skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say it is sort of the online community equivalent of a healthy big city, not a healthy small town. As such, it's not reasonable to expect the same sense of community here as you would with a smaller social group.

Last I heard, HN gets about 5 million unique visitors a month. The human brain can cope effectively with a community of around 150 members.

For a time, I was the lead mod for The TAG Project. Prior to my arrival, the founder had done some good internal research on her group of online communities (a set of email lists) and found that 20 percent of members were regular and active, another 10 percent posted once or occasionally and the rest were lurkers.

This seems to be roughly true for other communities I have participated in elsewhere.

If you do the math, that means you will have about 150 active members posting regularly when you get to about 750 members. In my experience, once you get to about 750 or 800 members, you start seeing splinter groups form and you start getting new things budding out of that.

Other small email lists began to spin off of one of those email lists once it got big enough.

So if you want a strong sense of community, you are talking about a small town atmosphere where you have about 150 active members and some number of lurkers.

I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community. But I don't feel strongly about it and I don't see any point in making it some hill to die on, so I think I have mentioned it in comments maybe once or twice before for some reason and that's it.*

Big cities rely on formality and such to account for the fact that we don't all know each other well etc. HN does a better job than most communities of actually applying the rules fairly even-handedly and not just playing favorites for certain insiders.

There are some really corrupt communities that pretend they are nice places, but the rules are applied by the mods completely differently for "insiders" versus "outsiders" and it's very toxic. No, they probably won't help you assimilate either.

This is not true here. The mods don't have to personally like you to give you a fair shake if you will make an effort to reform your bad habits and actually play by the rules.

I think HN is a healthy space, but no longer has a strong sense of community like it did when I first joined. But I was always an outsider looking in who never really got to benefit from that strong sense of community (in fact, it arguably did me a lot of harm).

I stuck around because it had those big city formality things already going on and was kind of the least worst option for my needs and purposes. It had virtues that helped me make it work for me in spite of humans being human and certain problems (like sexism) being rampant and inescapable across the globe.

* Edit: I run my mouth a lot. It's probably more than twice in the last decade, but I certainly don't harp on it.
If I'm not mistaken they don't offer Desktop apps and their browser experience has been just plain bad for me. Using Firefox on Linux I wasn't able to get mic and camera to work. While it did detect them just fine, it didn't allow enabling them. I tried that on multiple devices with the same result, so my take is that they consider Firefox as a second-class citizen.
This is really nice, are there any plans for Android deployment?
I think the "high-quality video conferencing" is the "hard to replicate" portion. I've used a lot of different conferencing platform and consistently zoom has been: Relatively easy to use, high quality, reliable.

Those last two portions are super critical. No one wants to spend the first 10 minutes of their meeting fighting with their conferencing technology. Also no one wants to sound like robots.

With COVID19 and a ton more people working remote, will there be more competition coming into the space? Sure. But it will take them a lot of work, I'd think, to at least meet Zoom's quality and reliability... and do it either so much better or for so much cheaper to warrant change.
Thousands* of hours in EU4 where you listen to an immersive playlist æsthetic to the nation/region you're playing and spend 80% of the time paused and reading Wikipedia about said nation/region.

Relevant combos:

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

https://youtu.be/NpCCYadZCNQ

,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_crosses_(Brugherio)#Bac...

https://youtu.be/BNnrRGNR0Ok
How much in taxes has Google avoided over the years???

Thats the actual funding the Government was Already supposed to have (and then be responsible for using correctly) to do this.

So, in my opinion, the Government (read: the fucking citizens of the country) should demand fealty payments from ALL the companies that were under-paying taxes.

All companies, who are considered "corp=people" should be taken to task and be required to PAY rather than get a bailout.

Have you noticed the marketing push by Verizon of late?

That company, for whom Ajit is their mole in the .gov, should be just nationalized and turned over. (obviously, this then means that its a 100% surveillance company... so that must be weighed)
Good if you are not trying to do some weird stuff like, god forbid, fractional scaling on wayland.
IRC bouncer with unregistered nick.
https://book.huihoo.com/pdf/confluent-kafka-definitive-guide...

https://dataintensive.net/
I think you are misunderstanding the parent's point. The basic gist is that any glove, mask, and ventilator manufacturer should at the very least get immediate working capital loans/grants from the government to expand production.

Guaranteeing the sale means that the manufacturer will assume no risk for overproduction. The price would be whatever the prevailing market price was before the crisis or maybe with a slight premium.

In essence, the government should remove all business risk for manufacturers of needed equipment.
Can you even get Windows 10 to show an analog clock?

