skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people panic buying, but stocking up now is a good thing. I'm not afraid of US food production halting. I am afraid of weekly grocery trips.
I also disagree with UBI for the premise that it does not fix any of the underlying causes of wealth inequality - in essence, it is a free ticket for the corrupt to continue business as usual. We need to address the nepotism and the crony-capitalism that maintains the status quo in the same families generation after do-nothing generation.
I grew up in India, I know beggars and begging better than most. I even helped one sell books on the road and now he has a bookstore and his kid is in college. I handout food all the time. But never, ever cash.

UBI will not solve begging, as much as you want it to. But giving people a clean room to stay in, good basic healthcare and a free education might.
This is basically theft.
I bought a home in my home country and still working in foreign land to pay for it, so the home stands there empty, but i would kill if somebody would just "occupy" it while i am landlocked in a different country because corona.
> Moreover, we are advised _not_ to buy protective gear for individual use because that is needed for workers with much exposition to other people

There's no real reason for this - not for low-grade ("surgical" or even "dust-proof") masks at least, and these are most critical in order to protect others in case you're sick and asymptomatic. Chinese suppliers are shipping those out as fast as they can make them, and many factories that normally make e.g. textiles and the like could retool and start making them if it came to that.
I'd like to see a similar pledge from small business owners. Stop supporting Neo-liberal idiots. It's great while it works, for them, but it's a horrible mess for ALL of us when it doesn't.

PS. I believe majority of small business owners vote-in pro-business governments and politicians (from Drumpf, to Nethanyhu, to Boris and the rest). Mostly Neo-liberal charlatans, which only work to strip public services to bare minimum in order to artificially boost the economy (i.e. mostly make their friends even richer) while putting us all in danger.

What we all need is a strong, pro-active, and humane government, which understands the economy, but doesn't throw us all under the bus.
In a healthy democracy, there are appropriate mechanisms that hold censors accountable than the average layman, so that they do not abuse their office. For this reason they are granted a louder voice.

To be precise, social media platforms do not censor, but selectively grant certain entities a louder voice at a subsidized cost. Of course, these companies are out of the reach of the checks that the US government is laden with, and this should be managed by regulation or other form of checks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

"Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired"

"To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy."
He could have replaced the normal distribution by any other roundly curve and the result doesn't change too much. For example with the SRI model you don't get a Gaussian https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIR_model , but the graphic is close enough. It's less peaky than the Gaussian so it should make things easier, but the reduction probably will be a small factor, something between 1 and 2.
Yes, but hydroxycholoroquine is a safer alternative.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28556555

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acr.23296
You can still have physical contact. I chase my kids around, carry them, watch the moon with them every night, wrestle them. You can long baths, play with bubbles. My two year old likes to creep up on her mother/sister and surprise them. Help them out with that.

Teach them to read. This isn't just "A- Apple, B- Ball." You can write text on your phone, like "dog" and Google keyboard will show an emoji of a dog. Or you can read out food labels with them. I count to 100 with my kids and it slows them down a bit.

I have a minimalist stash of food for the whole lockdown. But that includes lots of flour, yeast, eggs. We plan to make pancakes and donuts with the kids later. It's so cheap to do that it's almost free. If you want to get crazy and let loose, you can throw those eggs and flour on your spouse and kids (and have a good, long bubble bath afterwards).

This is a good time to pay attention to the little things. One of the upsides is no more commute time, so that just leaves you more time to mess around.
I am shadow banned. I think because of one comment I made many years ago that was heavily downvoted? I just don't log in anymore. I emailed PG at the time and he said there's nothing he can do.
and "Cloud" is the new "Web"
If our testing infrastructure is in place to get correct counts, yes. Countries can be "graded" based on their trajectory on this graph:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#trajectories-since-th...
Except they're actually not. I would love to buy one, but there is no one laptop with 4000 series in shops here, in EU.
Apple has done more buybacks than anyone! And pays a dividend.

> Since 2012, Apple has been buying back shares at the extraordinary rate of around $10 billion per quarter.

Shareholders demanded it.
Then you argue about sovereignty.

Any country will never let the law of a foreign country apply to commerce done on its territory. Saying otherwise is heresy.
What could be more irresponsible than merely staying facts without also having the diligence to additionally write some apologetics for the facts themselves.

What the reporter should have done, clearly, is get the opinion of one of those benevolent airline executives to explain why cash flow was spent on buybacks instead of literally anything else. They can tell us what we all know - that it is standard procedure and could never comprehend the complexity of corporate finance! That it was for our good, after all, in a way, and that, well, that's how Things Are.

