skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Along the same lines, Catch-22 had a huge influence on me, growing up. (Not necessarily entirely positive, though.)
I love how Giuliani takes notes and asks questions when he interviews Dr. Zelenko. Youtube's subtitle captioning is so often wrong and misleading! Giuliani's questions correct that somewhat and slow down the conversation so I can follow easily.

I really wonder how many little notepads Giuliani has and what kind of pen he uses?
Marginal cost isn't a useful term if you assume infinites. If you have infinite number producing at the same price you can just say "cost" instead of "marginal cost". Marginal cost is only a useful term if each product has a different cost.
I seriously recommend A Challenge to Apollo.

An in-depth look at the soviet space program. Its very gritty stuff and a story rarely told.
No, that is specifically not the problem. The problem is that the company had demonstrated a working design and was near production... but then the wheels of finance (by way of publicly traded company) stepped in with a profit-only motive.

If three companies were all competing, there's absolutely no guarantee that each of those three would not have been bought in the same way. No large company would have gone for such a contract unless it had no other way to make money; there wasn't enough profit incentive.
Player Piano is a great read for that as well
It's really a complicated subject. One of the best reads I've seen these days is https://hackaday.com/2020/03/25/ventilators-101-what-they-do... and they explain how many factors there is to consider: it's actually "very" complicated to make right.
Yes, Android puts on some security theater to pretend it has the isolationist model, but in reality random apps can do things like draw content over each other at any time, without any special permissions.
What’s the limiting factor there? The pressure regulation, pressure production, measurement accuracy? There’s open source ECUs that measure dozens of sensors at 1000hz+ and keep an engine perfectly timed using a $35 raspberry pi. Is this problem harder somehow?
Oh interesting, I didn't have that experience at all. Can you give some examples of what you mean?
But private entities can't do it, because the market forces them not to - those that the spend the money will be out-competed in the short term by those that don't.
Check out Scala! It has modern features and the tooling around it is mature.

If you like books, this should be a good intro: https://underscore.io/books/essential-scala/ (you should use IntelliJ IDEA instead of Eclipse, though)

And you can also use it for frontend development: https://www.scala-js.org/doc/sjs-for-js/es6-to-scala-part1.h... (having one language for both backend and frontend leads to great synergy)
A couple immediately come to mind: “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving and “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin. When I first encountered “A Prayer for Owen Meany” I was struggling with my religious faith and my identity. A lot of the relationships and events in the book mirrored people and experiences in my own life. Beyond being a great work of literary fiction, it helped me work through what I was dealing with and has been cathartic to return to in the years since.

“The Awakening” has been one of the more empathy expanding things I’ve read. The protagonist’s perspective and plight are resonant today. The tragedy of that story - both in its specific outcome and as generalizable for society at large - affected me a lot and has stayed with me for decades.
But even that doesn't follow from the link you give: the slowest C++ entry is taking 54 seconds there. But I don't see any, for example, Python code which is faster. There is node.js code which is fast, but we know that node.js depends on really, really, good JIT, which doesn't make it "slow language" in my view. The node.js implementation also uses all CPU cores, so we should at least compare among the implementations which also use all CPU cores.

So in this case it's less "an algorithm" in the narrow sense and more "is it written to use all CPU cores effectively" and is it using the JIT to run the code compiled to the native. Other languages with good scores are also all that can do a good JIT and use all the CPU cores, which yes, confirms that good JITs are really good.

Which still also doesn't mean that I don't know (or have happened to know) enough incompetent programmers who would, indeed, make even worse performing C++ than any entry that we see in the Benchmarks game. I could write a whole article about all the things they would or could do wrong.

I only wanted to see the examples in "the Benchmarks game" specifically.
Thanks for the link, I’ll read up on it!
There is no profit to be made in building up huge stockpiles of ventilators that will only be used in the event of a freak disaster. Government has to pay for such things, because no economically rational private investor would.
It was to warn them not to walk on the ice ffs.
Why? I agree that in the paper that Altman is referring to [0] H5N1 did appear to decrease in lethality after becoming airborne. The paper does not mention its incubation period.

