skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saudi arabia still need a barrel price of 80$ to keep their budget balanced. They have also mostly eaten through their reserves and are economically 100% oil dependant. Yeah it costs them only 2-3$ to get the oil from the ground but Saudi Arabia is basically just a huge welfare state and a kleptocracy for it's ridiculous number of princes and royal family members.

Russia has more flexibility imo and can cope a lot better with low oil prices, but Iran will probably see an even bigger economic collapse since they were already selling at a steep discount to offset trade sanctions.

Venezuela was also selling at really low prices and couldn't even afford to keep It's oil infrastructure from collapsing at 50$/barrel so I have no idea how they will avoid total economic destruction soon. Maduro won't be able to pay off the army for long now

So they are all going to be badly hurt, I don't see how saudi arabia can afford prices these low for long. They can't do like they did in the past and just drive everyone else from the market by crashing prices at will.
I want to agree with you, but I don’t think people have yet realized the depth of the depression we’ll be in even when the peak has passed.

We’re going to need to bounce back as much as we can, which means increased oil consumption.

It might mean coal gets knocked back, however!

Just saw a coal train going to the coal export terminal by my house that looked mostly empty.

Already, coal is down to just 22% of US electricity as of the end of January. It’s possible it could fall below nuclear power by the end of the year.
sure. the video conversion is running on AWS Fargate, with bits and pieces running on AWS Lambda. The speech synthesis is either Amazon Polly (neural voices) or Google Cloud Text to Speech (Wavenet).

Under the hood, the conversion system is using Chrome headless to generate slides, render markdown and provide syntax highlighting. Most of the video and audio processing is with FFMpeg and SOX.
Really enjoyed Christopher Bishop's book Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
A few years ago my startup was killed by a AWS mistake that ran overnight. The irony: my AWS expert at the time had made exactly the same provisioning mistake at his previous job - so I figured he'd never make a $80k mistake again. It turns out - his mistake with my startup was even more impressive. More positively - he did help shell out with me to cover the cost & overnight we were out of money. The mistake shocked me so much, and I've since heard so many stories of similar mistakes. The event hit me so hard I went back in time to PHP and shared hosting. Not kidding.
Reaching the Singularity May Be Humanity’s Greatest and Last Accomplishment
Wow, really nice! I will try using this as an extra resource for teaching my coding classes.
Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature
I think they were referring to the delivery drivers in California the article talks about not nurses in Croatia.

Regarding the bracing situation (outside of going to jail for talking about it) that does seem to be the effect everywhere. Heavily rationed PPE, mandatory overtime, PTO cancelled.
There's also a fair bit of "engineering for engineering's sake" (as a parallel of "art for art's sake" - "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art's_sake), "divorced from any didactic, moral, politic, or utilitarian function".
Siddhartha, Hesse

Foundation, Asimov

1984, Orwell

Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

Enders Game, Card

Jurassic Park, Crichton

Still waking up, so not going justify beyond saying these all changed how I see the world in some way at the time I read them.
Well done Google for cancelling the jokes 5 days before otherwise this would have been seen as an April Fools paradox.

To be fair, its perfect timing to call off the April fools jokes anyway since at a time like this, public health is at serious risk when reading 'medical content' on the internet in general from people and sources pretending to be 'medical experts'; especially on social media.

When Fake News Day arrives, take everything with a dose of skepticism.
This means absolutly nothing. Please stop making dramatic charts out of pure sensationalism.
I also do this, among other things to find subtle bugs in code and math. For every unbounded variable, what happens if it is 10^100, or 10^-100? It's a good habit that also makes you view division and logarithms with great suspicion :)
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is really a perspective expanding book. It just took a lot of persistence to get through as, at times, it was quite frustrating to read.

Perhaps I should read it again to get a deeper appreciation for it
Thanks for the biological analogy. Do you have other biological metaphors for other industries (or know of source(s))?

Related: Biologically Inspired Design:

> Center for Biologically Inspired Design at Georgia Tech: http://www.cbid.gatech.edu/
I don't know if any of that is true. I'm a free information guy and author and despite having a million users of my website, I'm not even profitable.

It's not some clickbait garbage either. It's been front page HN numerous times.

What should I be doing? I have a paid book as an option. But everyone Google searches "free book", it was so bad I ended up making my own free link for SEO reasons.
NOTE: This is tongue-in-cheek (for the most part). However, I cannot help but feel that articles like this are a subtle form of social manipulation; especially for younger, less experienced programmers.

From the article:

* The software is not the purpose

Translation: your craft, how you do it, and why are not important. Going meta for your profession is not valued and if people see you doing it, you're in trouble. Let the guilt wash over you, heathen!

