skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand that sentiment. But at the same time, if it ain't misinformation, I'm not sure what's wrong here. Sometimes the way to get started is by writing stuff while you are still too arrogant to not doubt (said with much affection). From code to essays, people's pasts are littered with stuff they cringe at years later. But it is what gets them started. So yea. Maybe we don't put anyone on a pedestal for shiny charts. But maybe we don't tear them down either :)

(also I say this fully appreciating that you were explaining the parent poster's view and you may not necessarily support it)
The mystery of Germany’s low coronavirus death rate
The maddening part is that we had the capability to deal with this and the systematically destroyed it.

There was a stockpile, but it was allowed to be depleted. There was a pandemic response team, but they got laid off. Hell, the Obama-Trump transition teams even wargamed this exact scenario but it wasn't taken seriously.
Companies borrow money to buy back their shares because they can borrow for long terms at interest rates below the long term of inflation.
Reminds me of this:

https://xkcd.com/1217/
An ECG is obviously a medical device.

A contact tracing app is far less obviously in that category. It might be, but it might fall under various exemptions, with the right disclaimers.

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-software-function...

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

> Many software functions are not medical devices (meaning such software functions do not meet the definition of a device under section 201(h) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act)), and FDA does not regulate them as devices. Some software functions may meet the definition of a medical device, but because they pose a lower risk to the public, FDA intends to exercise enforcement discretion over these devices (meaning it will not enforce requirements under the FD&C Act).
The Fed also kept interest rates near zero for years after the last recession. That’s where all the cheap credit came from in the first place.
Paying providers directly either means micropayments or committing to reading enough of that specific news source to get a non-micropayment-sized amount of value from it. No one has really cracked micropayments in a way that has caught on, yet, and the model of depending on a single source for a majority of news has gone the way of print newspapers.

Bloomberg, NYT, WashPo, the Economist, and other such places need to figure out how to provide value commensurate with the money they charge, or else figure out how to exist in a world where one of "their" readers still visits dozens or hundreds of other such outlets a month.

> Try 3 months for -$105- $6. Cancel anytime.

The 105 is just a joke, and even $2 a month is very high, considering there'd be similar payments to 20+ other such outlets.
Fed Infinite Printing US Dollar Makes Bitcoin Scarcity More Important Than Ever
The $340 million in Google Ads credits is self serving bullcrap. They are going to flood their ad markets with credits so that they can keep CPMs inflated so that the real advertisers have to continue paying inflated prices.
This is a good point, but I've been getting the feeling that the working class is getting more and more fed up with our conditions as we're squeezed for every last dollar of surplus value.

At the end of the day "the people in power" have power because the masses allow them to. If enough people refuse to participate in the system then the system will fall apart - e.g. the state only has the capacity to process so many evictions. This pandemic has been the greatest catalyst for class consciousness that I've seen in my life, and I think it has the potential to reshape our society after it's over.
Twitter, growing echo chamber: More retweets that original content since 2018
I don't get it. I get that you don't like the adalytics-based business model, you don't use the product. But I don't see a rational basis for making that conditional on cash price, which is an independent concern.
It only makes sense if you value the product at somewhere between the cash price and (the cash price - the adalytics cost), and $0 cost is exceedingly unlikely to be the exact boundary.

It only makes sense if you make the unsupported leap in logic that says that the cash price is itself promise to not use analytics. But you are willing to accept $0 adalytics-supported products, and FOSS exists and some has adalytics and some doesnt, showing that $0 is not any kind of meaningful boundary.
Ask HNs: Help finding OS soft explicitly made to fight the Covid-19 epidemic
Hi all!

A number of us (tech startups, volunteers, big-company sponsored task forces, etc.) have been working alongside various government agencies from our respective countries to see how we can help the government response of the COVID-19 epidemic. Having been coordinating for a month with a couple of countries (and having worked in the Govtech space for years), I see a few repeating patterns.

For example, most of the response in various countries is done by a (1) Minister of Health organization (where you have a CDC-like department underneath it) that is not super heavily tech-inclined, and which is asking for tech help from a (2) Government Digital Services department that is good at solving generic tech problems, but it is being stretched for resources and sometimes out of their comfort zone with the problems they are being asked to intervene in.

Another repeating pattern is that every country has started to write their own COVID-19 self-evaluation and infected tracking app, mainly to reduce every country's excessive calls into their official healthcare government phone numbers. Within this environment is that Apple and Google have been aggressively removing COVID-19 apps from their respective stores, unless they have some sort of government-backed documentation. A lot of these apps are open source, which leads me to the question:

Do you know of any good open source applications that have been developed explicitly to help fight this COVID-19 epidemic?