Do you have references for why a combination of these is not possible (or even unlikely)? I feel that it is quite possible to achieve by using only passage between animals (artificial or otherwise).

——

[0] Table 1 of https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534/tab-pdf
Yeah, no. Subjecting ourselves to the humor of mega corporations is its own drab nightmare.

Should my power company play a trick on me on April fools? Maybe call and tell me my bill is late? Turn the lights off for 5 minutes?

Maybe my landlord could post an eviction notice or tell me my car was stolen.

If you don’t think these are funny please define “funny”. Remember, it should be a definition every user of the service agrees with.

If you need a laugh turn on Netflix and select comedy but leave me out of it.
There's a lot of creative software that didn't survive the ppc switch. Back then the chasm between MacOS and Windows for certain workloads was a mile wide and despite all the software lost, which would never be recompiled, users stayed with it.

With recent changes to the OS, a decade of instability with every update every year, the recent hard deprecation of 32 bit binaries, and now moving to an unproven ISA for those particular workloads - all while Windows and Linux have closed the gap, mostly... the situation is a bit different.
Flowers for Algernon is an incredible book. I read a lot of it on a flight and cried my eyes out.
I second this. Poetry is a great all-in-one tool for dependency and package management. I've written a few blog posts about it, and I remain happy with it. The Poetry team has done a great job making quality of life improvements to the tool, and it's actively maintained. It's worth checking out.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Sorry! This looks like a case where our software failed to rewrite an AMP URL correctly. The correct URL would be https://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/Farmworkers-key-....

However, that page autoplays a video, so I googled the title and found one which doesn't instead.
I worry mostly about healthcare system overload so the curve I follow with most interest is the ICU admittance. https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/report/vtfstart-corona

Death curve is of course interesting too but harder to interpret at the low numbers we still have and says more about spread in certain age groups than the general population.
I wonder why they stopped testing...
I think there is small class of founders who fail and end up better off than their employees but it is not the majority of cases. If you factor in resume/connections/experience, that number is certainly higher -- but that seems fair to me.
Where did you read that?

10/710 infections on the Diamond Princess died. Would you expect flu to kill that many? (Older population but healthier than average older population).
Online Universities at least some of them do offer those things, within the limits of their funding. And that is really the issue - funding.
> Also pair programming contrasts directly with the promotion of autonomy

I couldn't disagree more with this statement. My sense is that engineers who've never pair-programmed before want to believe that pairing up will erase their autonomy, but it's just not so. Engineers who've paired up before know it's not true.
Accelerando by Charles Stross. It's an early work and not his best book, but it came at turning point in my life. It made me reconsider my definition of success, and is probably the one book that's had the most impact on my life.
I'm not professional and my napkin/google calculation shows something closer to 327.2 million * 0.7 * 0.01 = two million two hundred ninety thousand four hundred deaths - is it stupid?
Has anyone tried making an account on it?
the problem is that trump mentioned these medications so half the country thinks they don’t work now.
I also worked with Victor at that startup (Hi, Salim). I can't say I share this observation about him, and in fact I know he credited me with some trivia I was able to help him with in briefings he gave (in the Navy context).

I'd further opine I consider team sport participation right up there with panda-philia and whether one prefers vanilla or chocolate ice cream in their milkshakes as hiring criteria, but YMMV.
Jon Stewart's rant on deep dish pizza is a classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNYasqVmbiw
To me the statement "have to choose who lives and who dies" doesn't carry the meaning that the decision will be taken in a capricious way. In the end it's a horrible responsibility to decide somebody doesn't get a chance to live so that somebody else gets that chance. But that's the situation.

How would you write that, then?
>> a virus that spreads extremely easily, has greater than 50% mortality, and has an incubation period of several weeks? ... without the world having time to prepare, could wipe out more than half the population in a matter of months.

I am not sure if Sam or anyone would have expected this to happen in the near future?
If China is understating the damage from the virus they are only doing it by a constant factor at best. You cannot hide an exponentially growing epidemic, no matter how hard you try. That's just how it is on this bitch of a function.

