skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
its good to be skeptical. Others have had good results as well. Hope we get more data.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/18/sci...

An old malaria and autoimmune drug is showing promise as a potential treatment for COVID-19 – although health officials are urging caution until clinical trials are done.

The drug, hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil, was reported March 9 in Clinical Infectious Diseases journal to be effective at killing the virus in laboratory experiments. In a letter in Cell Discovery Wednesday, the study’s authors, mainly from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, wrote, “(W)e predict that the drug has a good potential to combat the disease.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/here-are-some-exi...
RLS is one of the shittiest things about Postgraphile and why I decided against for one project and am doing my best to root it out of a current project.

RLS is difficult to unit test, to configure with flags, not portable to secondary stores, and requires knowledge of arcane database features.

When you put some private data on a cache somewhere and query it, now you need to write your access layer twice since the other one is so tightly coupled to the database.
I see these sorts of appeals a lot on HN but never really understood the point. Sure, software had a good run of small devs making big splashes, but it's pretty obvious to anyone watching that the garage days are over as far as big projects are concerned. The only real exception is the European software devs who, from a market perspective, exist mainly to sell the most promising projects to China or the US since they can deploy those projects in a way that drives growth. Why shame people for making smart moves?
Recommended Guidance for Extended Use and Limited Reuse of N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirators in Healthcare Settings

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hcwcontrols/recommendedguid...
> I do the same thing for USD

Good for you!

> It's not the Bitcoin that makes your situation possible.

Then what is? Because I don't live in the US, I don't even live in a capital city, I don't have access to a bank nearby, sorry to burst your bubble but bitcoin is helping me more than anything else.

> your scam currency

You must be talking about the USD here, it's not bitcoin that is being printed like thin air.
The GOP held up one of the bills to ensure that language to ban federal funding of abortions was added. Even though that is already in effect.
I've been wearing a homemade mask when I go out to the grocery store. I think of it as a last line of defense if someone should cough in my direction. I know the virus is .02 microns but it's being carried in a droplet of liquid that's considerable larger and may get caught by the two layers of dish cloth with a sheet from an air filter between them. I sewed it to fit securely around my nose and mouth and it extends all the way around the sides of my face.
> and more to do with the web becoming the default application platform.

>> I dont even see any trend to suggest that is the case. Even if you count Electron as being one. Most Apps are not web based, and dont ever intends to be.

- Email

- Chat

- Music

- Calendar

- Word Processing

- Spreadsheets

- Social

- News

- TV

A shorter list would be what isn't on the web platform?

- Video games

- Graphics programs
Perfect time to test an alternate way to conduct interviews too. Give several of the second round candidates paid work on something you actually need to have done (perhaps pick tasks that are a sprint away). It should be a great test of both who can produce working code with tests (production code is way different than white-board pseudocode) as well as who can stay on task remotely. I can't imagine paying three people for the same work would cost more than flying them to your office and torturing them for a day or two. The one downside I can see is that currently out-of-work developers should be happy for a bit of 1099 work. Those who are looking to change jobs may not be so amenable.
If we were halfway rational, we would have started this in January. Failing that, start now.
Not based on information obtained here.
Lately "software engineer" feels a bit pretentious to me, with all the articles about how we're co-opting the word "engineer". I've started using the word "programmer" just to avoid the pretention and because it has a nice old-school ring to it.

I kind of doubt employers read it as such a technical term that it would factor into the hiring process.
Previous discussion from when their policy was first publicised, but before there was an active case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22600314
I think you're reading it right, assuming they do know the ages of all people hospitalized, and the total cases with known+unknown age have close to the same distribution as the cases with known age. 102 hospitalizations / 1226 total cases = 8.3%.

A huge remaining unknown is how many people were infected but not tested, which would tend to reduce that 8.3% but perhaps not to a negligible level.
Have you looked at the freelancer threads that the whoishiring account posts monthly? They don't get as much frontpage time but they're there.

Edit: if anybody has an idea about how to let more people know about those, as well as the "Who Wants To Be Hired" threads, I'd like to hear it. The problem is that frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN, and it's hard to justify using 3 of those slots for whoishiring posts.
Some companies pay out “retained dividends” on unvested RSUs.

Like buybacks vs regular dividends, the main differences have to do with their taxability.

From what I can tell, the main complaint in the Atlantic article is that CEOs time buyback announcements to coincide with their stock sales. The first example they give is the Home Depot announcing a buy back (apparently in the Feb ‘18 earnings call), and then selling stock after the insider lock up window opened. In all likelihood, that sale was scheduled well ahead of time (execs have to do this to avoid insider trading charges).