* Understand the problem

Translation: going meta (refactoring, egads!) is wrong. We're watching you and if you do this, you're in trouble. If you aren't feeling guilty yet, now is the appropriate time. In addition, you must feel shame for your irresponsibility!

* Perfect is the enemy of good enough

Translation: going meta -- unless it is to realize a clever kludge -- means you are a perfectionist. You're wrong! We're watching you and if you do this, you're in trouble. You're one of those prima donna programmers, aren't you? We have no need for you!

* Choose your battles

Translation: Everyone starts off doing everything by hand, so -- you know -- the whole notion of writing software in the first place is kind of a Faustian Bargain. Hey, why did we hire you anyway? It's clear you're one of those whinging, prima donna, basement dwelling, perfectionist, programmer A-type people. I see we need more money in the "team building" budget. You're fired. Now is the appropriate time to feel like a loser, because you are!

* The best cod (sic) you can write, is no code at all

Translation: We can't even be bothered to spell "code" properly, which shows you how important it is to us. Truthfully, if there were a magic product we could buy that does what you do -- but better! -- we would. Don't you dare start thinking about weighing cost/benefit of buy-versus-build. We know you programmer types. You just want to build stuff and it's never the right stuff and you can't estimate for crap and your profession doesn't matter. Screw it, let's just put out an RFP and see if someone has a silver bullet so we can use it against you programmers! Lead bullets aren't working.

Postscript:

OK, now that I got all the snark out of my system, I feel better. It isn't that parts of this article are wrong but rather it makes extremely broad assumptions that all programmers are doing the same thing, in the same context, for the same reasons.

The current gestalt around software development appears to be that only a select few are allowed to decide the "state of the art" in the profession. These anointed few enjoy autonomy and full creativity but the rest of us must check our brains at the door.

Maybe it's just me, but I find this attitude extremely risky and deleterious to the industry and the human race. Of course, I am a grey beard, basement-dwelling, prima donna, perfectionist, anti-social, programmer so nobody will be surprised.
Thank you. I did not know that.
Yes I came here to post this one as well, together with Narziss and Goldmund and Steppenwolf - I read all of them in a pretty short period. There is a sort of common theme where Hesse explores the trade-offs between a life of thinking vs a life of feeling (most obviously in Narziss and Goldmund) which at that time meant a lot to me. I can't think of another author whose work resonated in the same way, though I'm not sure I would have the same experience rereading the books now.
Hey, I’m Important
Illusions Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

An amazing book about choices. And what you can and cannot control in your life. I read it in college and have re-read it over the years.

https://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Adventures-Reluctant-Richar...
Since MSIX, Windows has brought UWP sandbox to Win32 as well.

The upcoming Windows 10X sandboxes everything by default, including Win32 applications.
There is significant regulation for prepay of things in many jurisdictions. Eg gift cards, and it is likely that the cloud businesses do not want to enter that mine field.

Yes some of them have gift card programs already, but they probably don't want expanded regulations to contend with large sums of money.
Hm, Sweden used to have huge strategic reserves, somewhere. Wonder if most if those are all destroyed or just empty.
Also a good reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if you can. They do amazing work and it is not cheap: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204428347444547584
I'd love a jit for DosBOX-X, or Qemu. I know, KVM, but think about emulating non-native archs. Or systems without KVM support.
>That the idea of "put them out of business and then double the price" won't really work in a practical manner.

Well, then you haven't paid any attention because that isn't the strategy. The strategy is to force them to become members of the cartel or you risk taking losses every decade. Those losses aren't high enough to drive out competition but they are high enough to make cooperation appealing.
> Sounds like an improvement actually. Less people leeching off the system, either through welfare, or by being rich enough to just sit and live off savings.

Any opinion that starts with the equivalent of "I'm OK with the deaths of those people because I don't think that they have full value" (referring to someone as a leech on the system is basically just saying that they are worth less as a part of society than the non-leeches) is not one that I hope to see much endorsed.
-> rented on AirBNB could be 3-5 times the basic rental rate

He has more expenses than your average long-term rental. He's probably making more money (thanks to his active management) but it's not crazy profitable, far from it.

