skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But people have hoarded gold and silver to successfully preserve value over the collapse of countless societies and civilisations for many thousands of years.

Ignoring the time from 1933 to 1971 when it was literally illegal to own more than a few ounces of gold.
..and in the meanwhile, I still can't use my Dell UP3218K with the latest-and-greatest Macbook Pro. Thanks Apple.
You need to consider who politicians are being funded by. Corporations and the wealthy people that own these corporations currently have a strong hold on politicians on both parties and you need to consider that in your analysis as well.
Sure, but all that paper gold isn't really gold. From TFA:

> The gold market seems split at the moment: while the price is falling, meaning there are more sellers than buyers, everything I read on Twitter is that physical gold is nearly unobtainable – many banks and refiners have run out of inventory. Apparently there has been a surge in retail demand for gold coins and bars at the same time as the price has been falling. It seems that the “paper” market, the futures and ETFs, is determining the price and does not reflect the heightened demand on the street for hard metal during this time of insecurity.

So the price of physical gold is much higher, for anyone who wants it, anyway.
"not operated for profit" and "dividend payments" seem to be contradictory.

The question would seem to be how the amount of dividend payments gets set.
You don't need to print money. You could have businesses pay salaries and refund back those salaries as tax credits. You can offer short term loans to those small businesses who have cash flow issues. You can forgive all taxes during the lockdown (so the rent and wages you just paid does not generate taxes)

There are many ways a government can help during an economic crisis.
> What I'm saying is the US is adopting more socialist ideas, and it's spreading the tax dollars around to more and more citizens in more types of ways, like the rest of the developed world has been doing for decades very successfully.

Rubbish. The Defense production act invoked today is from WWII and extremely limited in scope. After the crisis is over the government will be forced to give up these powers. And thank goodness. This is no way to run a free country in normal times.
This reminds me of a pretty niche article I found a couple months ago. It was about the bones of a bunch of cave bears that a father and his young son found in Drachenloch Cave in Switzerland in the early 1900s. They called in naturalist Emil Bachler and he got to work finding more bones in the cave, organized in tantalizingly structured ways.

> In Drachenloch, however, not only were there [crude stone] walls, but behind these walls were found accumulations of bear bones — the long bones of the legs and more or less complete skulls. The pattern was very consistent. Where such walls were present, bones were present. Where they were absent, bones were rare along the cave walls.

These and other deliberate-looking accumulations of bones (including apparent crude “chests” of limestone slabs enclosing more bones) led Bachler to suggest the idea of a prehistoric cave bear worshipping cult. But a counterargument suggests this explanation is unnecessary. It might just be bears being bears, no cult required.

> When cave bears entered a cave to hibernate, they began by scratching nests into the cave fill. In the process, bones and small rocks were pushed aside, often falling into crevices among the fallen blocks. This had two effects. First, it helped to build up accumulations of bones in natural cavities among rocks or among piles of rocks. Second, it protected the bones that did enter such interstices from further trampling and, if they were buried there, from weathering and decay. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that modern excavators should find concentrations of bones in cavities surrounded by rock. Moreover, because further weathering of the cave roof naturally produced subsequent roof fall, it is perfectly normal that such cavities would be covered by slabs of greater or lesser size.

I wonder if something similar happened here. Obviously, the lack of a cave is an issue. But it’s a funny connection to something I read randomly a few months ago.

Cave bear stuff from https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cav... which is also a fun read if you like archaeologists sniping at each other.
> Sure, but a decent share of Apple's success was due to making OS X a very nice development platform. This attracted developers who created great desktop and mobile software

Apple's customers are the >1 billion user install base it has for iOS and more broadly the Apple ecosystem.

Developers will develop great desktop and mobile software because that's the way to reach the incredibly valuable install base where consumer spend is 2x+ that of competing platforms.

