skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a profitable activity if there is scarcity in the future, regardless of whether I can influence that scarcity.

smallnamespace's made the same point as I made in the portion you quoted, but made it much more clearly:

"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!"
Interesting that they use the mean of the absolute value instead of root-mean-square as in other sinusoidal applications (63.7% of the peak value vs. 70.7% for RMS).

RMS has all sorts of interesting properties, being directly proportional to effects that result from the square of the quantity being measured such as force on the connecting rods or acceleration of the piston, but mean piston speed is easier to calculate from familiar quantities to an automotive engineer like stroke and RPM. I wonder if engine longevity is actually proportional to mean piston speed or RPM, it would be easy to mistake the 7% difference given all the confounding factors...
> His work is a criticism of Adam Smith's theories

Marx's work is a continuation of Adam Smith that the subject of inquiry was political economy (not "economics"), that value derived from labor and so on.

Modern establishment economics is a criticism of Adam Smith in that value comes from labor, that the study of the economy is political, etc.
I think the argument being made is that these individuals are creating scarcity as a byproduct of their intended goal, not as a goal in itself. If they wanted to profit from the scarcity they induced, they would attempt to resell the items they bought in the original locales rather than at online venues.
Not as often as driving over a horse poop when out and about in the countryside. And I’m not complaining about it.

But when I’m there, I never really feel comfrtable walking around. It’s full of people on bicycles who don’t give a damn about pedestrians.
100 Things to Know
Shower thought: if you can’t actually cook and improvise but are used to have access to industrially prepared food, being prepared to stay at home for a few weeks is way more complicated.
his wife is also talking about family planning in Africa, a difficult but earth-changing subject that politicians won't touch
"actively decide not to buy any that day" and not wipe your rear end after using the toilet? If you're out of paper towels or soap and the cost is 50x the usual you're just gonna not wash your hands? Think through the consequences here. Not everyone can afford to stockpile stuff like this in advance, some people live paycheck-to-paycheck. I've got a couple weeks of paper products in reserve typically, not 2 months worth - and if the timing is bad I might be down to a week's supply. Thankfully in this case I restocked just before things got bad but if this lasts I'll have to deal with shortages just like everyone else. I'm actually out of hand soap refills...
Hear you- it sounds like you have a sufficiently rich mental model that the reports "make sense"- some semantics/meaning are conveyed. They might even "sound obvious"- why is X even news? Etc.

That's a tough place to be- on the usual models of learning curves for a practitioner that's right at the edge of transitioning out of beginner. A lot of people who are "book smart" are here.

In order to learn more, to actually get out of beginner stage, brains need to practice. They need to DO. You would need to find a problem to work on that causes you to produce not just consume.

Does that make sense? Hope that's helpful and not offensive, all comments intended to be positive/growth mindset/supportive.
How many watts of electricity could this make, if it were removed from the car, and made to power an electric generator?

Would there be any efficiencies compared to say, an ordinary gasoline piston engine with a camshaft, driving that generator?

I'm guessing yes... which leads to the next question:

Would a diesel motor (again, to drive a generator) be more effective than this one which uses gasoline?

Why or why not?
Advice from a doctor who studied coronaviruses for 50 years
If you watch the press conferences, the main point is not deliberately infecting the population (that's a side effect), rather making sure the NHS can better look after those more vulnerable to the virus. A lot of it is to do with how long they think (rightly or wrongly) people will obey a quarantine situation. If you haven't already, I'd advise watching the most recent press conference (they're on YouTube uncut)
Being an English speaker living in The Netherlands, I rely heavily on Google Translate. Works near perfect for formal/semi-formal writing. Short form sentences & phrases (as you might find in casual emails), not so much.
>This guy needs a visit from the IRS

Why do you immediately jump to the assumption that he's going to engage in tax fraud? Or are you wishing for extrajudicial punishment when someone does a "bad" thing that's not illegal?
And how do the "poor" benefit from an empty shelf?

This argument about poor people not being able to afford TP at 2x, 3x, or even higher prices doesn't make any sense to me. Especially when we are talking about a very short term situation. It isn't like all the TP factories have suddenly vanished. People will adjust, even poor people.

Letting the price float is the best way to quickly extinguish the irrational behavior. Preventing the price from increasing is the best way to ensure a longer period of shortage (or complete unavailability).
Isn't what the UK is doing effectively flattening the curve that everyone is talking about. It's a fairly contagious virus that many people will get it seems no matter what. The goal is to control how fast the population works through the virus, but even a flattened curve still assumes a large number of infections.
> Most of the incoming light is being focused on a plane that the sensor isn't on. Indeed at 1200mm it has an equivalent f-number of 555 requiring some insanely bright lighting and long exposure time to get a good image.