Personally, and this is just me, we should ban the plebeians , oh I mean the uniformed, from making dangerous observations of fact!
Google is blocking me from updating my own Chrome extension
This might backfire on a 2 year old because very small kids are resistant to schedules. I handle my kids better being impulsive. Two years old is when they say no to everything, so I prefer to make them offers they can't refuse.
> Btw most of these shareholders have been smart enough to sell immediately when the markets began falling so they will buy these stocks at the bottom and get bailed out all over again by the taxpayer and watch the capital multiply.

If they sold, then they're no longer shareholders; there are new shareholders, and they will be the ones to receive any potential bailout.

There's two sides to every transaction. If people were selling, someone was buying. If someone will be buying, someone will be selling. The sort of people who invest in distressed companies (and I think all airlines count as that right now) tend to be hedge funds and other sophisticated investors; they're hardly going to give any potential gains to previous shareholders asking for their stocks back because they changed their mind hearing about a bailout.
RE "wouldn't be called free cash flow": it still would, because it'd be their own personal decision to save it for a rainy day. When they'd have to save some amount for a rainy day due to regulations, that money wouldn't be considered free cash flow. FCF is, from what I understand, not automatically equal to what you send to shareholders, but sending it to shareholders is an option. Another option would be investing it, or putting it in your bank accounts, as Apple, Google, Microsoft etc are doing.

The airlines simply made a business decision and bet their company on never needing to sustain a drop in traffic, and they've lost the bet.

If you take whatever you have left after paying for rent, food and insurance, that's your FCF. You can now decide whether you want to save some or all of that, spend it on a new bed, or blow it on coke. The airlines chose what made them/their shareholders happy in the short term and potentially very sad in the long term.
Also in Canada here, albeit the big-city part - our telecommunications sector is uniquely bad in terms of bandwidth / service for value and consumer choice.

We have organizations like Internet Society Canada (https://internetsociety.ca/) that are aiming to help change that, but it's an uphill battle.
> So now they gets taxed twice?

I don't understand this argument. I've seen it so many times among a certain crowd of people, but I still don't get it. Yes, we, mere mortal humans have to form our systems of government using a patchwork of heuristics as we try to approach a more perfect system.

Sure, an omnipotent being that knew all outcomes in advance could set a perfect single-tax rate for each person's individual circumstance that only affected their income. Is this somehow more valid than trying to approximate this same outcome by taxing wealth as a correction on top of what income-tax and other taxes were supposed to accomplish?
I can't speak to the complexity of building an open source Figma. The UI isn't that crazy. But even if it existed, you would need a cloud storage solution. And the file sizes can be quite big. And then there's the ability to share project urls, so you'd need some sort of hosting setup.
People know what they need to spend their money on. Telling them what they can and can't do with it is both patronising and counter-productive. Let the person who is affected by the choices make the choices.
There's a small, positive effect on immune function from swallowing zinc pills. But there's a large effect against the coronavirus family, specifically, from coating your throat with zinc.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28515951
> ... and pretty much all of those were addressed, [outside?] Unix, by the evolution of the 1960s terminal I/O model into the console I/O model during the 1980s.

> Note that the lack of a layout system is only applicable to character-mode terminals. Block-mode terminals are a quite different kettle of fish.

Indeed but the point isn't "are these solvable problems?" but rather "why are we still using archaic tech?"

Designing a solution to those problems is actually the easy part. It is shifting the ecosystem away from TTYs that's hard.

> You even forgot to mention

It wasn't intended as an exhaustive list :) There's plenty more issues I hadn't raised.

---

In an ideal world I'd love to see UNIX terminals reinvented. The reality is things are "good enough" for most people that they simply don't notice most of the issues and migrating to the next evolution of UNIX terminals would mean a break in backwards compatibility which will be more disruptive (initially in a negative way) than making do with the warts we currently have.
You need to assume they were all tracked before. For sure Israeli Arabs and Palestinians were always tracked. So not really news as such.
This was the UK government position till a few days ago. Then they ran the numbers again and changed their mind, because even with all mitigation measures in place they estimated around 250k deaths with this approach.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

The UK is now heading towards a more comprehensive shutdown and I suspect will resemble France and Spain soon - the method referred to in this paper as suppression.

This will be really damaging to the economy though and probably lead to a global depression if it is done everywhere. I'm honestly not sure which is worse, because a global depression will lead to a lot of deaths as well.
I wasn't planning on ending up with that it just happened to end up in a state which basically doesn't move (just like cash). I forgot I had made one transfer and then before I realized it all hell broke lose. I could just as well sell all of it now, but instead I'll probably slowly move from the bear to the index.
No, they aren’t. Buybacks push stock price higher, which also makes a difference for option values in a way that dividend don’t.