More importantly, that doesn't show you AM/PM, or the differences in days, both of which are important.

(And there are edge cases where just another hour hand wouldn't be enough)
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's law)

Does this apply here? It seems you could argue that profit is the one true number that _is_ a good measure, but it seems even that can be 'hacked' so that it isn't good anymore.
It's certainly more nuanced than that. However, it does point out the fact that corporations focus too much on shareholder value as opposed to just making a good business system...except for the major players that is.

These the so called "too big to fail" types of companies which borderline monopolize market sectors like Amazon and Walmart. But they don't care during recessions because they're fine. They essentially are the government as they have a larger impact on your daily life than the actual government!

It's not so much that the stock buybacks are the straw that broke the camel's back, it's just another inevitable economic event that the invisible hand dealt. There is no stopping it. Otherwise we're just back in a labor economy again where money can't flow where irrational people deem they need to place it.
> The only thing you do is to move attention away from cryptocurrencies to (other) fiat currencies. They may have problems too.

Are there any NON-fiat currencies in use today?
> Interesting, but it's a lot easier to just toss out the inkjet and buy an inexpensive laser printer.

Ah yes, the true hacker ethos.
> Somehow it seems that Google has managed to disappoint a lot of people.

Yeah, and those people aren't wrong - it's not like Google didn't do their own share of messups.

Still, the upplaying of Googles' faults and downplaying of other companies faults (even when they're the same!) has not been the best outlook of this community lately.
I agree, this would look amazing on the watch.
I understand that, but I still dont trust it.

I want an app that tells me EVERYTHING that my phones radios are doing. ALL of them, and ALL the data.
I find this scary and telling.

"It is too early to say where the bottom is to this recession, but we have reason to believe the Millennials and Generation X do not have the resources to purchase the stock that Baby Boomers want to sell at prior market highs. 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's almost like bankrupting a generation by forcing them through punishingly expensive higher education, obscene healthcare costs, absurd cost of living in major metropolitan areas, and stripping worker benefits makes an entire generation of this country's youth unable to prosper like their predecessors. I truly have no idea what will be left behind for me and my peers, when all of this is said and done.
The cited data is from a paper The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Valid... in 1998 as a meta-analysis of other findings, but they are not specific to software development (one account is sourced from 32000 employees in 515 diverse civilian jobs in the 1980s). Maybe software is like any other job (sales, clerical, accounting) but maybe not.
He's not putting down people for self-learning, he's putting down people who think that they're an authority on a subject because they put in a few 70 hour weeks in a classroom.
Agriculture employs about 1.5% of the population of Canada according to the world bank. It's heavily automated and while crucial, it will never be able to employ a large fraction of the population. You can't wind the clock back to the 1900s without undoing all the gains made in the last century.

Alberta needs to look to Norway and Dubai for how you diversify away from oil in earnest.
Googling those people + the CEO of the company, they all seem to have moved on though. So I wonder if that company is even alive anymore.

I found this https://informaconnect.com/ventaleon-ceo-on-inhaled-drugs-fo... where the CEO said they had enough funding to produce the study but would need funding to move past that. Doesn't look like they got it.
Corona as Vaccine
It works just as well on Mac too, no markdown support though..
They should have picked a credible source of information.

I can't believe I'm typing that about the CDC...
Gets points with me for honesty in the comparisions page (https://www.talkyard.io/compared-with)
They do have a partership. I know RingCentral whilelabels Zoom for video, so maybe vice versa for phone.

https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/company/pressrele...
> This is only fair to Alberta, considering how much they’ve contributed to Canada’s GDP over the last two decades.

Is contributing to GDP something you get "credit" for? Or put another way, does someone living in Toronto get any benefit from this increase in GDP?
He's not "walking it back."

https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928
Metafilter now requires a nominal fee to participate, which cuts down on trolls and sockpuppets. It also limits you to one topic post per day, which cuts down on spam.

Quality and quantity seem to be inversely related in social media.
Thanks. I'm already in contact with the owner of the fork with most of the fixes to figure out how we can merge all these changes into the upstream project. He has promised me to open PRs to get the changes merged upstream.

