skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great advice. I don't usually choose it to show off in interviews as it's not my strongest skill, but I currently work full-stack across an app with Rails backend and Angular/React front-end. I also have experience with Express, but haven't worked with it for a couple of years.
Why are you hijacking his thing?
> A society built on top of perpetual growth is about to grind to a halt for 2-6 months

Grinding to a halt may be an exaggeration;

There's little reason for

- food production to grind to a halt (California, Midwest, Florida) as these are not high density jobs with a high risk of contagion.

- Technology oriented jobs; These have been increasingly work remote or from small offices; In many ways technology production should be stimulated in solving many problems presented by our now quarantined economies.

- Existing Construction jobs; Maybe they're slowed down to decrease worker density. these have a potential for low density, especially Crane operators, concrete trucks, etc. If you touch your face or take off your helmet you're going to have a bad time in these roles already.

- Power Company. Whether it's hydroelectric, coal, or nuclear; few of these use worker density to run or be maintained. Major projects will likely be stalled for those 6 months. These are also places where touching your face is already avoided.
I would integrate systems by CORBA over the web technologies on any day if I could.

Too bad newer languages won't even support it...
Readings on Time
I don't understand finance and economics as well as I'd like but it is always refreshing to read Ray Dalio's views mostly because of his focus on the long term but also because of his proven track record on these things.
Even with that, it's only slightly more difficult than knowing where to aim the toilet paper.
maybe if you go over, you automatically add ads to the page or something.
> Nothing fundamental has changed about what people would like to do. These measures are temporary.

My wife's a PhD microbiologist, and works at a $bigPharma, and she's not convinced that we will be back to normal any time soon.

I'm currently in an area where we are essentially in total lockdown. All non-essential shops are shut. Businesses are laying off staff everywhere. Hotels and restaurants are all closed. Borders to neighbouring countries are closed. Schools and kindergartens are closed. Even the local playgrounds are closed and taped up - try explaining that last one to your 4 year-old.

Recovery in six months' time? I'm struggling to see it.
I think this is fundamental point, related to yesterday’s discussion about the need for “transparent” computing tools, which can be used in a “convivial“ fashion — custom shaped by users to match their own needs. Humans have always used technology in this manner till the industrial revolution and the use of machines to scale production meant inflexibility of the product. IMHO, the next step of progress should involve ways to give back the flexibility while keeping the power of modern engineering. Software makes this easier to do than hardware, since experimentation and cloning are particularly cheap — so “software eating the world” should hopefully find ways to give power back to the users.

In the urge to make interfaces “simpler” by dumbing them down (appealing to the lowest common denominator), we have lost sight of the importance of ramping up novices into power users rather than having them stagnate and atrophy. Yes, there might be a learning curve, but keeping it gradual and steady can allow users to reach great heights! In what seems like an eternity ago, it is difficult to put in words the freedom I felt as a college student when I first moved from Windows to using Ubuntu — for the first time ever, I had the freedom to shape my own computing experience, rather than accepting the straight jacket I was given. Two other examples that I have less experience with, but am quite fond of include Emacs and SmallTalk. There’s a lot that can be learned (at least philosophically, if not technically) from the passionate love inspired by these examples.

The user/programmer divide is a symptom of yet another sharply increasing “inequality”. We need to think about it in fundamental terms, and can’t solve the problem just by making “coding” appear cool. It’s not enough to have references and guides, because all those only make sense once you’ve crossed a knowledge barrier. They contribute to a shitty on-boarding experience. Focusing specifically on teaching programming is missing the point, IMHO. No amount of teaching (artificially structured) can ever be as good as a platform that enables people to gradually learn and adapt at their own pace. The human mind is enormously capable of learning with experience.
Silver is down because it is largely an industrial metal used heavily in many electronic components. Gold is also used in industry (e.g. Gold plated connectors) but less so compared to its use as a value store by governments[1] and private parties. Since the economy is expected to drop, industrial metals are dropping as well.

[1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/gold-repo...
I'm betting the best places to target for individuals who have been laid off, for the next 6-12 months at least, will be organizations who serve higher education.

When the economy hits the shit, higher education booms. This is absolutely true for tech programs and community/junior colleges, less so for 4-year colleges/universities.

Source: My experience with the 2001 bust and immediate higher ed boom, 2008 bust and immediate higher ed boom.
Finally, being bang average pays off
This looks nice. Going to have to give it a try.