Not interested in startup product pitches (heck, I would put mine in the bucket if this was the case).

I guarantee that whatever links you provide might actually make a difference in some country somewhere (at least I will point a few of the relevant LATAM agencies to this post).

Thanks!
Yes. Aggregate corporate profits have not gone up at all: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A053RC1Q027SBEA

There's a long way to go down to normalize this situation. I'm not saying this will happen, but the downside potential is enormous.

Also, don't forget about the 50% of US GDP ($11T) that have been loaded into US capital markets (both debt and equity) by foreigners. This is also hugely out of balance:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IIPUSNETIQ
For a few weeks possibly, but most of their items can be ordered online and their failure would open many doors for new stores.

Also, the overwhelming majority of people are driving to Walmart so even if significantly less convenient they can also drive somewhere else.
It's funny that we're technically cheering on a cartel (OPEC) to artificially raise prices for a commodity that the world depends on.

Ok maybe not so funny, but it's a conversation worth having, isn't it? Doesn't it imply something severe about free market innefficiencies?
It's healthy in some ways and unhealthy in others. Overall, I guess I'd have to say that it's healthy since the quality of the content and discussion far exceeds Reddit, Twitter, etc.

But it's not without serious flaws. As others may have mentioned, there's a lot of groupthink here that's shrouded under very academic/intellectual pretense. Because everyone wants to look like they're on the cutting edge, the community creates this illusion that "only real developers use <insert language/framework of the day>". I'm almost certain that a lot of content gets no attention or isn't discussed because it's not considered cool.

However, this is nothing new. I haven't really seen this community degrade in that sense.

What has degraded is the community's attitude towards voting/downvoting. In my opinion, as I have expressed many times, the comment voting system is broken. Obviously, there needs to be some kind of community moderation, so I'm not necessarily saying that the system should be abolished(not yet), but it's not functioning that well in its current state. Users have to be extremely careful about what they post because, if misinterpreted in the slightest way, your opinion, even if civilized and valid, will be demoted. If your comment is even the slightest shade of grey, few will take it seriously, and it will be pushed down on the heap. All it takes is a few people to not like what you have to say and press the down arrow in the belief that their dislike should mean something.

Over the past maybe 4 years, I've noticed more people taking advantage of downvoting rather harmless comments without creating a discussion about why they feel that way. This is harmful because, due to the mechanics of downvoting, people are de-legitimizing others when they should really only reserve the down arrow button for "This comment is blatantly rule-breaking/offensive/wrong, and others shouldn't see it". The latter really should be a rarity.

I don't know if it's just the politics of our time that have encouraged everyone to hold strong opinions on everything, but the increase in downvoting behavior makes me believe that downvoting should be removed and replaced with flagging. Maybe HN runs on bare bones, but if something isn't breaking the rules, then it shouldn't be suppressed, but if something breaks the rules, moderation should know about it rather than letting randos on the internet determine what's legitimate and what isn't.

TL;DR The community is healthy in that it has above-average caliber in discussion, but there's a higher level of intellectual suppression and back-patting than I've seen elsewhere.
I am unfamiliar with the history of that particular document. I don't really want to get into the question of climate change here.

Nonetheless, I see what you mean about high vs. low magnitude coefficient trust. Personally, I don't assign a particularly high-magnitude coefficient for Cato either. However, I don't assign a particularly high magnitude coefficient to any economic/political think tank. For two reasons:

1. Economics is not a science in any meaningful sense of the word. There is no empirical process for falsifying theories; there is merely a dialectic. Now, the dialectic can be more or less rigorous, but there is an upper-bound to the level of certainty that dialectic can provide.

2. Everyone has an agenda. This is inescapable when it comes to politics. The best we can hope for is that all parties demonstrate some self-awareness of that fact.

Relative to plenty of other sources, I would say that Cato ranks relatively well. At the very least, they are one of the most respectable libertarian sources, and should probably be taken seriously (even if you disagree with them).
If they hadn't injected this credit you would see your CPMs decline and you'd be able to generate a better margin. Now your ad dollars have to compete with all of this free money until it runs out. You and I will receive no benefit from this.
Japan has high population density but a small piece of land, and it is probably the most mono-cultural population of it's size in the world.

I agree that we need in America is stronger leadership. But we shouldn't be looking to the government for leadership. The government should follow the will of the people, not lead it.

Democratic governments act when they feel the people want them to act. The reason the US government didn't act early is because the majority of Americans were not yet concerned about the coronavirus until recently, and it would have been unpopular.

