complexity" CLIA labs; the instrument is already widely deployed to hospital labs; and the instrument is highly automated compared to the basic 96-well RT-PCR machine, with a robotic stage that allows it to run thousands of samples per day with less manual work.

The WHO does not have a massive stockpile of complete test kits, and to my knowledge the countries that have scaled up testing are not relying on the WHO for anything but information. Any kits the WHO provides would need to run on an existing RT-PCR machine anyway.
I see the incremental piece as a dev-time bonus rather than something to try to leverage much in production— it lets you iterate more quickly against an already-there target, but that target is still basically pristine in that any accumulated state is well understood. But that's very much not the case if you're trying to do an Ansible-driven incremental change against a machine that was deployed weeks or months earlier.

Even in the run-once case, though, I think there's a benefit to Ansible's role-based approach to modularization. And again for the dev scenario, it's much easier to run only portions of a playbook than it is to run portions of a shell script.

And finally, the diagnostics and overall failure story are obviously way better for Ansible, too.

Now, all this said, I do still go back and forth. For example, literally right now in another window I'm working a small wrapper that prepares clean environments to build patched Ubuntu kernels in— and it's all just debootstrap, systemd-nspawn, and a bunch of shell script glue.
>We would be doing our entire society a severe disservice if our solution to this problem is simply "create so much toilet paper that people can't hoard it."

If the people want to hoard toilet paper, who are we to deny them?
It's almost as if even nonprofits were interested in furthering their own agenda instead of rigorously seeking the truth in order to inform people.

Great comment, by the way. Thank you for the summary.
I know but already function prototyping of a DLL your write to get around language limitations isn't quite in the spirit of "things you can do in VB6". And technical you could do it in VB, but it was pulling teeth. I could just as easily write it in java and shell out to it. In VB it was hard pretty difficult. But you are completely correct, that's the right thing to do. I don't have bad feelings towards VB at all. Even today it was probably the most productive GUI development environment I've ever seen. But function prototypes returning structs / buffers? OnError GoTo <label>? Nostalgia only goes so far.

ps - noticed the employer on the profile. Powershell + .NET assemblies crushed it, and VB.NET was a far superior language (though, just like all the jvm languages have the same feel, all the IL based ones did and why not use C# at that point?)
Freedom of movement between municipalities makes most attempts at solving homelessness difficult if not impossible. NY simply shipped them out; cities with nice climates and access to welfare see a large influx from elsewhere. The harder a city works to solve the problem, the bigger the problem becomes.

A friend's mother- a chronic drug user who lived off of welfare- moves from state to state as she uses up whatever benefits they offer.

Not all people are in that situation or abuse the system like that, of course, but small countries with tighter borders have a much easier time dealing with a less mobile population of homeless and indigent.
That book is about securities trading and market microstructure; it has very little to do with what OP asked for.
What Bill Gates is afraid of (2015) [video]
How do you get data for walk-ins? Do restaurants share that with OpenTable, regardless of reservation? Is this so that you can remove the table from your inventory, or because you provide their "seating management" software?
Roche says the machines that these tests run "automate the preparation and analysis of samples for quantitative and qualitative nucleic acid testing using real-time PCR technology. "

https://www.dialog.roche.com/pk/en_us/products_and_solutions...
"There can't be life anywhere else... everywhere else is too cold for liquid iron, and iron is the only solvent with the unique properties required for..." :)
Care to share the answer you received?
* Use [...] error and business monitorings with alerts

* make logging an explicit part of your contracts

* Logging should be done right
> The government may support a lot of research but the government’s tax base derives from entrepreneurs who create a healthy free market.

Wouldn't the free market be healthier if the government stopped taxing those entrepreneurs so much?
Not just red tape. The advantage of this test is that it can be run on testing machines that US labs already have, which obviously isn't the case for something designed to run on South Korean machines.
If you limit your hosts to those having sufficiently grown up kids, or wait killing and invalidating them until they have, that can work fine.
Funnily, I wrote my take on this not too long back:

http://madhadron.com/posts/choosing_your_base_stack.html

Don't be distracted by FAANG scale. It's not relevant to most software and is usually dictated by what they started using and then deployed lots of engineering time to make work.

My suggestion is to figure out how you will manage your database server and monitoring for it. If you can do that, almost everything else can fall into line as needed.
>A lot of people in this thread are willfully ignoring some basic facts here. These products are being made in sufficient quantity for everyone. There is not a significant decrease in production. 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.

You neglected to mention that demand is increased. If it wasn't, then people would be hoarding lysol wipes and reselling them year round. But they're not, because it only makes sense when demand has increased. The lack of correct pricing by the stores is incentivizing hoarders, because, given the increased demand, they can make a profit on the difference people will buy it at vs the difference that they can acquire it. The stores should be pricing in this increased demand.

If this is indeed a case of people "creating small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit", then I would like to hear your explanation as to why they aren't doing it with toilet paper all the time. Why can I ever buy tp in the stores? Shouldn't a hoarder have taken it all and is charging double somewhere online?
Long time Linode user, moved to DO last year. I can confirm that the quality of support at Linode is really good- you interact with people that care and know their stuff, follow up and through.
My interactions with DO support left me with the impression that it was a generic outsourced service were “complaints” go to die or get killed with indifference
@glitchc is right though! He said “national emergency” and in January the only nation impacted was China ;)

(Even though it was obvious to anyone with half a brain in January that this thing was going to spread and become a global problem in no time... and that the WHO said as much, too.)
> But if the experts are imperfect and people are banned from helping themselves then there really is a problem.

Why?

You're comparing apples and oranges.

Perfect isn't a reasonable criteria. More effective than the average person is.
Is there any evidence consumers are stocking up to profit rather than just have enough so as to be able to avoid stores for some time ?
I was on a team that did the same, a long time ago. I’d be interested in a follow up if they ever ask for an update. Or can you push updates to them?

I’m also curious how you structured the changes. Does this work exist on a separate branch that you’d need to update/replicate in order to push an update? Or did you merge it to master, and will be living with that added complexity during everyday development? Or something else?