I'd love to see automated ZFS-on-root setup, but suspect that'll have to come from Canonical if we ever get it.
They give eric ding a hard time, but he was sounding the alarm while other epidemiologists were downplaying it. Because of him, I stocked up on groceries over a month ago, decided not to buy a house, and got prepared to work from home and started selling stocks before the market crashed. If I had listened to the ‘real’ experts, I’d have lost twice as much money in the crash and I’d have been scrambling to find food for my family right now.

I took everything with a grain of salt, but I was alarmed enough about worst case scenarios to start preparing.
Confirmed on Manjaro (which is Arch-based) as well.
https://wirhelfen.eu/ is a German app to offer help in your neighborhood. (found on https://www.reddit.com/r/de/wiki/corona-links)
It's why the two used to be tied via the gold standard. Then cash became fiat and by nature short-term. Governments can't help themselves.

The anecdote on the gold threads is fascinating.
I'm a fully remote software developer based out of Chicago, IL working on a mobile app built with Typescript/React Native/Redux/Firebase. Just found out our small startup is shuttering at the end of the week "until the markets stabilize". We're in the events and community management realm, and mainly work with co-working space communities.

Been spending the last few days really wrapping things up with the project getting it into a more stable place before payroll stops at the end of the week. Getting my resume/portfolio up-to-date has been a priority since Monday. It's overwhelming starting up the job search abruptly and in such a turbulent time. Keeping my fingers crossed and my eyes open for opportunities, in the meantime I'll be working on a few personal projects.
What do you guys do with an iPad? I cannot barely imagine working with it. I just see it useful for emails, web surfing and not much more... It's a very expensive device, I don't see any justified use. You can get a macbook air for less and have a full blown Photoshop, IDEs, Word...
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Neither valuation (which I assume was what they meant) nor revenue tells you much about a formerly-growing company's fixed costs or its reserves. Rapidly growing companies frequently have very limited reserves.

When revenue collapses, as it has for many industries, your fixed costs dwarf everything else and most businesses will be in trouble.
When you have things like the New York Times publishing articles about how the CDC is publishing misleading information, or the WHO and the South Korean government publish contradictory guidelines, or the federal government announcing one thing one day and the opposite thing the next day, then you really can't just blindly trust an authoritative source any more. It's impossible, because the authoritative sources don't agree with each other! Everyone is forced to do their own amateur analysis. It is no surprise that given the situation, many people are publishing their own amateur analyses.

IMO this is better than the situation in previous similar disasters. Like in the 1918 influenza epidemic, many governments censored information, and there was no social media to circumvent this, so the public understanding of the real situation was quite poor.
Fuchsia looks pretty active as far as commits go:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log

It also seems I regularly see new posts about it on HN, with a generally positive reception and optimism among its users.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> at least they tried.

I recognize the optimism and idealism in this way of thinking and feel bad about countering it, but as someone who has taken on a number of “if we fail at least we tried!” ideas over the years, this is a recipe for burnout.

Enthusiasm and passion are valuable and scarce resources: we don’t have an unlimited amount. Each time we take on a project and really throw ourselves into it, we’re investing a bit of our limited passion supply. If the project works out and makes an impact, we get a return on that investment, and feel the motivation to take on even bigger projects! But if you throw yourself body and soul into too many projects that totally fail, you’ll eventually run out of steam to keep going, and you may not even see it coming until it’s too late.

To continue the investment analogy: I recommend folks invest themselves in projects with an eye to risk. “A weekend project that will almost certainly go nowhere, but could go somewhere” is a small investment, sure go ahead. A months long grind with a startup better come with a plausible strategy for success that doesn’t hinge on something unlikely.

Invest well, friends.
I can sympathize with some of the points in the article, but personally it seems like it is easier than ever to learn to program:

* There are definitely more resources now than ever before, many which are available for free online and are accessible 24/7. Most questions you can think to ask for a beginning programming task have been asked dozens of times on Stack Overflow.

* For many programming languages, there are web-based interpreters (see: repl.it, godbolt, etc) and/or easy-to-install bundled platforms (things like R Studio). Many programming languages have installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux that work well via a GUI. And once a learner has overcome the fear of opening up a terminal, package managers are easier to use than ever before. So my personal experience has been that installation is easier now than in the past, but perhaps others will disagree (as it seem the author does).