Japan would not have acted so strictly and so early if their culture and respect for community weren't strong. It would have been unpopular and ineffective.

What's needed for Americans to tackle these types of issues better is more trust in the community and stronger citizen leadership.
What makes you think this is not already the case?
> Also HN is mostly free of the unproductive "culture wars" discussions that have led to the heat death of so many fora.

This is objectively and demonstrably false. The wars just manifest differently and happen to lead to an outcome that you prefer.

There's a reason this site has "avoid controversial topics unless you have something new to add" or however it's phrased in the guidelines. Let me be completely and plainly clear: there is an HN culture. You will be banned, often quietly, if you wander off that reservation.

---

Edit: Dan, I'm rate limited, so you get the edit here because I can't be bothered to account hop again.

Grandiose? You ban people for not adhering to a culture. How is that even a remotely controversial statement? What else would you ban them for?

There is a set of guidelines and approaches you want in place for HN behavior. When people fail to meet those, you give them a couple chances and then remove them from the community. Examples: "We've asked you to be nicer," or "we've asked you not to bring up gender politics," or whatever nice explanation you give.

There's a word for that kind of thing; that word is culture.

I wasn't even criticizing moderation, because I'm not sure what I could add there because it's your employment to manage this stupidity, but you sure showed up fast assuming I was. Is it really like that now? Nobody can speak objectively about how this site works and point out an incontrovertible fact without you taking it personally and trying to rally a bunch of usernames you've never met to believe you?

While I have you, I appreciated that you declined to share your age in that fawning profile you and Scott got. That was tacit admission of your own site's culture, and you know it.

---

Edit 2: I'm really enjoying watching your comment evolve via edits into reading back exactly what I'm saying from a position of authority and then challenging me to find authority.
Barely, the only reason co-owning a shared-pointer for a little while is a problem is because of performance problems caused by locking.
Kudos to NYT, but I think the COVID Tracking Project data is probably better because it attempts to measures total testing as well (positives and negatives). I've been using it to report state-level testing statistics and new case/death curves:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/

From the data I've learned that Washington state appears to be getting their arms around this thing:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/washington/
Albertans overrate this. Equalization took about 4.4% of Alberta’s provincial revenues in 2017-2018. And Alberta is tiny within Canada: 11.7% of population roughly.

So this is....not that big an amount? 4.4% of a fairly small budget relative to the total country.

Further, Alberta has had a large net inflow of young, productive workers from the rest of Canada. If there was no oil, these workers would mostly go work and be productive elsewhere, increasing local tax revenues.

Alberta did contribute wealth to the rest of the country. But Albertans tend to both overestimate this contribution and also ignore that they benefit from young workers trained and educated by provincial budgets elsewhere.

Source for equalization percent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Can...

(Alberta is not the only
province to pay into equalization)
I sincerely doubt "buying time for the west" was even remotely in the minds of any Communist Party officials in charge of the lockdown. They committed to the lockdown so their own medical systems wouldn't get overwhelmed and cause even more economic damage, just like everyone else.

US adaptation will take the form of putting systems in place to prevent a re-occurrence. Of course we move too slow in the initial crisis, we always have. Any democracy moves slower than an authoritarian dictatorship in the moment, that's one of the trade-offs. It's frustrating, but a natural feature of the system, and pays dividends in the long-term.

China's trajectory over the past 15 years has been providing cheap labor to be the world's workshop. But that labor is no longer as cheap, automation continues to advance, and companies were already relocating their supply chains due to political/economic/IP theft concerns, Samsung being the most notable example. Now this? There will be a surge.

That and the Chinese's government's bottomless-loans-as-political-favor policy can't last forever. And thanks to the one child policy they're facing a major age and gender demographic crisis. China is also dependent on imports for food and energy.

They exist in their modern form at at the pleasure of the rest of the world. The foundation for their economic miracle was the west opening them up to world trade to distance them from the Soviets, and later cheap labor. It was never anything intrinsic to China or Chinese power. The moment they try to force their will on the world they'll find their ability to do so is short-lived.
> may take 7 days

This is one of the things at minimum that fends off takeover accounts from people demanding immediate access and faking urgency, while also notifying all associated accounts that someone is trying to recover access and giving them time to respond.
Are even basic needs met...? To put it a little acerbically: what is more valuable, global ventilator & mask stockpiles - or having in your grocery store 6 varieties of applesauce (which all taste the same) instead of 5 varieties (which all taste the same)?
Ask HN: How do you synthesize what you learn?
Smart people frequently mention having mental models or a "tree" of knowledge to which they add new information.