Western propaganda has trained its people to think the Chinese communist party is as stupid as it is authoritarian. Quick quiz, if you don't know who Li Keqiang is then you more likely than not treat the CCP as a black box controlled by Winnie the Pooh.
Those two books of his, and in addition his earlier books The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time, have all had a huge influence on me.
Describing engineers as children is a pretty bad place to go with this. I'm pretty sure you are part of the problem with hiring.
I will add Ender's Shadow, by the same author. It is a parallel novel -- the same story retold from the perspective of a different character (Bean). They are very well integrated: both books stand alone (I read Shadow first), but are not repetitive when read together.

I read both books in my childhood, and they have shaped my view of children. Specifically, I think children are mostly just small humans, who appreciate being treated as such. Please note that I do not recommend the later books in each of the series'.

Aside, it has always surprised me that someone as homophobic as Orson Scott-Card was able to write those two books, that have strong themes of compassion/understanding for those different than you (intentionally vague here to avoid spoilers).
My Notion Dashboard for Running a Agency Biz Solo
Show HN: Pitch Deck Website – SeaListings
These are small businesses, though. Presumably nearly all of them have no shareholders (at least not the same way large corporations do).
> If the government had done it in house they could have succeeded.

Ok, so how do we get the government to do it in house, and stick to it long enough so that the stockpile is there when the next disease crisis happens, which might not be for another 10 years? That's five Congressional elections and at least two changes of Presidential administration.
People do, but there's too much chaos and too many individual actors making crazy decisions.
Or has an Instagram account.
Worth noting that the JVM has this feature as well, under the name of "flight recorder".
Except the loan money will go straight to Amazon, and you are now unable to repay the loan to the bank
Super cool!

I created a single video from text using python (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CIakJ8PMZs // https://github.com/sidpalas/devops-directive-hello-world), but this is next level!

I'm excited to try it out.
Sure.

If I had a government slush fund to develop a low cost ventilator, I would try to structure the payments in the contract to be based on milestones with concrete deliverables. Not a tenuous agreement to buy a bunch of ventilators at below market price (it's implied in the article that the sales to the stockpile wouldn't justify the project for the company).

There's of course a possibility that the government wrote the most aggressive contract they could find someone to work on. But I doubt that is what happened.
If you cannot pay, negotiate with Amazon instead of stiffing them after agreeing to the TOS.
While Donald Trump speak about infinite amount USD, Bitcoin is scarcer than ever
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway.

You'll finish it in an evening. I didn't get how it impacted me at first, but I knew that I was deeply affected by it.

It was what made me internalise the idea that struggle doesn't necessarily lead to external reward.
Ask HN: How to ace my FAANG interview
I have an interview with Amazon for a Business Intelligence Engineer Internship position. It requires to be proficient with SQL. What is the best way to prepare? Would appreciate if you could recommend any resource or question banks!
See my response to the sibling comment.
How widespread is coronavirus in New York? We need to know
> The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government

Ok, so how do we keep the government from being corrupted? Nobody has yet solved that problem, and people have been trying for centuries.

> Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking.

The money supply is not the same as the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP, which is the closest estimate we have to "the size of the economy", has been growing, not shrinking.
If you read that one, also read Ender's Shadow which tells the same story from a different characters' perspective and really adds to the out-of-the-box element.
Ask HN: Business and work opportunities during the pandemic
An obvious, basic question: With the Covid pandemic already having caused immense economic disruption, to the degree that even if it were to magically stop spreading tomorrow, we would still likely have months of economic recovery time to deal with, what do some of you consider to be the strong entrepreneurship or work opportunities in the coming weeks and months, particularly of a digital nature, with so much movement outdoors having been frozen.

I work right now as a technical writer for the consumer electronic industry and yes, I already worry about slumping demand making me have to shift gears. This is partly why I bring up the question.
3 counter points:

Bans on exporting equipment are not the same as bans on exporting parts. The example of a bad ban he mentions is for a part, not a piece of equipment.

The long term effect might be less production. But no one cares about the long term in an emergency. Plus, governments can fix the long term problem in the medium term.

