skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long time kernel/OS dev, right now is not the best time for kernel jobs. Majority of jobs are in user space (particularly Node/JS/React or aws/Kafka/Hadoop type) or at least the interviews are geared towards them. Most companies which used to maintain their own kernel have either outsourced it or use cloud where minimal kernel change is needed. Even if a company has kernel/OS team, majority of their work is to debug, patch, and port. Usually even they don't want to touch kernel much since, it is super critical component of product, debugging is really hard, getting company specific patch upstream is hard, etc.

Obviously, RedHat, SuSe Canonical, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, firmware and embedded companies will always need kernel people. However, the demand has really gone down and it is no more considered "elite" team within companies. Jobs are still there but obviously teams lean towards hiring experts and veterans of kernel instead of new comers. Moreover, once you get over simple char driver and few lines of patch type stuff, kernel development is extremely complex and hard. You wont get much support either as very likely your problem will be unique to your company's hardware. So, my take - learn and do kernel stuff on side but avoid getting into it full-time unless you are really passionate about it.
Ask HN: Project Management for freelancers and small agencies
Hi HN! I’m looking for an affordable project management tool as I am starting to start my own small agency. Thing is currently I’m using Notion but I’m growing tired because first, their mobile app is just horrible and second Notion is just too much work. I’m looking at Basecamp but the pricing is just ridiculous, $99 per month. What can you suggest please?
> While [all or nothing] is technically right

No, it's not. Have you done the math?
What I really want to know is if there's been a stairwell boom.

Stairwells usually have the freshest air because they have to be at a positive pressure.

And people with respiratory diseases will be taking the elevator. Possibly before they even feel other symptoms.

Not sure how often stairwells are cleaned though.
> I'm sure engineering viruses is a difficult task, but we know that they were doing this sort of thing already via funded public projects.

Yes, but what they did is different from (and much easier than) engineering a protein for a new function, because what they did was combine parts of different known virus strains together.

If that was the origin of SARS-CoV-2, you would see precise matches to the different origin strains for the different viral proteins. Now of course, the origin might be different secretly collected wild viruses, but at that point the only reason why that's a compelling story is that it sounds exciting...
Could you please explain why you think you'll have to move out of it soon?
Not a medical scientist at all, but I would assume any virus that is primarily respiratory to affect your lung function. I would bet the influenza does similar things. I don't know many people that return to their prior physiological strength after a bout with a serious virus.
> Have we lost all sense of humanity for the sake of our ideology?

There has been a lot of strict adherence to ideology in spite of critical thinking and logic going around lately.
If you've been paying much attention to how the populace is behaving you'd realize that the State is collectively our mom right now because people keep gathering in massive groups, showing up to work sick, touching their faces, and not washing their hands. Meanwhile employers insist that people show up to work sick and refuse to offer sick leave.

If left to their own devices the populace of this country would all succumb to plague. Who or what caused this situation is of course a matter of debate, as is the effectiveness of government response. In my country the response is pretty inept, but you can't exactly claim the free market would have solved it - it explicitly has not and people from industry have admitted as much.
I think the last sentence of the response is also important:

"all Whole Foods team members have access to the 2-weeks paid time off related to coronavirus that was announced for all Amazon employees."
FYI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic#Climate

The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Probably, higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are thought to have almost eliminated the north-south temperature gradient: temperatures were about the same across the planet, and about 10°C higher than today.
I don't think there's a big risk they'll have trouble selling ventilators
The service intervals aren't good on a lot of cars in this class. This is mitigated by a lot of them not being driven much.
> The UK has explicitly declared that its strategy is to let about 40 million people get it

Not exactly: https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/123882151552689766... (threaded)
Have you noticed that the shelves are empty? The price gouging laws don't help that situation they create that situation. How are empty shelves better than the items available for 2x, 3x or even 5x the regular price for a short period of time?
In New York, the "authorities" park in the bike lanes: https://twitter.com/copsinbikelanes
Very informative. Thank you
Thank you! I've seen that and I don't fully like it. I am not interested in deploying the configuration. I believe that generating configuration, versioning it, baking it, should be a totally separate process to deploying, rolling out, reverting etc

That's why IMO we should separate those. (:
"On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations."