Also, they are efficient in that they defer the taxation to the point of share sale, but they are inefficient in that holding a stock for less than a year in the US taxes them at the much higher short-term capital gains rate.

Furthermore, the dividend is cash, it cannot go to zero without giving you a chance to realize it - whereas a stock can go to zero at any time (and many will likely do shortly). I was a small investor in a company that did a respectable 5X exit for shares of the purchaser. I was thus locked up for 6m, during which they did a stock buyback but later promptly went down by 80 percent for reasons unrelated to the purchase of the company I was an investor in.

What was supposed to be a nice 5X exit, turned to a meager 1.5X, and I was extremely lucky that the lockup ended September (that is, same year) because otherwise, for tax reasons, I would have been approx -0.5X (that’s all my investment and then half again) on a 5X exit — as I didn’t have any taxes profits in the following years to net again. (You can carry losses forward for tax reasons, not backwards).

Dividends and buybacks are similar when everything is hunky-dory but never equivalent.
Software Donation Initiative – Donate tools to enable remote working
I'm sure it was probably a typo, but I just want to point out it's COVID-19, not CORVID-19. Don't want anyone mistakenly thinking this is related to birds of the crow family.
Dutch President Announces Herd Immunity Strategy Against the Corona Virus
Apple has a lot of cash, but they also do more stock buybacks than anyone. ~$20 billion just last quarter!

https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/stock_buyback
I'm a bit late to the party ... just wanted to say that his account seems to be back (don't know why):

https://github.com/catamphetamine?tab=repositories
Let no tragedy go to waste...
Opportunity cost, the banks in no way payed out what that money was worth at the time. Hand me 1 billion interest free for 5 years and sure I will pay the money back, but...
The TARP bailouts turned over $10bill profit.
Buffet why he has avoide Airlines:

>"I think there have been almost 100 airline bankruptcies. I mean, that is a lot," he said. "It's been a disaster for capital."

Airline bailouts are still distaste for capital. Berkshire did not buy Airlines so that they will be bailed out. They are thinking that they got a bad century out of the way. Their thinking is that Airlines are becoming business that has no bankruptcies or bailouts over long term.
Actually I think you are the one with a privileged word view. We know that in a decade or so climate change will come to affect tens of millions of people who will become refugees. Crop yields will fail and lots of diseases much worse than corona will spread.

Tough luck that you can't get fly home but that doesn't affect my main point. International air travel is unsustainable and is KILLING OUR PLANET!

We as a species have two choices; either we let our global economy collapse or we let our global ecosystem collapse. I know what my choice is.
I recommend adding a "/s" to the end of sarcastic comments for those of us who have trouble interpreting sarcasm
They must be doing the same thing along I-80 as well. For several years, I have been seeing these patches of bright pink/purple flowers here in NJ and been wondering about them as they looked too regular to be entirely natural. I love them and they add some much needed color to the landscape.
In Australia we have Superannuation (compulsory contributions retirement fund) so actually pensioners are expected to live partly off capital gains/sale of shares. Of course their portfolios usually get more defensive (less stock more bonds) the older they get.
This is from Sara Nelson, whose role as a union leader for the AFA played a key role in ending the government shutdown last year.
Most of the time, but not always.

It is somewhat typical for certain activities to "feed into" multiple high-level goals or needs. Trees can't express that, so you get into activity categorization problem. Trivial example: are you cycling your way to work because it contributes to your health, is fun or because it enables you to do your job duties? Obviously it's all of that. None of that matters until you try to introduce some "time budget" for different spheres of your life, and with the tree concept you realize that the results don't make much sense.
And I think no facebook employees had a significant role in that v2.
Interesting. Some feedback (i only tried the webapp, from ios):

- i’d find more intuitive to have “the big prize” at the bottom, so i can work my way down by priority. Maybe an option?

- i should be able to delete the root node, which would scrap the entire hierarchy. Give us a big warning but have the feature.

- i should be able to edit nodes from the graph - even just by clicking an icon that sends me to the list-item view

- this approach is good for one-off tasks but doesn’t seem to fit recurring tasks. For example, if i want to lose weight, i have to meal-plan once every week. Either i keep adding the task manually (bleh) or i cannot deal with it here.

- maybe have a bit of song & dance when you tick off the root node.
A firm who returns free cash flow to shareholders and then defaults on debt is transferring money from bondholders to shareholders.
Agreed. Perl makes it easy to do complex text processing and can replace many individual command line text processing tools.