I'm don't think that's why the lens has such a high f-number at large focal lengths. Rather, it's simply because they only manufactured a very small (1.8mm diameter) lens. Given the exotic shape and manufacturing of the lens I'm not surprised it's so small, and I suspect scaling this to larger lenses would be a very serious barrier to practicality. It's also not clear why they chose that particular focal range, so there may be some other issues I didn't notice. But on the whole this is very interesting work!

The fundamental observation (not caring about the phase of light at the focal plane) that makes this work is more interesting to me tbh. The authors' previous work uses a similar technique to produce a thin, single element apochromatic lens -- something that normally takes 3 thick lenses and expensive glass formulations.
What does it say about society in general when younger generations collectively despise older generations to the point were they don't care, even find it funny that they are under threat from a deadly virus. For too long old men haven't planted any trees they wont sit under, instead they've harvested the trees for short term profits to invest in their property portfolios.
If we break down the challenge, we can start having an immediate impact. Here’s how:

- Now: there's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available. Trump recently said that Google was working on it, but it turns out not to be the case (they are weeks away from an MVP that would only cover the SF Bay Area). I propose we start by solving this problem.

- Next: What is the scope of COVID-19 infection? Today, the CDC doesn't have an accurate count of the # of COVID-19 tests that have been performed because they don't have a way to collect that info from the growing number of labs that are performing the tests. Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many people have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times. We could solve this problem by crowdsourcing that information directly from individuals.

- Next +1: We need to know where the sickest people are right now, and predict where they could be in the near future. This is crucial information for healthcare providers (like me) and public health officials alike. Without this information in hand, it's virtually impossible to know where to direct resources (like doctors, nurses, ventilators, medical supplies, testing equipment, etc.). We need to be able to track demand AND supply in real-time --> this is the point at which the project starts shaping itself into an Uber-like platform.

- Next +2: Enable individuals to post offers to help and for others to request assistance. This would enable individuals with medical training to help meet the need. It would also enable everyone to help in other ways, like delivering food for the elderly.
Material for teaching using tracing and observability on FreeBSD
I think the statement is "most NYC commutes are longer than Amsterdam commutes, so chances are lower that each commute could be done by bicycle".

My commute would be almost six miles by bicycle. I'm not especially looking to replace the subway with a bike trip.
They can and they do - I live in SF and it happens constantly. Especially with all the shitty cars with hypersensitive car alarms, so you get the double impact of motorcycles obnoxiously roaring by at 120db and then a few minutes of car alarms. Makes me nearly homicidal to realize how selfish people can be.
Less trips to the supermarket, less chances to get infected.
Thanks for the direct link! I can't find any vimeo reference in the page source, perhaps it depends on country or adblocker or whatever.

I guess part of my confusion stemmed from mixing up the camshaft and the crankshaft (the former seems relatively straightforward to replace in a conventional motor, the latter not so much...) O:)
Maybe that's why its not crazy to consider conspiracy theories about the nature of this virus. It would be beneficial for humanity in the long term to shift e.g. from cyberwarfare defense spending to biowarfare defense. The side benefits of the first are at best marginal , while a massive shift of investment to biodefense would be life-changing
Disc brakes are almost completely pointless for commuter bicycles

Ignore this comment. Year-round commuting is the prime reason to buy a bike with disc brakes. Is it overkill not to burn through a set of rims each winter? Is it overkill to have decreased stopping distance in the rain?

Anyone want to go back to drum brakes on their “commuter” car? Yeah, didn’t think so.
Doesn't it? AFAIK it's illegal to have a noisy muffler, at least here (but it's not enforced, much to people's dismay).
Because of this, I wonder if cycling actually increases health risks for people.
Works for smaller teams and smaller # of hosts. I would say that it would start getting harder with 5-6 people and > 100 hosts. But for small stuff, it is the most awesome thing in the world. I had a structure I used a long time ago (https://github.com/chrisgo/fabric-example) but have broken it up now differently in the last 2 years (looks more like Ansible)

... and peer pressure (which is probably not a good reason)
Wouldn't this qualify as datacenter use and as such violate the consumer nvidia driver EULA?
You are generally correct that a 4,500lb car will do 5x the road wear per mile than a 3,000lb vehicle. (Although some studies find damage increases closer to a power of 3 not 4). However it’s extremely important to ask... 5 times what number?

The cost per mile in terms of road damage is mainly a function of axle weight and designed load and volume of the road surface. The damage per mile per ESAL (Equivalent Single Axle Load) can vary from $0.03/ESAL-mile to $5.90/ESAL-mile when you exceed the design load of the road. Low volume roads will have a higher ESAL because of natural wear exceeding use-based wear.