Just to clarify, I think HN formatting ate a caret here (now dang can see in the dark!) and it's supposed to be "10 to the 21"; either that or floating point math is much harder than I remember.
We already know that it's possible to build an economy that is interest/usury free. It's been done before. It's just that the people benefiting from it today make easy money, while putting down the section of the population that needs it, ensuring continual slavery. Neither the democrats nor republicans dare bring this up.
However this age group is also predominantly conservative voting so they would not want to off their core support base.
Oh yes absolutely, I come from a family who work in jobs where WFH would be impossible so it's definitely something I'm not taking for granted.
Well they can only deliver so much pasta per day (the pasta factories are presumably already going full tilt) so the other option would be to massively raise the price... apparently not a popular option. You don't have to go back every day because there are 100s of other non perishable foods people aren't panic buying.
I agree with this guy, but he's not calling the shots. I'm talking about the UK government's position, and they were quite explicit about it.
This could actually be a really good solution to the maximum supported size of a Go module. If you place a go.mod in the root of your repo, then every file in the repo becomes part of the module. There's also a hardcoded maximum size for a module: 500M. Problem is, I've got 1G+ of vendored assets in one of my repos. I had to trick Go into thinking that the vendored assets were a different Go module[0]. Go would have to add support for this, but it would be a pretty elegant solution to the problem.

[0]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37724
Ideology is all fine and well until you start to deviate too much from reality. Then you hit a wall.

Example : there are cases of babies dying because their parents refused to give them animal milk.

Be pragmatic : you don't want to hurt animals, OK, but why not raising a couple chicken to get some eggs ?

Fwiw, my servers are Linux, but my desktop is Windows (it's not for lack of trying Linux as a desktop).
Ask HN: Can we build an open source platform that helps COVID-19 patients?
Many communities around the world are finding themselves in dire need of trained medical professionals and first-responders to deal with an influx of critically ill COVID-19 patients. Other areas need volunteers to work at food banks and shelters.

The demand for resources will wax-and-wane as local outbreaks are identified and then addressed. The supply of resources will likewise be dynamic. For example, there are many retired, semi-retired, and part-time doctors, nurses, and EMT staff who are able and willing to help. There’s currently no way for people to know where or when they are needed. The HN community can help.

The mission would be to build an open-source platform QUICKLY that could be used by communities around the world with little-to-no deployment overhead. If successful, the final product makes it possible for community leaders to partner with 1-2 developers that would clone the repo, customize a few parameters, and deploy instances in less than an hour.

I am a physician and an engineer with product development and full-stack experience, but I can’t do it alone. Any help is appreciated, particularly with the following immediate needs:

- Experienced PM who can flesh out the specs further and assume ownership of the roadmap. This would free me to focus my efforts on coordinating with public health officials, healthcare providers, and (if needed) to help care for patients on the front lines.

- DevSecOps lead with open-source experience and a reputation for QUICKLY building consensus involving key technical decisions. This would allow me to focus my technical contributions to those involving clinical data pipelines.

- Open-source community manager who would own all the engineering components that are not directly part of the product - this includes the project landing page, community rules, and offering assistance/guidance to developers around the world who are looking to deploy the platform.

Anybody interested in helping out?
Good reason to

1) be pleased that we haven't let price-gougers achieve regulatory capture yet

2) be frustrated that the predatory hospital/insurance ghouls have not been displaced by Medicare For All or an equivalent like they have in most other civilized nations
If these griefers blew out your "carefully optimized logistics network tuned via competition to keep prices down", then maybe there's a problem with it, and its ability to react to crisis or manipulation.

What specific rules of the free market did they break? Are you suggesting we should have anti-hoarding regulations imposed against the free market to keep these individuals out of it?
The UK was only testing mild cases where the person had travelled from one of the countries with a large number of cases or had contact with another confirmed case. The government now reckons that those cases are now substantially outnumbered by community transmission which hasn't been detected because it doesn't meet those criteria.
Demis Hassabis: The Power of Self-Learning Systems [video]
We have 10k trees per person, and growing. We subsidize farmers to keep the forests from taking over the landscape here.

Making ethanol from wheat or similar is bad, but from forest products in forest-covered countries seems ok.

I don’t think a number of hypercars makes any difference to the climate issue. For the rest of us the solution is probably BEVs
> I'm not claiming that manufacturers are at 100% capacity.

Cool. So that means that manufactures have spare capacity which they can use to make more product.

So, there is no real problem here with everyone buying a bit of extra toilet paper. Manufacturers, will just use that spare capacity, to fulfill that demand.

> the cause is something other than a need for the per-unit price to go up.

Ah, here is the mistake. The extra capacity that I am talking about, still costs extra money to activate. IE, running the factory for longer hours requires overtime pay, as one example.

That is how the increase in price would cause capacity to be used more, and for the local shortages to be solved faster.

Marginal cost generally increases in the short term, as temporary, but expensive methods are used to reactive unused capacity.