So, the controversy seems to reduce to Home Depot having a strong quarter and buying back stock, making money for shareholders, including the CEO.

Note that if they’d issued dividends, and they pay retained dividends on unvested RSUs, the net effect would be exactly the same (except taxes).
I think since most of the people reading hackernews are the startup type most people here just sort of tolerate the shameless plugs out of understanding
If the company is allowed to fail shares usually come out worth zero after the bankruptcy. Dilution can't be worse than 0.
Let me share an original thought I just came up with. As Paul Graham recently wrote, you can be an accidental moderate because you disagree with people out of intellectual honesty and critically analyzing the positions in an effort to learn something. So people like that contribute to steering conversations towards the truth.

(PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
Playstation 5 versus Xbox Series X: The Tech Specs
I’m from Levels.fyi, this is the second issue of Salary Stream - A digest of verified salaries sent weekly. Let me know if you have any questions!

You can subscribe at https://www.levels.fyi/verified/
This is reported in the same way that the Google website debacle was -- someone offhandedly mentioned something, and this administration runs out to scream it from the mountaintops as an accomplishment. Look, they're doing stuff.
Without proper search assists like Elastic search/lucene etc, it’s not useful for most people trying to read it. Maybe someone can set up a site with elastic search with articles on there?
This is inspiring. Echoes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_of_Democracy
I'm a frontend dev. I do not expect to be laid off anytime soon. Our company was planning to double in size this year, we were hiring quite a lot, and now we're just slowing down hiring.
From what I read, it seems there was a cache of N95 respirators in the Strategic National Stockpile.

However, it was depleted during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak and never replenished. Instead, their budget was used for what they thought were more pressing concerns at the time — stockpiling drugs/equipment for other emerging diseases.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/face-masks-in-...
What about my post was attacking? Also, may I quote you, at you?

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Why wouldn't you assume good faith that when I said "asking everyone else to join in your self-induced blindness is unnecessary" I meant exactly what I said, without any rancor, malice, ill-will, etc? You may read my original reply with an angry tone of voice, a pleasant one, a curious one, a vindictive one, etc. But I have to believe, based on your comment, that you did not assume good faith with me but rather read my comment with something less than a pleasant tone of voice. Am I wrong?
For US Data try: https://covidtracking.com/
We're Launching a Covid-19 Fold-Off to Help Beat the Virus (and Anandtech)
> make business “survival” kind of pointless

they continue to survive and make the payments. Yes, profits will tank, but eventually they will pick back up. It's not like there's a better alternative. It's better than shutting doors - you may not be able to pick back up when this all blows over.
Yeah I don’t see any current AI models that can combine all the knowledge from a subject and do something really profound with it. I do see you can generate more AI covid19 articles from it.
This is pure hindsight. This didn't warrant that kind of response in January, not by a longshot. In January it looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years. We can't shut down industry and retool factories just in case.
So, are the dollar amounts for stock we see on the website the literal amounts users entered at the time of grant or did they enter number of shares that are being translated to $ in real time?
Hey, at this point, I'll take it.
It depends on the person and situation. Sometimes the game becomes the major source of stress, sometimes it's the right abstraction and motivation for improvement.
NASA fixes Mars lander by telling it to hit itself with a shovel
No but it could have the force of law behind it soon. There's no mandate but they're preparing for a case where it might be. Besides, the real issue is if everybody gets sick they can't help their customers and they can't sell their product and that'll cost more money in the long run. Really, they're probably just trying to make sure their business keeps running.
Neat language. Looks like a fun project, and I totally get that your previous work is generally owned by the folks you did the work for and therefore non-public.

I can ask when I next meet with my manager, but I can say from my nearly 5 years at Khan that engineering has not desired to spread out beyond the timezones we're in. I did work for Mozilla for 4 years, so I do know that it can be done and what the tradeoffs are like. This is just not a step we've wanted to take at Khan.
A common catchphrase: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
cash will help you in the short term but then the nature of barter will become apparent.

basically the current situation turns freewheelin franklin on his head "things and stuff will get you through times of no money easier than money will get you through times of no things and stuff"
> I can't be the only one who's hiding all the stories about the pandemic, right?

You're hiding all the stories about the pandemic. How is that not self-induced blindness? Nothing about my response, nor this response, is judgmental or attacking in any way. If you're hiding all the stories about something, you're blinding yourself to it. That's all.
What's the problem with views?
You should take actual progress, not bullshit. I'll take the whipping, but this administration is 100% show. If they cared about actual progress they would announce an actual plan, with actual participation of the company. Instead it's yet another incredibly lazy "See...and now we'll do jack shit for another week we've presidented".