I'm happy to add new members to the Github organization.
E-mail in the comment has a typo but is working :)

You can also reach us @ portostartup2020@gmail.com
A Survey of Deep Learning for Scientific Discovery
I try to do it, but then I end up using websites, log out, then log in after some time and get hooked on again... I used to have a blocker app acting as a pseudo VPN on iOS but I just turned it off constantly.
You are way more likely to get it from someone you know than a stranger. 80% of Wuhan infections were in 'familial clusters'.
I think there are views that are contrary to this in people who regularly browse it (like myself for example), it's just that they aren't held so vehemently that they have to announce or comment on it whenever it comes up, so you don't see as many comments contrary to these.
There's a tendency to be very idealistic when talking about IO in haskell, people talk about launching missiles when you ask to print a string and it makes you think we're purist fools. For debugging you can easily drop print statements in without affecting type signatures (with the Debug.Trace package) and this is really helpful but in production you almost never want logging inside pure functions. Think about it, why would you want to log runtime information inside a function that does arithmetic or parses a JSON string? The interesting stuff is when you receive a network request or fail to open a file.
Study: Bat-to-Human Leap Likely for SARS-Like Virus (2013)
The point is that the existing behavior is de-facto correct by virtue of being the existing behavior.

The goal here is not "Prove this software meets a spec" it is "This software is the spec, and we must not regress". There are many more systems that act as a defacto spec than that are built to an external one.

If you choose to then move to a world where you want an external spec, as I said, at that point some of these tests will be thrown away or refactored. Most systems never make it to that stage.

This is especially common when you have legacy software where the person or team that wrote the code is no longer there. It takes a monstrous amount of effort to derive a meaningful spec, and step 0 is always preserving existing behavior.
Corporations are the largest net purchasers of stock. The narrative was never "generations of ordinary people will support prices". Because ordinary people control proportionally small amount of the nation's total wealth.
Thanks, I appreciate a distinction that you're making between 'aggregation' and 'community conversation/engagement'. Have you been able to notice whether those 'button-pushing' types of comments ('highly emotional', 'imprecise in statement', 'poorly thought') are ones that push the buttons of the rest of the community as well? Do you consider yourself an outlier in this regard (having this sense for 'button-pushing' posts)?
> we expect that demand will tail off before supply does

While I agree with your "sound economics" conclusion, I think that tapering demand was not part of the "peak oil" modeling.

The underlying assumptions involve no particular shift to the oil demand curve, whereas with improvements to other energy technologies (renewable energy, but also natural gas) we find that oil demanded per unit output at a fixed oil price appears to decrease with time. (The covid-related demand shock is of course not helping to bolster this curve.)
It's basic supply and demand, which is microencomics, formally known as the non-bunk part of economics. Macroeconomics is where the bunk lives, so it's quite easy to tell - only slightly joking.

I don't think anyone on either side really knew with oil how things would go. Hindsight is 20-20, and one of the two camps was going to win with 100% certainty. It's not fully decided yet mind you, peak oil could still happen if people keep increasing demand for it instead of weaning away from fossil fuels. But I don't think that scenario is likely at all.
Ahh, yes I was a bit confused on the terminology. So surgical masks are just masks with some filtering capability but without a respirator.

And N95 is a respirator, which is different from mask as it protects the wearer better from airborne particles?
Joe was my Grandad, never got to meet him unfortunately. If you have any oral histories I'd love to hear them!
> Peak oil theory is sound economics.

Why is oil special? Why not peak iron, aluminum, concrete, NaCl, or any or the myriad other things we consume? All of them are in finite quantities, not only oil. Earth has a finite mass after all.
The government can, in an emergency like this, set prices. They could set prices at the previous price for bulk PPE and order companies to fulfill it and if they refuse, eminent domain them and sell them to someone who will.

As much as this will annoy civil libertarians, the powers of the state are vast and in emergencies should be used to protect people when justifiable and without harming people. The takings clause will ensure that whatever companies are affected will be monetarily compensated and they have recourse through our courts.
This is interesting, but might lead to more confusion.

I've struggled to be absolutely sure on this point myself but my understanding from talking to my accountants is that there are terms in the bill that's currently moving through congress that will greatly affect what SBA options are available for startups and diverge sharply from what's listed here.

For example there's no mention here for the forgivable nature of loans used for payroll and similar expenses, which is a really crucial concept that I believe is in the final bill.

In their defense they're talking about disaster loans here which is a specific thing, but this is still a pretty fast moving topic and I think the site would be better off with an intro that spoke to these points.
The House just passed a two trillion dollar relief bill. That's almost 3 times the entire value of alphabet. And much of that's going to obtaining medical supplies. What are you talking about?
Marburg.
We Need to Know Who’s Developed Immunity to Coronavirus
You actually need to be really careful with Urgent Care clinics, because some work out an arrangement where they are an "extension" of the hospital's ER.

What does this mean? It means they get to inflate what they charge you for certain procedures because they're "an ER", but somehow aren't bound by all the other regulations hospitals are.