In the long term, cost per unit goes down, because of economics of scale. But in the short term, you have to do things like pay overtime pay, ect.

The expensive short term costs are why the increase in price helps increase short term capacity.
The problem, if you do the maths, is that this must be done over several years and, thus, the same drastic measures as other countries must be taken now.

Having 40+ million cases in the UK this year alone does not seem even remotely manageable for the health services.

I don't even see extra hospitals being built or anything at the moment, just threats to schools if they close.
It’s interesting that we’ve never developed the equivalent for Git of what every programming-language ecosystem has: keeping two parallel listings of dependencies, one in terms of version constraints to satisfy, and the other in terms of exact refs.

I could totally see a .gitmodules.reqs file specified in terms of semver specs against tags, or just listing a branch to check out the HEAD of; resolving to the same .gitmodules file we already have. Not even a breaking change!
I favor Ansible for 2 main reasons:

- If you have SSH access, you can use it. No matter what environment or company you work for, there’s no agent to install and no need to get approval to use the tool. It’s easy to build up a reproducible library of your shell habits that works locally or remotely, where each step can avoid being repeated in case there’s a need to rerun things.

- If you get into an environment where performance across many machines is more important you can switch to pull based execution. Because of that, I see very little advantage to any of the other tools that outweighs the advantages of Ansible.
The video says this happens for the duration of the summer, every year. That seems pretty frequent to me.
Pandemic exercise in NYC oct 2019
And Formula 1 engines are only meant to last hours (yes really, most engines don't even last one season), albeit at ridiculously high stress levels.

If we extrapolate from this, where high performance drag cars typically last minutes (20 years ago they only lasted seconds), that would mean this engine might only be good for a couple of hours of driving around the track. Assuming this is true (I am not saying it is), this engine would be pretty worthless for anything other than being a collector's item or being used for 1 or 2 races before it had to be retired.
My impression is that it will use the normal git experience managing design assets. Ie. with this there should be no need for additional tooling. If it works, that would be so great!
Well, I've done the same back of the envelope estimates they're claiming, but what do you have in mind? If you're saying that their plan is doomed and going to kill millions, I agree.
Sigh. The fact remains that perfectly rational actors have concluded that they may not want to be shopping for the next two, three, or four weeks. That means purchasing more now for your own completely rational use.

If everyone does that at the same time, you'll have a shortage.

One thing that might limit the shortage is higher prices, as it makes people purchase less, and incentivizes production and delivery.

One thing that most definitely will not help the shortage is limiting the price increases (i.e. price gouging laws).
Videos of one year's lectures are available on youtube, with links at here: https://www.ineteconomics.org/education/courses/the-economic...

I'm halfway through, and I'm really impressed not only by the prof's preparation but methods. Very clear.
I think where supermarkets give refunds at all for non-defective products, it’s generally discretionary.
Also, supermarket operators are not irrationally leaving free money on the table. They have their own reasons for not adjusting prices -- all the free market advocates lecturing the supermarket managers about econ 101 principles should try running a supermarket themselves, and see how kindly the market reacts to their strategy.
> bunch of papers is not actual progress

Papers are where researchers report on their progress by presenting specific findings to the world. Confusing papers for science is like confusing the scoreboard for the sports.
Which is a strictly inferior and botched way to go about it, especially since golang was designed from scratch.
> How do you go from one of the most hyped IaaS companies to suddenly losing steam? If it worked for them from 10m - 100m ARR, how do they lose steam from 200-275m? Its not like the market for their stuff is that small, Azure and even GCP have proved that. I'd love for some perspectives from people who know this market, because it's baffling to me.

DO's market (raw compute and occasionally unreliable object storage) and that for Azure, GCP, and AWS (top tier cloud ecosystems) are entirely distinct. The former competes on price and is a commodity, the latter are premium offerings that large companies happily write checks for.
That's exactly right. The NHS is going to completely collapse before their "plan" is even 1% finished. I suspect that once this happens, they're just going to fold and adopt the same plan as every other country -- but after thousands of unnecessary deaths.
The man behind China’s talking drones which disinfects public areas
Researching the automated MDx market, I found out the Cobas 8800 (and indeed, pretty much all automated MDx solutions) only works with Roche-manufactured proprietary panels, or results are only valid with proprietary panels. BD lets you run user-originated panels, but you can mix them with FDA-approved panels. I can't just take some master mix from someone else and generate a valid result on a Cobas 8800, as far as I can tell. Would appreciate any clarification/correction on this, though.