And I'm sure the imaginary ventilators would be the best. Just beautiful. Everyone says so.

Company that actually makes ventilators (versus someone spitballing) has told the government they could increase production 5-fold with government assistance. Government has no interest. But here's a fun story about an imaginary plan with zero actual consideration where car factories are going to make somehow make ventilators...
A false exaggeration about me but an understandable policy. Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt regarding being a shill. Have a nice day.
Couldn’t SK open their borders again, but then test everyone entering the country?
Actual paper comparing homemade masks said they were about 70-80% as effective as a commercial N95 mask. Both are equally effective at preventing you from touching your mouth and nose.
At the very least food handlers should have been wearing masks since the beginning of this. Before all the restaurants closed I didn't see any food handlers wearing masks.
I work for an airline. Leadership is saying pretty much every day that employee layoffs aren't planned currently but they sound less and less confident about it every time they say it.
All of the clouds have a service to run containers (GCP Cloud Run, Azure Container Instance, AWS Fargate) but you have to deploy to the different regions separately and use their global load balancers or an external CDN to manage traffic.

Stackpath is an amalgamation of many acquired companies. Their CDN is fine but nothing special. The computing services aren't great. Not very competitive on price and have reliability and latency issues. Their cloud storage is white-labeled Wasabi. I wouldn't recommend them as the first choice for anything.

Zeit Now version 1 was also a run your own container runtime but that has been deprecated: https://zeit.co/docs/v1/getting-started/deployment#docker-de...
This is what Musk should be doing.
why is it ridiculous to expect a business to not make any profit after a crisis? The alternative is to close down the business, which, imho, is worse. At least, with the loan, a business that's barely making any profit can continue to barely make any profit after the crisis (but even less profit for the loan repayment). That's a better outcome than losing the business entirely. The employees remain employed, and the economy doesn't grind to a screeching halt into a depression.
Yeah everything is good for bitcoin. Yawn.
Cool, that's a great example, and I see exactly why it's a problem (I've implemented raft).

Thank you for clarifying.
I won't tell you how to invest, as who knows, other than that if Buffet buys then that is probably a good time to buy.

I will ponder a question though, will the flight from markets drive more money into other assets asides cash?

For instance, we are selling a farm property right now (in a small city, not a hot market) and don't yet know if it will be impacted by the overall economic climate. Part of me thinks more people might move their assets into farm/raw/rural land as another "hard" asset during these times. But there's no way to really know without observing.
Using a Mobile App for Contact Tracing Can Stop the Coronavirus Pandemic
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/m.html

How about the world of radio waves? Type in 198, AM. There's a good documentary of Apollo 13 on the Beeb currently, 7:43 PM PT, 0243 UTC :-)
> Onyx Boox Max 3.

Can you tell me if the Onyx Boox Max 3 works with USB-C to USB-C cables? I had a Onyx Boox Nova and it was noncompliant somehow, I had to only use the USB-C to A cable that came with it. I ended up selling it for that reason -- I didn't want to carry around a single cable just for this device when all my other devices are USB-C.
At this point I hope they do. I'm sick of seeing the governor pleading on television and people not taking him seriously. I have friends that literally don't get that this is much more serious than the flu. There are daily posts on Facebook about how it's a conspiracy of the government to control us or there's posts about how this illness isn't worse than any flu that's come through and it's going to bankrupt people. Just sick, ignorant people that don't give a rats.
Yes, that means that "Amazon delivery person" is a job that will continue existing. It does not mean it will have the same person in it.
You got the wrong computing device when you got your iPad, should have got a macbook
Do these alternative topologies still have the proven guarantees that raft has?
Programming on a projector is the stuff nightmares are made of... but it still beats a whiteboard.

Anyway, I don't think those boards are there to investigate ability. They are basically useless for that. If they have a rational motive at all, it's probably because the most strict schools teach the "assemble everything in your head, then write it" method, so they accidentally select people with good credentials.
> but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee

What would be the reasons for that?
Adding onto my last comment, is Stackpath container pricing cheaper than yours at the moment?

I understand this might be due to Stackpath being a larger company and owning hardware instead of renting it. But the price for traffic and compute seem to be cheaper. There is also no mention of how much you charge for storage on the pricing page.

I’m looking to deploy my next app onto one of these platforms and would like to know the price differences!
To be fair, if we had started back then there is almost zero chance that we'd need to pull in additional factories like this.