Since passenger cars will never exceed the design load of a road, this is not a factor in our analysis (but it’s a very big deal for heavy trucks, particularly on rural roads). Since low volume road wear is predominantly due to natural causes and not road-use we should probably exclude those as well.

Just to put this in perspective, the cost per mile per ESAL of $0.09 (a relatively high volume road that operates within vehicle weight design spec), gives us road damage for a light passenger car (3,000 pounds) or 0.0002 ESAL which equates to $1.80 per 100,000 miles.

Increasing to an ESAL of 0.001 results in a wear cost of $9.00 per 100,000 miles.

Basically all road wear comes from heavy trucks with an ESAL > 1. This is compounded when those trucks exceed the design load of the road, which can add another up to 500x multiplier on the damage per mile driven.

The damage/road wear cost for passenger vehicles is a barely even a rounding error by comparison.

Based on this simple analysis, I do not believe it is at all justified to claim that Teslas (or EVs in general) have “road-destroying heavy batteries.”

[1] - https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design...

[2] - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/tswstudy/TSWwp3.pdf
We are using stripe's api in the frontend to generate a token and then it to our backend in order to generate the "customer" and the "charge". Our backend is on Rails so we are using stripe's ruby gem.

Any advice?
Yeah but there is a non-zero portion of the population that may choose to use a home-brew solution instead of seeking proper medical care. Sure, we want to give people tools to be self-sufficient, but we don't want billybob hooking grandma up to the vacuum cleaner to save money.
> I honestly have no idea what that Tweet is trying to say.

It's a thread (click the tweet).

> The UK government explicitly used the phrase "herd immunity" in a press conference, so that seems to be an explicit objective - even though the mutability of the virus is not yet known.

Did you watch the full press conference, where the phrase 'herd immunity' was described in context with the main objective, namely to ensure the NHS can cope with demand over the next several months.

If you haven't, I'd recommend you do; they're uncut on YouTube. They explain their strategy better than I could here.
You know who else is anecdotally mistreated? Anyone. The brief piece builds its case on two anecdotes to claim general problems for a class of people.
Copy-on-Write in C++ and Rust
Modeling Progressive Fibrosis with Pluripotent Anti-Fibrotic Small Molecule
Agree with other commenters... this article is criminally stupid.

Author... Stop writing articles in an effort to appease your ego. You are contributing to the problem.

I have a PhD in chemical engineering and worked in biotechnology off and on for several years: aseptic filling, clean room design, microbiology contamination mitigation, bio-processing design) and I come from a family with a lot of medical doctors. Even though I have a fairly good grasp of our situation, you won't see me writing any articles about the pandemic because I'm not an expert.

Among many errors in the article, you can't blindly apply statistics from China or other parts of the world. It is a question of "data sample size" relative to the "actual population"; as a statistician, the Author should know that. The sample size, relative to population, is very small and highly skewed (mostly testing people who are sick). The question is: how many people came in contact with the virus vs. how many people got sick vs. how many people got really sick? This we don't know... China would have needed to randomly test a large percentage of the otherwise healthy population in Wuhan to figure this out BUT both PCR and immune antibody tests would need to be used (to my knowledge, these didn't exist in bulk a month ago)... and then there is difficult to know uncertainties in the percentage of false positives and false negatives.

As an extreme example, what if 3-5 million people in Wuhan had contacted the virus but only a small portion (~100-300k) became ill enough to seek medical care and get tested and about 3-4k died? That would complete change the statistics around the severity of the virus. Given the contagious nature of the virus and delay between community transmission starting and 'the recognition that there was a problem", the virus was almost certainly more widespread in Wuhan than a mere 100-300k people.... the question is 'how widespread'. We don't know the answer. But the more widespread it was, the less severe the severity/mortality rate would look.

Also, any comparison of statistical sample sets between countries should take into consideration other factors not included in the sample set: population density, severity of air pollution, percentage of people who smoke and how much, and other factors which negatively contribute to respiratory and immune system health (e.g. low-level heavy metal poisoning?, vitamin deficiencies?, etc.)
Strange, I asked about this a few days ago and people thought it was a bad idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542494

“ If you’re under 30 without any other health issues, you should be fine? Might not realize you have it?
I wonder if it would be easier to create a low dosage vaccine for younger people, thus creating a bit of a firewall so it doesn’t spread as rapidly.
I know nothing about medicine so this may be silly.”
Or, worse, and common in classic VB, ON ERROR RESUME NEXT. Which just skips the line that errored.
So let's assume that building immunity is even a possibility even though there is no evidence to support this while there exists substantial evidence to the contrary (people getting reinfected)?

Not happy to be living in the UK if that's really the plan.
And I directly refuted your argument and this is all you have to say.

I didn't even get into the laughable aspect of how 1/7th of the planet's population still lives _without electricity_.