* Running VMs (and installing OSes from scratch) is easier now than ever before. I remember how difficult installing some Linux distros was 10+ years ago. Installing Ubuntu is mindlessly easy now - just follow the instructions in the wizard. There are pre-built images for most VM software and on all cloud platforms that means you can get a machine up-and-running while knowing next to nothing about system administration. Recently I got a DO droplet spun up with Ubuntu 18 in less than 10 minutes from wanting it, and almost everything was handled for me. Linux does come with a lot of programming tools preinstalled, which gets around some installation worries of the author.

I do think it is getting harder to understand all layers of a software stack (and there is more information to know now), but just getting up-and-running with a single programming language is easier than ever.

One caveat about my first point: I see more and more top questions on StackOverflow or programming tutorials that use syntax that is out-of-date (or use packages that don't exist anymore). But this has always been a problem, and its more a visibility thing in my opinion.

So ultimately, my point is that the "Embrace the future" and "delay the pain" options are very natural for the new programmer learning today. As such, they will have more experience and confidence in the software world before they need to muck about in the sysadmin world, and by then picking up some system administration skills will be much easier.
Are there any software projects on GitHub which need volunteers, that helps the researchers?
It's actually a book. I happen to be reading it right now (on recommendation of HN users):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050068-money

Well written and fascinating.
> “I have a two-hour podcast every week,” he said. “Very few people are listening because it's long and complicated.”

I think this is a good example of an opportunity the population here on HN can exploit, and which many others can't: We can metabolize a deeper-than-average scientific discussion and help convert that into reliable and responsible social discourse. It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the expert-level information, and digging in.

This is also more respectable IMO than mainly just being critical of information and influencers. A lot of the so-called influencers are good people who are trying to help out where they can. That's why they're getting attention; the social organism is looking for help right now. The critical viewpoint is not nearly as effective under these circumstances, in part because it shoots down solutions more than it creates or identifies them.
"Sorry I need to do critical maintenance we're gonna shut off the power for three days and stop renting rooms".
We're providing services for people organizing events (weddings, conferences etc.), that is probably one of the most affected sectors right now.
Good overview. The 'comfort masks' were pretty useless and 3M discontinued them. It's almost impossible to find any N95 masks now because people are hoarding them.
Masks while not 100% effective do in fact help for a lot of airborne viral infections in public places. Especially when paired with hand washing and staying home.

Then again if you are making an unavoidable trip to the store, there is not much point since the original chance of infection is so low from casual passing contact with few people. But it makes sense if you or a family member are immunocompromised, have COPD or some other critical condition. That reduced chance from wearing a mask is worth it due to your high chance of death. Not so much if you are a healthy 15-50 year old who lives alone with their cat.
lambda can run up to 30m I think (idk about lambda@edge). CF Workers fail when trying to use something like node-unfluff, because the CPU time takes too long.

This seems to me, like a more controllable lambda@edge.
So for context, last night I made a subreddit for discussing over-the-counter drugs, supplements, and other interventions for coronavirus: https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack

I already knew this before I made the subreddit, which I did just because I find this stuff interesting, but honestly right now there is very little appetite from the general public in terms of experimenting with treatments or prophylactic measures that could potentially hurt them. Maybe that will change in a few weeks, but right now there is very little risk of people being harmed by whatever misinformation is currently out there.

As of right now most people don't even believe the virus can hurt them in the first place. It's hard enough just to folks to stay inside.
I feel like this is implying this is a bad thing, which it absolutely is not. Am I the only one who hasn't stumbled onto any conspiracy theories whatsoever?

I've found the internet to be an invaluable source of outstanding information on this virus (dashboards of diagnoses, research on variants, journal articles on origin, updates about potential treatments) and have found most people to relatively reasonable (e.g. frustrated about lack of testing, but nothing resembling conspiracy theories). That said I focus on HN/reddit.
So you’re saying your company has only enough cash on hand to cover 2 weeks of operating expenses?
Bidet attachments usually have a self-cleaning mode, ie you push a button and then it sprays water over the sprinkler.

I bought mine off Amazon for like $40 and it does that.

BTW I do clean mine now and then, and there is like, almost nothing to clean. Compared to e.g. my humidifier, that needs almost-daily cleaning.
Put it on the corner maybe?
As the OP, I intended for this to be more about a discussion of the current market than my particular situation. While things just became quite difficult for me personally, and I would love the opportunity to make a connection that leads to another job due to this post, things have gotten much worse for many people all together. This individual's comment was insightful, helpful, and directly answered the question I asked in my post. Personally, I'm quite glad this person added their perspective.
VBA is the exact same language as VB 6, with the same implementation and the same IDE. It lacks some options (like compiling to an executable and setting some module attributes) and the forms library is different, but the language is identical. Since diverging, VBA has had some small revisions, with VBA 7 adding support for 64-bit pointers.