Recent versions of Perl also support UTF-8 so they can support text processing in different natural languages or internationalization needs. See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_Programming/Unicode_UTF-8
Just in time for the coronavirus lockdown that has the major ISPs throttling torrents to nothing due to network congestion.
This was my first thought as well. We don't cut off water or electric without plenty of warning, typically months of past due bills or eviction. When the service goes out, it is responded to as a public safety matter.
Great app! The author gave a very nice talk about it at 36C3: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jI7F5cjouNg
It seems a lot of the media is focused on the fact that people are being exposed to the virus. However, the Dutch are adopting a controlled way of doing this while protecting those at risk. All measures to limit contact are in place, in a big departure from what others who claim "herd immunity" are doing.

Any comparison to the (previously?) British approach where in the weekend even concerts weren't cancelled and people are still being forced to go to the office by their employers doesn't quite hit the mark.
>Thanks for the kind words. I just don’t know if I can ship code anymore. The endless sprints for years, retrospectives that never end, performance reviews. I just can’t anymore.

Maybe just burned out by Agile???
Shhh, if that gets viral politics might ban print to PDF because of some weird misconceptions regarding copyrights ...
This is wrong on so many levels.

First; no, it's not basically theft. Theft is when you take away something without permission. They are not taking away the house, they are using it. So, it's basically not theft.

Second; this is a vacant house, it's not currently used. By not renting out houses to an affordable prices, the landlords are creating artificial scarcity. Desperate people make desperate choices, if you don't offer them any other options.

So I'm all good with that.
I really want capitalism to give you a wage to do all those things. I understand it's been cronified and monopoloies have fucked over a whole lot of people.

The real fix is to fix capitalism, not write you a check every month for being born. We need to enforce fair markets, fair wages etc.

For those at the very bottom, I want dignity, a free education, and if still unsuccessful access to a low skill job that can pay basic bills.
Or ghettoflix as we call it :D

Is this the same repo that is in Archlinux AUR?
The bottleneck with distributing new ventilators isn't physically producing them - it is getting them tested and approved by the FDA.

So the use-case here is people putting their loved ones on these ventilators at home because the hospitals are full (which is entirely possible).

Ideally, we should be working with existing ventilator manufacturers in the US to have them increase their current output.
Can anyone point to data about chloroquine use by people with quinine allergies? I am allergic to tonic water, perhaps to the quinine in it. Thanks.
Simple things go a long way. An easy one is abstraction.

If you are writing an interface to another system of any kind (DB, API, etc.), abstract that interface one layer from other parts of your app. Then when that other thing changes you are less impacted.

An example: if your organization has multiple apps, it might sound easy to just let app #2 have direct DB access to app #1's DB. Take a little time and build a simple API in app #1 to get at the data, then when you change column names, etc. as long as your API layer doesn't change app #2 won't require changes. You don't have to build a fully RESTful API to all-the-things if it is just one table. Iterate.
Show HN: Doc Search, a biomedical search engine
I'll very likely have to fire 14 world-class engineers, OPS, PMs and designers. From the team that I've spent building 4 years. We'll very likely have to kill the product that I've spent all my work and free time working on.

This is gonna be the first time I'll actually have to say "thanks" to people that I consider to be my friends. At the beginning of very likely the worst crisis that the world has seen.

Ruby, Scala, OPS, Machine learning, AI, Angular, fully-remote and distributed...

FML.
This is going to be one of the costliest panics in history.

A 1000 person test case was ran in isolation and they found this disease to not be very deathly, and this population was skewed toward the elderly.

Half the world’s population lives in a 2 hour flight away from Wuhan, and even without testing, there have been no random spikes in deaths especially considering most of that world is significantly poorer and without proper healthcare infrastructure.

The tragedy here isn’t about the immediate health impacts, of which are low, but of the second and third order effects to society and the world.

That office cleaning night crew ain’t getting paid. New tax revenues to fund potential research at universities isn’t raised. Those with still less fashionable diseases, will have even less money for their cause.
You cannot wait until the shortage hits to build more - obviously.

It will come very quickly.
Yes but assuming bankruptcy would have actually destroyed the US economy (highly debatable) then it was a low cost measure.
How much TARP invested and how much it profited. Now compare that with how much Warren Buffett invested in Goldman Sachs and how much he profited. No wonder GS decided to become bank, access to taxpayers money is much cheaper.
There aren't nearly enough ventilators.
I hope they don't have similar patents in other parts of the world. Looks like it's a US patent so can't cause too much pain outside the US