You don't win developers purely by giving them nice developer features. You win them by giving them something worth developing for. Part of that is a nice developer ecosystem, but that not enough on its own.
This seems to be a Kubernetes thing. Why the hell does it idle using 25% of my 4 CPUs?
Algolia is great, we use it for search.
I don’t know why this is posted now, but since it’s here I wanted to share this review which I thought was incredibly well crafted and refreshing to watch.

https://youtu.be/rtd7UzLJHrU
The intensity is not a linear function of the bit value, the intensity is more or less value^2.2, which does give ~1e6 to 1...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction for the gory details.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you explain and/or provide a source? I can't seem to find anything about this.
Such 1%, wow.
It seems a bit false to call it a hoax:
- first, the locations he amazingly manages to find with Google Street View and Earth are actually in Venice or in it's district
- second, as pointed out by a response on twitter, Reuters interviewed a resident there about that matter, so they most likely were there and would not post about it if it was not true

Reuters tweet here: https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1240242797933821955?s=21
Same boat, except for multiple weeks I was “offer pending” after playing hardball to get market rate (as others have mentioned, market really wanted seniors only if they were cheap). Now everyone’s on hold. I last tied up a contract nearly 6 months ago and had been eating savings since.

Good news is I’m both really frugal and willing to dig in. Not ideal, but working in an Amazon fulfillment center covers most of my fixed expenses (despite Boston not being cheap) so I start that in a week and it lets me continue to search/interview during the day without feeling much pressure.
Do you think nobody hoarded gold during this period? I'm sure they did.

And did it retain its value? Yes.
I have a project I would like to build one day called web 3.0.

It's HTML only. No JS or CSS. All styling is done browser side under user control. All interactions are done using simple GET or forms and POST.

There are no cookies, and not even hidden form fields, All data you send with a request is visible to the user.
> By paying dividends, you distribute profits via cash.

Dividends are paid from profits. This particular example of stock buyback would be paid from an emergency loan granted to the company under the assumption that it is to be used to help the company get back on it's feet.

Wasting an emergency loan on buybacks is the equivalent on burning the emergency cash by funneling it straight into the pockets of the company owners at the tax payers' expense, in a way that's a whole lot like fraud.
My concern is how long we’ll have to work to flatten the curve (i.e. how many illnesses are there per month if we get it as flat as we hope). As someone else said, another Great Depression will also bring death. Crappy options :(
I wonder how social distancing is effecting online posting numbers right about now?
Instead of nationalizing them, create an index fund run by the government. Capitalize the fund using taxpayer dollars and use the fund to buy out the companies at rock bottom. Then distribute the entirety of shares in the fund to all US tax payers.

Taxpayers then win on the upside when things recover.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/press/

You also claim vitamin D could treat cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, cystic fibrosis, and premature births and....Coronavirus?

Eating less sugar long term probably would help treat all those. But we have underlying reasons.

What's yours?
I haven't been laid off but I voluntarily quit my job in Jan when COVID-19 looked like China would handle it by themselves. I went solopreneur fulltime on https://boomadmin.com but everyday I question myself whether it's a good idea.

Had about 3 years of savings, now only 1.5 years. The stockmarket wiped out a huge part of my runway. I can live like a cockraoch, but let's see what happens. Tough times. I'm optimistic of a rebound once there is a vaccine.
What are you trying to learn?
Sadly India started with this assumption (nationalized a formerly private airline) and are now trying to unsuccessfully sell Air India to private buyers without much luck.
and buying back shares is exactly what the airlines have been doing - $15B from AA in past 6 years for example - from Matt Levine:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
There is no way to structure it. If a CEO wants to walk away he walks, and then you’ll be stuck with choosing from a pool of people who are desperate enough to be CEO of major airlines for $50k a year. Bad idea.
Are hospitals near me ready for the coronavirus? Here are 9-scenarios
No disrespect intended, but I don't get in debates with brand new anonymous HN accounts that have solely commented on threads that deal with the topic at hand.
According to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22619102 something like that happened to some of the UK banks.

It did happen in the UK. Banks that took bailouts traded shares for cash with the Treasury (this is a layman's understanding at least). RBS notably became 84% publicly owned.

The real scandal is the government selling back the shares for less than they paid for them (when RBS was on the brink of collapse).
Can't stand sneaky developers! They'll try to pull a fast one on you for sure!
This would be terrible
blowhards ⊂ narcissists

( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )
We're still hiring, and are trying to help where possible to combat covid-19 (We are a "cloud lab" that gives programmatic control of lab equipment to scientists via the internet)

https://strateos.com/
How many employees will this policy kill?
Where does the idea that the company is going to immediately spend its emergency loan on more buybacks come from?
Where does the novelty element start, though? Someone could come and argue that your comment is also predictable, as is my reply below it.
I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely consists of the more problematic users. Consider that:

- The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter.

- The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time.

Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
No layoffs, reduced rent: 'Italian cure' for pandemic
How about no companies are allowed to buy their own stocks? It makes no sense and just sets up a company to focus on one thing- raising the stock price. When all the companies do it, it seems like an elaborate multi-sector price fixing scheme. If they all have so much extra money, they could be lowering the prices on their products for consumers.
It's quite dangerous because most people will think it's like any other VPN with regard to making an effort to keep your IP address/location private. Cloudflare also don't prominently communicate the difference (not many are going to read that blog post).
Not to my knowledge. I live 3 miles from the Life Care Center epicenter, and I have not met anyone who has it, nor have any of my friends told me that they have it.
The CEO of Japan Airlines makes $80K USD/yr and their airline actually performs incredibly well so maybe that's a pool we want to swim in. [1] Nobody's going to turn down "CEO of one of the biggest airlines in the world" because it pays just a pittance. There's other reasons to take the job.

[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/sink-or-swim-haruka-nishimatsu-...
Truckers Facing Coronavirus Hurdles in Keeping Supply Chains Moving
Is this not what happened to GM?

The treasury put 50 billion into the bankrupt company, shareholders wiped out, and eventually sold the stake in the new company for a moderate loss. It's up to the reader to determine how the net effects outside the investment/sale were profitable over all or not.
The EFF should lobby to get a passage slipped into this bill stating that anybody who votes for it goes straight to jail.
A little off topic but can we start a thread for people who have been displaced by coronavirus seeking work? There sure to be many great people who will be looking for work now, or will be shortly.

I haven't been displaced, but I am a Data scientist seeking work. I'd particularly like to jump on projects which can help deal with this virus. But I'd work take any honest work.

I have the usual DS experience Python, TF, sklearn, stats, Postgres, AWS, scala/spark pipelines, etc. Contact is in the profile.
>>Companies borrow money to pay dividends too.

The very definition of "dividends" is precisely distributing profits to it's shareholders.
Compiling Python code isn't easy!
Wasn't UNIX originally hacked together in assembly language on an already-obsolete PDP-7 that was sitting around unused?

And according to Dennis M. Ritchie, the B language that preceded C was also first implemented on the PDP-7, whose auto-increment memory cells "probably" inspired Ken Thompson to create B's ++ and -- operators.
Cool. Now to get the first version of the pro
> "I get the issue that a lot of execs would just walk away."

it depends on the alternatives they have. there aren't many open executive roles out there, and anyone in that position will be loathe to trade down. the incentive is prestige and power, not (just) money. they'd still be the ultimate monarchs of their little fiefdoms, just with less cash stuffed in the pockets.
> On the flip side, most people who use toilet paper think their butts will get completely clean. That is actually not the case.

yeah yeah we are all unhygienic savages, but isn't this what the two showers a day are for?
I might have an opening for you, can you email me?
Why Americans are dying from despair
Why's it a bad idea?

Apparently CEOs don't matter: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+ceos+dont+matter&t=canonical&i...

Or, put it another way: agreeing to pay them high salaries has, evidently, not helped.

Edit to add: I mean, CEOs don't matter in the general sense. Of course there's going to be exceptions where visionary leader matters. Extremely thin-margined airlines don't seem particularly innovative. Any MBA should be able to do ok?
You do realize that in the case of Github, an account suspension may prevent one from earning a reasonable living with the skills that they have? There are no social safety nets in some parts of the world, so being broke may be just as bad as <insert bad thing done by a government>.
Is there a post you made when you ran the numbers before? I'd be very interested to see that.
From what happened in 2008.
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. ... only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.

This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum.

Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute. But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing. e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1 community while lurking in the rest.
Seems like a good usecase for row-level permissions
Hasn’t Facebook already taken up enough of our time? ;-)
Well said, @eezurr!
Its because it’s Tesla... for some reason that gets clicks. It’s like how the articles about Foxconn’s suicide nets focused on how Apple used Foxconn while ignoring the other major companies that have stuff manufactured there.
Yes and I've heard the sigmoid described as "the first half being exponential, the second half being logorithmic" all over the place and it bothers me to no end. The natural log of x goes to infinity... I sure hope that doesn't describe infection rates.
Buyouts make more sense and allows the government to recoup the money. Example being the Great Recession an the AIG take over by the US government.
I used it once upon a time to essentially allow joins across 3 separate databases that had all been developed/grown independently. Once you have certain kinds of resolvers between types, all sorts of neat stuff is possible. Ultimately, once we had time to update the applications, we merged the databases and dropped the GraphQL app entirely.