There's countries that do have electricity where their energy infrastructure and access is unstable (e.g., Moldova).

Most of those places can get some burnable fuel, but I'm sure they'd just love your argument that batteries will soon be the only game in town.

The idea of ICE being a technological dead end is a spoiled person's fantasy.
“Visible mending,” fast fashion, and disposable culture
I imagine US machinery being nonstandard with the rest of the world, given the imperial units
Surely it's travel _from_ an area with high levels of infection that's important to stop?
And the problem is that they put loud mufflers on purpose. The stock mufflers aren't very noisy, or at least they're as silent as a 16k RPM engine can be.
If a conservative 20% of 70 million people get a disease where a conservative 10% need to be in intensive care (NB people who need intensive care tend to need 3 weeks treatment) that is 0.2x0.1x70,000,000 = 1.4 million intensive care beds.

My parents will be some of those that need the beds. They won't get them. They will die.

In the nicest most civil way I am asking you to think about your words and actions and how they might impact others. If you want to express your lack of care for the lives of our loved ones to people you meet in real life you should be very careful how you do so.
NPR did an interview with the owner of one of the last companies to make surgical masks in the US. He said that during the last panic they ramped up production and just as the new machines started coming online demand evaporated. It very nearly destroyed his company. Ramping up production is not an instantaneous thing and doing it without a clear customer for the increased product is an incredible business risk.
I posted the call to action here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577611

There was a word limit, so I had to comment on my own post to share full details. Sorry, not sorry HN mods ;-)
I'm saying it's not even an extreme, in that I don't believe what people are calling "immutable infrastructure" includes that.

If your biggest objection to an idea is that you can make up a silly thing that sounds like it might be related, I'm not understanding why we need to have this discussion. I'd like to focus on real issues, thanks.
Are you using cloudflare dns? Not being able to access that site with cloudflare dns is a known issue.
Assholes and annoying people will find a way to skirt regulations.

The more pressing thing is that if you keep asking for a big brother, don’t be surprised when you get one.
The point is that designing interfaces and technology in general should not assume that everyone is a "digital native." It's only a matter of time until the entire world goes online and with that comes a lot of startup opportunity.
Is it the sound of the engine, or of the exhaust?
Do they officially sell user data or show ads to users?
Do you really think that you wouldn't kill a child if you crashed into one on a motorcycle, or that the visibility on your motorcycle makes that outcome impossible?

Car safety for occupants and pedestrians has improved dramatically over the last few decades. The same cannot be said for motorcycles.
That does sound like a "you're holding it wrong" issue. As one of the Go team members pointed out, defining a separate module is not a hack, but the intended way of doing it.

How would a partial checkout help?
Yeah it seems like the tech could be used to target efficiency instead of performance and perhaps improve the small engines in hybrid cars.
If you Google "buy ICU ventilator" there are tons of sources purportedly selling them, no idea which ones are legit though.
Not by more than 1% or so. Or a few percent at most. If Africa totally melts down, perhaps more.
They should be charging increased prices. They should have charged increased prices the moment demand went up (like Uber surge pricing). That would have snuffed out the speculators right quick.

One reason they don't do this is because of the attitudes illustrated in the comments here. People irrationally believe that surge pricing in this case is wrong and the negative response by their customers outweighs the benefits of surge pricing. I believe that attitude about surge pricing is wrong and it is one reason why we end up with shortages. It is a terribly self-defeating attitude that exacerbates the situation.
LinkedIn Marketing, What Is and How To
> Would you like to refute or respond to this plot?

"Flattening the Curve" is not and cannot be the entire story. It's a process to reduce the stress on the health services, but what seems clear from all the numbers is that the health services will be overwhelmed, we're just trying to reduce the number of concomitant deaths.

> But "flattening the curve" means allowing exponential growth ...

The cumulative number of cases will, barring exceptional intervention, be a logistic function, and the number of cases "in progress" will more-or-less be the derivative. And for a logistic function the first part is more-or-less an exponential.

So whether you "Flatten the Curve" or not, the first phase is always effectively exponential, and since containment is now effectively impossible, it's inevitable that most people (they're suggesting 80%) of people will eventually have been infected.

The way to reduce the catastrophe is to make the rate of infection as low as possible, thus stretching the logistic function and thereby reducing the maximum of the derivative.

That's my understanding.
In Australia we have strong consumer protection, but not for changing your mind. It's a courtesy most retailers offer but you clearly don't deserve it when you realise you don't need 2000 tools of tp.
> Many actions have multiple motives.

That's what I'm saying. And this specific way of thinking is focusing on the worst of the motives and treating them as if they were the main motives, the most important motives, the most worthwhile motives to observe and point out, maybe the only motives worth mentioning.