In short: be bloody paranoid. The only pattern I've noticed in Urgent Care centers using this weird billing hack is they tend to offer some of the more advanced imaging services in-house.
You're being downvoted but it wouldn't surprise me if this was discussed while they were coming up with this. While I highly doubt it is their main motivation, I'm sure they've acknowledged it as a benefit.
A lot of people would love to have an all-in-one app that can assuage fears on what to do next amidst a potential slew of symptoms. You can even tailor it to answer questions for a loved one. Not sure what’s so “Apple marketing” about it aside from genuinely caring about people during this time of crisis.
This is phenomenal. I've been scraping the data from primary sources for just Washington state for the past week [0], in order to make this chart which I hacked together last weekend [1].

[0]: https://github.com/jake-low/covid-19-wa-data

[1]: https://observablehq.com/@jake-low/covid-19-in-washington-st...

Doing this for just one state was a pretty substantial effort. I imagine there are multiple people at the Times who are spending several hours a day reviewing and cleaning scraped data (seems every couple of days some formatting change breaks your scripts, or a source publishes data that later needs to be retracted).

The Times dataset appears to contain per-county case and death observations in a time series, going all the way back to the first confirmed U.S. case in January in Snohomish County, WA. This makes it by far the most comprehensive time series dataset of U.S. COVID-19 cases publicly available.

Some people in this thread linked to the Johns Hopkins CSSE dataset; I've looked at this data but it doesn't go back very far in time for the U.S., and the tables are published as daily summaries with differing table schemas which makes them hard to use out of the box. For some days earlier in March, "sublocations" aren't even structured (for example the same column contains, "Boston, MA" and "Los Angeles County", making it very hard to use). No disrespect to the team behind the JHU dataset; it attempts to cover the whole world since the outbreak began which is an incredible and difficult goal. But for mapping and studying the outbreak in the U.S., the Times dataset will likely be the best choice right now.

Huge kudos to the New York Times team for making this data freely available.
But those stock prices can never go down because of how much generational retirement wealth is locked up in financial markets.
Its great that US companies are trying to help during times like these, but it feels strange that companies are filling in the gaps left by American government.

Like why do we have a Google website with CDC information and an Apple website with CDC information? Why not have a single place that we send people? It seems like we should have a single, cross platform app/website that is CDC branded versus Company X branded.
Oh gosh you're right, I hadn't and nobody else had thought of setting a sensible price before you mentioned it. Thanks for saving the country, internet person!

Look, it's pretty simple. You send a Major General and their staff to every factory that has ever shipped a box of nitrile gloves. You tell them that you will buy, at 150% the normal wholesale price, every glove they can produce for the next year. You provide them with a blank check to buy inputs and secure a labor force. If there is an input they can't get you put the General on the phone with another one who is sitting at the oil refinery or the paper mill or whatever.

Civil defense is 99% logistics. If you can't use your gigantic military apparatus to make stuff, it's useless.
Out of curiosity. Did you use code from the linux-minidisc project? Would be great to see if our code was used in such innovative ways.
“General Mental Ability (GMA) tests (like the IQ test) are very predictive of future job performance, largely because people with high intelligence can learn the skills needed to be successful on the job more rapidly. However, due to legal concerns they’re not recommended for companies hiring in the US.”

This is what a classic FAANG interview is: an IQ test which is disguised as a relevant skills test for legal reasons. And they work quite well.
While it's not realistic, I guarantee that if you initiated the homestead act again in the US, people would do it. Free land and basically full autonomy? I'm 100% certain there is a sizeable chunk of those types in the US and Canada that would make that trade. The reason the homestead act died was cause businesses lobbied the government to get rid of it so as not to give lower income types a choice. They had to work in their factories to survive.
This should be taken down.

Unsafe procedures are proposed and discussed here.

This is a single study and not a recommendation for treatment of anything, esp. the virus causing COVID-19
Then there’s still Affero GPL (AGPL).
With Covid-19, modeling takes on life and death importance
Of course the places where plastic is used specifically because it doesn't rot in damp environments probably include some of its more critical deployments.
I created a new organization, transferred the repository now and invited members. Worked like a charm.
Pretty much this. The average HN lurker will be reasonably sophisticated when it comes to technical subjects, but they are incredibly naive when it comes to all of those humanities subjects they skipped in university. When it comes to politics, economics, philosophy and other such subjects the average HN response vacillates between the extremes of either outright dismissal or arrogant pronouncements that are such a caricature of the Dunning-Kruger effect that you initially assume it to be satire.