EDIT: It was awesome, and I kind of miss it, but it was too much to maintain within our constraints.
Patriarch of Pandemics
That's just nationalizing them with extra steps, if I may deploy a cliché.

I definitely agree with the idea, but it's effectively the same as taking them private with government money and re-IPOing them later.
50 small airlines would all individually collapse in this economic climate. None would have the capital position to weather a multi month lull of this magnitude.

I’m not saying I agree with the bailout cycles but I don’t think they’d inherently weather this storm any better. On the plus side it’s more likely smaller localized capital would be able to get them back up again when things finally turn around.
Thanks! We don't consider Zeit or Netlify competitors. We're a level lower than them -- you could actually run those things on top of fly!

As you said, they're both going deep for JavaScript apps (and doing an awesome job at it!) and we're focusing on being an awesome place to run full stack apps and exotic (non-http) servers.
Holy cow! My hat's doffed to you sir. Good work! (Also your site strikes a nice balance between info and marketing.)
> iPad Pro is faster and more powerful than most Windows PC laptops

This is such a frustrating comparison that Apple continues to make.
They factor in that most Windows PC laptops are very low-spec and low-price. If you compared performance with similarly priced machines it would likely be a different story.

But come on, Apple. It's not 2001 anymore. You don't need to keep up with the 'us vs them' mentality.
French researcher claims to have found Covid-19 cure
If you buy a troubled company, the company is still troubled, you just own it, no resources have been transferred into it. Give away the shares to the population then you don't have any influence on it any more.
Gold price 2010: $1650/oz

Gold price 2020: $1472/oz

And that's not adjusting for inflation.
I’m always confounded by this “banning bonuses” conversation. In any job I’ve had my bonus is an expected part of my annual compensation. If you ban bonuses, people will switch companies, and their new contracts will state the same comp at 100% salary. Setting a total comp threshold could make sense. Not sure if it should be related to what % of revenue comp is, though at airlines it’s very high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
What would prevent them from doing exactly the same thing with dividends: spending the emergency loan on them?
That's not a good choice of counterexample; they're generally not considered separate species these days, largely because of that.
So I was reminded on YT homepage to check him out again... I went through about 15-20 last drink reviews (descriptions). They are all 7-8s. I am super curious if he has ever not liked one now.
Not laid off but about to have a third interview with my ideal company and was told they were starting a hiring freeze.
“This will all come back to bite them in the ass eventually,” the employee said.“

Considering they are pretty much a monopoly, I doubt it. Unfortunately.
http://www.roundup-tracker.org/

I'm sure bugzilla is older though.
Flat HTML
What alternative disincentive would you propose?
> It's encouraging that a retrospective analysis confirmed that the Wuhan lockdown had the intended effect however, to reduce the true spread of cases.

If Wuhan is a guide, we should know starting Saturday if the lockdown in Italy is also having an effect.
WestJet in Canada for instance is basically going into hibernation. They're laying off 50% of the workforce, and cancelling all US and international flights [1]. They are however not yet being bailed out by the government, and they are also not going out of business.

I'm not sure any small carrier need go bankrupt. They park their planes, furlough their staff, and in a few months, open up with some summer promos. Not flying doesn't mean a trip through Chapter 11.

[1] https://torontosun.com/business/money-news/canadian-airlines...
Some more background: Russian folklore attributes the name to the event when god Indra (Inder, Hindra in other spellings) was about to cross the Don river.

Indra tried to drink all of Don's water, and exploded.

The locality was then named for his scattered bones.
I wish someone would at least try to come up with a portable mechanical-like solution.
We're not running docker or making you run it. We simply use docker images (aka OCI image format https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec) as the packaging format for your application code and dependencies.
Well, part of the reason why I feel there are so many companies is because no one can _prove_ what's actually going on. So they spend a few months doing research and selling their knowledge as a service to clients - it would be the same thing you would do if you pursue this path. I don't see an issue with it, people sell what they know to others in all professions (now that I think about it more).
And, given exponential increase in cases, how many other people completely unrelated to the company will it kill?
https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk
We put all of our film on glass plates for the stability. We currently don't have a film-only option, because the success/quality for getting good holograms has not been as good.

Our film plates are pretty competitive when you consider you never need to buy, mix, or bother with chemicals and the whole wet process.

It's pretty sweet to just expose the holograms, and then view them immediately. Maybe get a box of the plates and test them out to see the difference.