There seems to be alot of apps that encourage note-taking or information storage/sharing but few that truly encourage critical thinking or synthesis.

An exception?:
https://roamresearch.com/
They've buried the lede. In the last sentence, in the last 6 words.

> With Corporate profit growth unmasked and the Baby Boomer’s transition into retirement, it seems unlikely that stocks will make a quick return to their prior levels unless governments engage in massive asset inflation.

It is not the Federal Reserve's mandate to inflate asset values, however it tends to be a consequence of their mission to support low unemployment and some stable, positive inflation. We have $6 trillion in emergency stimulus arriving shortly -- two thirds of that support is monetary policy.
I believe that not being able to see the "upvotes" on each comment is a good thing, and really cools down a lot of the intense vibes. People place way to much emphasis on this number, and I'm glad we don't have them here. Also good: submissions cannot be downvoted. Flagging appears to be a kind of pseudo-downvoting in that it causes submissions to fall in rank, but does not effect the upvote score. Compare with other sites like reddit or the stackoverflows, it really sucks submitting stuff there and then having it be downvoted to oblivion. Once you attach a number to something, it heavily biases your opinion of that thing, be it number of followers, or dollars, or upvotes, or whatever. There's probably some psychology experiment I should be citing here...
Is the sky blue? The Pope catholic?

Vast money supply inflation, rock-bottom interest rates, stagnant wages, share buybacks. All accelerating over the last several decades.
2010 called, it wants its memes back.
I feel a lack of empathy in this comment, and, since empathy is the topic, a lack of self-awareness as well.
This statement of yours shows a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between price and availability as it pertains to oil: less availability only implies higher price in a very local way and for very short time spans.
Oil is too vital to the global economy, it's not competing against any other energy source at its scale and mode of usage, and it's availability conditions enough of all economic activity, that availability conditions affordability for all economic actors.
There is therefore no correlation between availability (production volumes) and prices for oil.
I tried: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/117
Your average Gen-Xer is 50+ years old today, so your very bleak picture fails to acknowledge that they've also been the benficiary of all the public expenditures and national debt that funded it.

Outside of the US Millenials have enjoyed cheaper (when adjusted) education than ever before and better healthcare. I think you paint an unnecssarily bleak and defeatist future (coming from another in a similar situation)
> people would sell their homes for a dollar just to get away from the mortgage

That's not how mortgages work in the USA — or any other country I've heard of! Usually, the way a mortgage works, is that you owe the lender the money, and the house is the collateral asset. Divesting yourself of the asset usually requires you to pay off the balance of the mortgage on sale.
So nothing that qualifies you to speak as an expert on matters of medicine. I refer you back to your own words:

>> "without idiots posting on web forums about their non-expertise and not giving in to who can yell the loudest."

I don't think you need credentials to learn enough about a topic to discuss it intelligently, but I do think people should be consistent in application of their own standards.
The first point I make is that profit growth has been flat since ~2014 but the stock market has gone up quite a bit.

My question is: Why had the stock market continued to go up despite flat profits?
Social distancing fashion: 19th-century women had to keep the wrong men away
Are you sure about that? All the people in your town would also have to shop at those alternatives as well.

Do you think that there is enough inventory and stock to go around? Would those alternatives replenish their inventory in a timely fashion? Would you seek alternatives to your normal shopping?

I think people vastly overestimate the capabilities of their local options.
haha - if you agree to do technical support for all the people fumbling around with other clients - they MIGHT say yes.

One reason zoom is POPULAR with the IT folks - less tech support / help desk stuff. Test my audio is the biggest tip for folks stuck.
Agreed. I think it's a combination of maturity in the participants (the symbolic $5 helps here), and also tough but fair moderating really helps.
The idea is similar to the previous financial crisis, except this time, it’s abstracted a layer higher. The previous crisis was a severe drying of credit that had (what they literally called it) a “contagion” and systemic effect. This time, there’s an actual contagious virus that is threatening the banking system if people can’t pay their bills, and the banks can’t pay who they owe because too many borrowers default. In other words, the Fed stepped in proactively because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to avoid any drying of credit.

The idea was never to keep the economy afloat- it was to build a bridge to prevent being exposed to the rough waters.
>
Longer term I think we will see a host of Zoom competitors, because really there is nothing special in the client. Hangouts in particular could easily eclipse it with some work.

Then why hasn't it, despite far more work and funding than Zoom, for over a decade?
This is a "I could have invented Facebook" comment. Things are
harder than you suggest.