What is Roche's manufacturing capacity for these panels each week for the US in the next four weeks? With the 110 machine figure someone else reported in this thread, there is a theoretical limit of about 451K Roche tests per day assuming we shove aside all other testing on this gear, but we could be supply-constrained by these proprietary panels instead. In which case we really should get BD MAX, Seegene All-In-One Platform and similar S. Korean solutions' approvals from the FDA specifically for their Covid-19 panels for their systems on an national emergency basis.
golang's approach is inferior and error prone. We already have better designed languages.
I've been working from home for a decade. I've worked at many companies and been part of the hiring process for remote developers.

Most people just don't have the discipline to work remotely. I think productivity will be reduced overall and it might prevent remote working in the future.
As I said, it's a silly example just to highlight an extreme. In between there are more fluid examples. I don't think it's that ridiculous to propose destroying and recreating the cluster in its entirety when you're deploying a new node image. However as you say I'm not sure anyone would advocate that except in specific circumstances.

On the other hand, while my suggestion of doing it to add a node sounds ridiculous I'm sure there are circumstances in which it's not only understandable but necessary, due to some aspect of the system.
are they comparing SETI@home in 2001 vs supercomputer in 2013? Looks unfair
This is wrong. Just spend some time in finance, then spend some time in a field which is closer to a hard science and you'll realize it. As an example, most theories in physics are pretty darn good - ie you can use them to predict the outcome of something. Most theories in finance and economics are pretty darn bad - ie you can't use them to do anything useful.
I honestly have no idea what that Tweet is trying to say. 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.

The rest seems like babble. No, closing schools for two weeks will not make the problem go away - but it will buy time, to try and set up revised working and living arrangements for everyone.

So what is the point of doing almost nothing?

I'm not seeing any other country looking at the UK and saying "Oh, I wish we'd thought of that."
Ah yes, because a virus will totally respond to some arbitrary line an old dude draws on a map.

Maybe it doesn't do animal transmission (yet), but it's already everywhere... Even it a 'ban' would help, selecting a subset of 'everyone' who already has it doesn't seem like a strategy that would work in any way, shape or form.
FreeBSD to Sponsor Work for 802.11ac Support
Are you joking? I can't tell if you're joking or if you have a serious case of ultra-selective memory. Were you asleep between 2008 and 2016?
They’re not ok with it, it’s simply seem as the best option to control spread - almost everyone in the world will be exposed to this over the next few years. Seems fairly rational to me to attempt to control that exposure given the vast majority will experience v. mild symptoms and those who are at risk will be able to stay home and get urgent care as required if it works out.

Denial is not an effective response, nor is attempting to quarantine 60 million people indefinitely, or closing schools for indefinite periods (puts more pressure on hospitals as staff need to take time off or find childcare, kids not even confirmed as a vector here).

There are certainly different possible ways to delay and different timings for implementing different measures, it will be interesting to see which is most effective in the end. Let’s just hope that hospitals in most countries can cope with the strain.
I just want to thank you and point out that Picnic has the most thorough explanation of the interview process I've seen in a posting lately. Thank you.
Sure, just as when I lived in a big crowded city I never really encountered anyone who was more than mildly annoyed by graffitti, trash in the street, minor vandalism (broken street lights, etc), and even petty theft.
This platform has been developing beautifully. Everything works smoothly and if we have any suggestions hauxir listens and implements them very fast. I'm loyal to this platform, I've tried many and this is surely the best.
"that would be end of days bro."

That is why climate scientists have been trying to change the phrasing to "Climate emergency". It is not a shift in seasonal changes, summers will get warmer, also.
> The extra capacity that I am talking about, still costs extra money to activate

You're claiming that both

a) not enough toilet paper exists to satisfy genuine demand

b) in order to meet that demand, they need to raise prices

I agree that it is theoretically possible that not enough toilet paper exists, and I agree that there exist ways to increase production that involve spending more money. Both of those are different from saying that in reality not enough toilet paper exists, and in reality manufacturers need (or even want) to increase capacity by increasing per-unit expenses. That's what my question is about.

More importantly, those seem like testable claims. Again - have any toilet paper (or hand sanitizer, or whatever) manufacturers raised prices? Have any of them said that they're unable to supply enough to meet demand? Have any of them said they could meet demand better if they could raise prices?

And back on topic, have any of them found themselves unable to raise prices because of price-gouging laws? I'm pretty sure that if a manufacturer raises prices, and if resellers pass that cost on to consumers (and do not disproportionately increase their margins), that isn't price gouging, and therefore resellers can actually charge more, and therefore they can actually accommodate manufacturers charging more, and so we have nothing to worry about. Do you disagree with that?
What's the point of looking at third world countries? They don't even have running water everywhere, of course not everyone there has Internet access.