You might be confusing it with VBScript, Microsoft's old vaguely VB-like alternative to JavaScript that was used in Internet Explorer and (I think) classic ASP.
This inertia will probably apply also to those who die :)
This seems like a positive trend. The article quotes a guy saying Twitter is two days ahead of newspapers, but that's severely underselling it; many Twitter sources were saying "watch out, this isn't likely to be localized" in late January and "this will be a problem everywhere, start preparing for a lockdown" in mid-February. If it's possible for people to be a month ahead of the mainstream media, that's not a matter of higher verification standards - there's gotta be some structural obstacle in place that systematically prevents the media from noticing important new things. And if that's true I'm glad to have alternative sources without the obstacle.
Hah I also learned C# doing Unity programming and now work as a "enterprise" .NET developer, it's a great path if it's one you want to take...
I'd love to see them stop posting this hucksters move every day

Obvious they are trying to take advantage of a crisis
I've been comparing this with the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009.

H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the time. People were saying it had a CFR of >1% in Mexico (where the original outbreak was). That number dropped way down as better data came in after the outbreak.

But still, up to 575,000 people may have died from it. That's not nothing.

And... nobody cared? People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic.

I think part of it was how social media has changed the way we consume and respond to information. I've seen extreme panic on FB, Reddit, HN, Twitter -- which seems to cause more panic. Everything in the media is turned up to 11 now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

It's interesting to go back further and read this Bird Flu article from 2005, where a UN Health Official warned of 150 million possible deaths, and said things like, "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids 10 times faster than it's running at the moment." So, the media has always turned things up to 11, but something about the current era has exacerbated the issue.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4292426.stm
In 20.04 they will have ZFS on root with BEs as an install option, looking forward to seeing the first major Linux distro making it available as a default.
Are you out of food where you are?

Where is it this bad, already?
So to be clear about your argument, we don't trust epidemiologists becasue they crashed the economy in 2008?
Article is disingenuous as fuck. Glad to see so many good comments here.
I'm not jassmith87, but they're making a super slick app builder at glideapps.com and using fly for custom domains
In Firefox's reader mode, click the "Aa" icon in the left-sidebar and you'll see -><- and <--> icons for changing the line length. Click <--> a couple times.
>> Also, you could post on HN if they do withdraw the offer during this outbreak, so other people would know they suck.

So every company that lays off an employee "sucks"? I guess you're welcome to stay and work for free, but if they don't have money to pay you what are they supposed to do?

I agree this situation is terrible for the OP, but I don't think we need to name and shame every company that makes a prudent decision as the world moves in a abad direction...
Time to Ban Wet Markets
Curious - In what way would building an Anycast network be expensive ?
I'm surprised that they did not do that yet. While ZFS license status is questionable, Canonical seems to be sure that everything's OK, so they should embrace its technical superiority. Something like full system rollback after bad update is trivial with snapshots and it's extremely useful feature.
We also had China set the tone with the largest quarantine in history. Leaders are looking at the precedent on how to act.
Apple is working on a common core for iPadOS and OSX that's should be a way, but a memory limit is important for performance for your browser tabs. I'm waiting for iPad Pro with a minimum 16G RAM.
Both of those links are blank pages with JS disabled. It's a minor thing, but still a thing.
Like what? Interested to hear what you deem interesting enough to tinker on.
Show HN: Abot Anonymous Messaging for Slack is now free for educational purposes
> That way we could build entire application on edge without buying into the FaaS movement

So you want to be able to upload your code and have someone manage the infrastructure and datastore.

Isn't that the definition of FaaS?
I cannot imagine investing in these types of assets. For those who speculate on gold & silver, would you also purchase futures contracts on oil, pigs, and grains? It's pretty much the same idea unless you are having gold bars shipped to your home.

If your objective is to make money "quickly", I'd recommend averaging any cash you have sitting around into a market-wide ETF ASAP. The trick is to not get emotional. You have to hold every last share through events just like this one. If you don't use leverage or purchase options contracts you can literally forget the stock market exists when monster events are occurring. Assuming you diversified, there's really nothing to worry about under any circumstance. Just keep buying the same market-wide funds on a regular basis. Never sell. Ever. Selling is how you lose the game.

All of this fear has created a generational buying opportunity.