One possibility is that he is renting long-term and then subletting on Airbnb. If the bookings stops, then he'll be burning lots of cash rapidly.
Ah, I still remember the sweet smell of methanol.
As Covid-19 cases rise in India, “Covtech” based surveillance intensifies
Surprised how no one mentioned Little Brother[1] by Cory Doctorow and the sequel Homeland[2]

It's near-future Sci-Fi and since it was written in 2008, it's more or less present now. It dives into a lot of topics that are relevant nowadays

1. https://craphound.com/littlebrother/

2. https://craphound.com/homeland/
I have a prepaid account at Aruba Cloud for my VPS, zero risk. Just top up when necessary.
thanks. that's one of my use cases as well, so as an extra tip, you can generate code snippets over video or images just by adding a fenced code block. eg

---

![](background.jpg)

```js

//anything here will be rendered as a slide on top of the background, with javascript highligthing

```

---

There's a full example here: https://github.com/videopuppet/examples/tree/master/slides
Amazon profits off price gouging, though, because they get a percentage of the profits. And since price gouging isn't strictly illegal -- it's seen as a perfectly valid part of capitalism by the state -- there isn't really any way to disincentivise it.
>Do you think there is "a gene" for being an asshole on the internet?

Well of course, there are multiple such genes that predispose people toward being "assholes" on the internet. One could argue that autism related genes increase the odds that a person will be called an asshole online.

>Is there an instruction, or a group of instructions, responsible for a computer game being terrible

Well you're kind of stretching with this analogy here...code doesn't sexually reproduce and lines of code don't typically have such global and complex functions.

>Talking about separating the noise or environmental influence is "not even wrong".

That's a little ridiculous, isn't it? Are you saying there's no reason to study the relationship between behavior and genes because there's too much noise? Is that something you think is true or something you want to be true?

Because OP literally proves you wrong...
The GC is still nondeterministic though.
Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship, sewage is not considered mission critical and required to have multiple redundancy. You can, after all, take a poop in a bucket and throw it over the side. Redundancy engineering is reserved for truly mission-critical things, like being able to find and shoot the enemy, and surviving a certain amount of damage. You don't waste valuable redundancy resources on things like this.
You're missing the point.

The goal of cooking meals is to have a meal at the end. Because people need to eat. The food is the solution to the problem you have.

People don't consume software, slurping up lines of code like ramen. Having a steaming bowl of software is not the end goal. The end goal is to solve some _other_ problem which may or may not, once you dig into it, require writing software, and if it does then still: more software doesn't mean more food.
Governments and police in particular are customers for these tools and they do care about open source. If there was a good competitive FOSS tool out there, not a weekend project by any means, but a serious effort. It would be adopted.
Slavoj Zizek’s Covid-19 lockdown survival guide
> I didn't need an article to tell me "dunno lol". I knew I didn't know already.

But I think a lot of people don't know that they don't know. There are lots of problems where the scientific consensus is in, but the will isn't there to implement it—whether due to denial of the science or to fear of the costs. This is a situation where the scientific consensus isn't in; no-one knows for sure—and that's not a state in which the modern person is used to living, or realising they're living.
This. There are many possible scenarios how to end the shutdown, not one is back to normal on Monday.
It's definitely something we should put a marker on to come back to. Three weeks is a lot, and the full extent of measures here just isn't feasible outside of a pandemic. But if we come back in a year and realize there's been a significant impact on overall disease burden, maybe we should mandate a 2 week block of national holiday for all nonessential businesses.
Please do share what it was and why it happened, you can't leave us like that :) !
Everything is connected. You can't do without them any better than they can do without you.
You mean behave like the usual curl ... | sh advice that is so prevalent nowadays?
The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson. I read it in middle school, although they later removed it from our library as it had some explicit themes. It was an amazing escape into an alien world, and an amazing alien species/civilization that I could not have imagined had I not read about it here. A human crash lands on this planet and is forced to live with and adapt to this bizarre species and their way of life. Reading this in my mind was more like living it. Eventually I bought a copy second hand for myself. It was one of only two books that I brought with me when I moved to the other side of the world years ago and now I have trouble finding it. I wish there was a Kindle version.
I am a tech writer and I write tasks and procedures using DITA-XML. I was thinking about transforming my .dita files to .mlt to use in shortcut/melt, but I think I'm going to use this instead.
I came here to just recommend 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. Such a profound, breathtaking novel.
I agree the absolute number of cool things done with Java is bigger, but the average Java project is very bland and as a Java programmer you are very unlikely to land one of these NASA projects.
Sure but that statistic is always measured as oil + natural gas + additives + other hydrocarbons. If you can find a source for crude oil extraction, not production, the US would almost certainly not be #1.
The way Edmond escapes the prison was the best thing I've ever read.
> Physiologically, no, we don't.

The grandparent mentions gyms as one of these non-essential institutions, and they or their equivalent are something we need even physiologically. The impacts on health of not being able to get out and move regularly, much less to have serious exercise, are going to worsen the already serious problem of obesity.
When people break not when policy dictates. People get complacent once numbers go down and there seems like containment which looks to be happening in Korean and Hong Kong.