Although arguably there might not be much need now either. The companies that make these have said that production can be increased.
Fed reinstates multi-trillion dollar bailout program for Wall Street
We'll have to agree to disagree. Writing a manual security layer that doesn't understand your data model is one of the worst things you can do. Multiple databases? Now you're also manually doing integrity and probably manually doing joins. That's a ton of extra things to go wrong.

As an example, consider a query that is fairly complex. How exactly are you going to make resuable security tests for it? How do you know that an error in the query won't expose unexpected data, or that a modification to the query that introduces and error exposes unexpected data? Your security now has to be customized to every query like this.

The alternative case is that you only use super simple queries so that you can write resuable security checks. But now I'm going to ask why you are using a relational database in the first place? Because almost certainly you're doing manual joins in this scenario and incurring huge performance hits.

If you are using a relational database to its full extent, there is nothing as secure as built in row level security. You wouldn't dream of doing integrity checks outside the database, why do security?
"Expired" might mean that the mask material has disintegrated and could itself be sucked into the lungs. Or perhaps it means that fungal infections could have grown in the masks. Or maybe the government really made a decision based on short term thinking and tossed the masks to make room for piles of salt or something. Or maybe the cost of storing masks really isn't worth it because there's lots of things that can decimate society (nuclear war?) and we needed to more urgently spend money there. Who knows, right?
> their 3 biggest increases in new cases were the last 3 days

As raw numbers but not percentages. 13% each of the past 3 days is better than the 15-25% (mostly nearer 25%) of the past few weeks.
Not sure if you recall, but in January China put large portions of the country under lockdown in a quarantine effort of unprecedented scale. At that point, the writing was on the wall that this was not something that "looked exactly like the other comparatively minor respiratory viruses that pop up every few years".
My HR friends say it matters to some. That engineer looks better
As a 5th generation Detroiter; this offer makes me very, very proud.
> This didn't warrant that kind of response in January

Could China's mobilization of resources have been a hint to us that this would have made sense? Even early on there were stories breaking of people taking double doses of some meds to lower their temperature to get through fever screening. Shortly after that we found out there was a very long incubation period. Shortly after that there was talk of mild/asymptomatic spread.

All the while no one shut down air travel and boarders while China locked down it's country.

It's not the time to play the blame game but saying this is entirely hindsight doesn't make sense to me. Many people were talking about stocking and isolating in Jan/Feb. Back then they are just met with misinformed masses "the flu kills..."
Is asking people to keep hope alive the same thing as shaming them for feeling hopeless? I hope my words don't come out that way, since it's certainly not what I intend.

Also, one point I'm making here is that a small dev may not be able to make a world-dominating project by themselves, but it may serve as the foundation of something larger later. Is that really surprising or controversial?

Perhaps a more important point I'd like to make is that neither Apple nor Google were quixotic enough to start a browser engine from scratch, for all of their expertise and cash. Without KHTML, we might still be suffering under IE or something even worse. It may take someone willing to tilt at windmills to dethrone Blink/Chrome, I don't think the suits will save us.
> How about a priority heap? It's much more useful to sort things by their min priority, but just telling me the priority at the end isn't helpful. You'll want the thing as well.

Sure, but again, at that point you're not taking the minimum thing, you're taking the thing with the minimum priority. And it wouldn't be strange to say that two things have the same priority (even if they're different things).
By late January the Chinese government had already ordered the lockdown in Wuhan. There were plenty of signs that this wasn't an unremarkable minor respiratory virus.
Yep. My training is all biomedical, extreme skepticism is like a brainstem reflex at this point!
I'm not going to argue. We only need to wait for 2 months to see who's right.
Yup checksumming and snapshots and compression and at rest encryption are amazing to name a few
IMO engineer implies the same direction of thing it implies anywhere else: a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're building, an ability to rigorously model and optimize for the key aspects of your problem space and turn them into a solid design that meets them (whether that's performance, scaleability, reliability, latency, throughput, memory use, etc)

Programmer moreso implies just making things work, like a carpenter, by putting together something good enough using existing tools, possibly constrained by the tools available to you, in my opinion.

That said, everyone's understanding breaks down at some level of abstraction, so it's a spectrum, and you can be plenty productive and useful operating at a high level of abstraction.
I imagine they have some algorithm that takes an input consisting of the title, abstract, and authors with the information about how impactful their previous work has been (this is probably the most important factor) and outputs some ranking or a likelihood that the research will be cited/clicked on.
I hope this update introduces global preferences. Keeping preferences synchronized between different workspaces can be a real chore.