Young adults living in cramped share houses in a city aren't going to stay in for the summer or go celibate for the months decision makers are thinking. At least in dense urban areas, there's too much quality of life disparities for long term behavior change like this to be feasible.

IMO Social distancing is to buy a few precious months max for logistics and medical system to prepare. Pretty soon economic stress exceeds fear of the disease. The financial aid package in most of the countries that can afford it leaves a lot of people behind.
Zenn and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- It was the first time I'd heard someone speak about values that mattered to me personally.

The Diamond Age: Or, A Ladies Young Primer -- A fantastic book about a future where computation and construction of devices is nearly free. It was about 25 years ago but predicted so many things. The story meanders a little but is full of amazing ideas and revolutionary thoughts.

I try to read both these books once a year.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article because I had a sense it will be a rehash of Dr. Taleb's work. That said I'm interested in your criticism of the man (or his work instead?). I've read Taleb's volume and found them convincing. They're well argued and pull from several sources (history being a big part, which appeals to me a lot as a history buff). Antifragile is up there with the best book I read and has merited a yearly re-read.
Uh. What. GFC. Great Firewall of China. It's the same dragnet stuff that NSA dreamed of, only enshrined in law and staffed with thousands of people, and well funded.

They have the technology. It's only a matter of time and economic expansion to get their stuff into other exchange points.

Huawei is a greater risk than let's say Eriksson or Nokia, because there is nothing to even suggest that they have any safeguards against a future intervention by the NSA or CCP. (And users won't reverse engineer every new firmeware update.)

How greater? Well, it's hard to say.

> I think it's alright, US is no longer the country that stands for something beyond nationalism and most of the Western nations are not covered by that American Nationalism.

Agreed :/
This book is just about to go to the printer. The book business has been turned upside down by COVID-19. We still offer free ebooks with print books purchased directly from our site but we don't know when we'll be able to ship to our customers directly again.

We'll also be pushing out a promotional offer on this book, likely this coming week so you may want to wait for that. Just trying to keep things on track now that our company is completely remote and physical book stores are closing left and right.
In nuclear engineering, we use computational fluid dynamics programs and fancy neutronics codes to model reactor concepts. I was reading some history recently and found that back in the nuclear heyday they just used plastic cutouts and flowed special fluids that defracted light differently when under tension to design components.

They also used electrically conductive paper and cut it out into odd shapes and applied a voltage since resistance is an analog of both neutron diffusion and heat transfer.

Wild.
Exclusively? No. But I think suicide is covered on some policies after a waiting period.
It's only a win after the switch to EVs. Before that you are going to need every drop of that oil.
I recently learned about School of the Air ¹, where classes were conducted by radio for children of rural areas in Australia. I wonder if something like that could be a temporary solution for rural America, until Internet infrastructure reaches those areas.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air
VideoPuppet is excellent. I am using it to create videos for the Five Minutes Serverless Youtube channel, and so far, results are outstanding. I can create a video from the markdown file really fast.
Video Puppet can also process YAML and JSON files, so if you are running an automated conversion from XML, it might be easier to output JSON instead of Markdown; in any case, should you need help, drop me an email at gojko@neuri.co.uk
The office that rented me the car closed, and I was not able to get in touch with them. I called the US Embassy and they were able to help me arrange for the car's return. They're main tip was to make sure I had a copy of the rental agreement with me.
There are other ways to setup guard-rails in Azure - policies are one such feature:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tut...

They may not necessarily enforce spending limits - but it's possible to restrict provisioning of costly resources, or even whitelist resources that can be provisioned.
Almost every Cloud Foundation project nowadays involves setting up these guard-rails.
I think they're taking the Imperial model with more credulity than is warranted here. Social distancing for 5 months was the suppression scenario the paper considered, but I don't think anyone believes the current set of severe restrictions could be sustained for that long. 5 months of a ban on large events, maybe.
4,656 to 4,758 crewmen, at $391 million average annual.
How’d you acquire that domain?
Healthcare saves lives --- by definition.
Google's April Fools jokes were pretty benign anyway... obviously anything related to the virus would be in terribly bad taste, but I don't see why something in the same vein as https://maps.googleblog.com/2012/03/begin-your-quest-with-go... would need to be cancelled. IF anything, we need the humor now more than ever to lift people's spirits.
I read it when I was 16 and it really changed my views

A couple years later I witnessed a lot of similar events to those in the novel, especially the protests and the government's reactions to them
When you buy print books from us you get the DRM-free ebooks too.

Amazon may ultimately discount this from the list price as they usually do but they are currently deprioritizing books due to the pandemic.
Efficacy matters. US has a cost disease. Also, in terms of GDP it's far from the highest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...