The problem the author ignores is that the market doesn't care about lives. It will move ventilators to the highest bidder. A billionaire with no need shouldn't get one because he can pay more than a whole ward of Romanians.
A conversation with South Korea's leading COVID-19 expert Professor Kim Woo-Joo
Age groups is the most important factor IMHO

In Italy we have less than 100 deaths in the range 1-49 and only 347 in the range 50-59

87% of deaths are in the range >=60
There's no reason why 40-70% of people will inevitably get infected. California daily new cases already plateued
Interesting interview with doctor in NY using it on over 600 patients so far. 100% success rate.

https://youtu.be/1TJdjhd_XG8?t=117
A Wizard of Earthsea is still one of the wisest books I've ever read. Mostly because it cares enough to want to be.
Government is not congress, or a president. It is civil servants beavering away.
Pentagon sends teams into MOUNTAIN BUNKERS as pandemic preparations
That's the idea, no? Ownership is optionality, you can end up with 0 or with billions. Employment is security, you're "guaranteed" your salary but no more (or fired).

Sounds like he's promising security to his employees, and eating the variance himself - taking a hit in bad times and, conversely, making bank in good times. Sounds fair to me!
It depends on if it's a live chat, audio chat, video chat, or VR chat. Not all modes require the same level of explicitness.

It's true that effective text communication in async forms is a skill, but that is a competency that is very important even when not on lockdown.
SaaS? Satellite as a Service?
But social distancing can make at most order of magnitude difference (generous, semi-arbitrary) - which is still way too small change, it just spreads a lot of deaths in time, doesn't stop all of them, right?
Yes, from what the government agencies communicate they most closely look at the number being admitted to ICUs per day, which has actually been declining.
Grads get those numbers for FB NY and Google NYC (at least based on what they told our recruiters).

levels.fyi seems to corroborate this too:

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Facebook/SE/E3/

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/SE/L3/
You're being generous with "nice try". It's not a "nice try", it's just being a troll.
I think that number might be coming from the idea that at that level of infection you'd get herd immunity - i.e. this thing is going to keep going around until we hit herd immunity.
This is the internet we live in - clickbait-y titles get clicks, not "Theorema Egregium, the strength in curved surfaces", or whatever.
I see, thanks for the details.

You know, it happens, to everyone, however good or experienced; what matters for a company's (and individual) sake is how we respond to mistakes.

You guys responded well, that was resilient. The next step would maybe be antifragility. Did something change afterwards, because of this bad experience?
I wonder how long it would take to teach someone to be more help than harm? After 30 intensive days of training, what would candidates lack?
For me Google.com has the search box and then a link to “DO THE FIVE. Help stop coronavirus” and then some news tiles, the second tile is about protecting your family from coronavirus.

Google.com is directly giving health advice. Any joke on that page will be related to that advice.

Would it be appropriate to redirect those links to Rick Astley videos on April 1? Even the other links? Can you see how that would undermine Google’s credibility?
It's a great allegory for classist society, and the arbitrary and self-serving nature of the processes by which class hierarchies maintain themselves.
The Futurological Congress by Lem.
If you look at history, I'm not sure it's possible for a government to get better. I'm not aware of any historical examples. Revolution can happen, but that means a new government.
> private entities can't do it, because the market forces them not to

Private entities don't have to be subject to the market. Someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk could set up a privately owned company, not publicly traded, that would not be subject to investors' demands for consistent quarterly growth. Matter of fact, maybe that's what Bill Gates should switch his attention to from malaria.

The fact is, a private individual, or a small group of them, can have a longer time horizon than the government does, and a longer time horizon is exactly what is needed for something like this.
No, it's that killing the host isn't a good strategy.

There's dozens of viruses that infect us right good and mostly don't kill the infected. They are really hard to get out of circulation, which is 'success' for a virus, it continues to exist.

Once we had the knowledge to do so, we destroyed smallpox in short order.
> There's of course a possibility that the government wrote the most aggressive contract they could find someone to work on. But I doubt that is what happened.

Why do you doubt that?
> I think most people forget that the American oil industry is one of the largest in the world

You say American, but >40% of production is Texan, and the remainder are primarily low-population states like North Dakota and Alaska. Most of the demand isn't in the same states as most of the supply.

So you do it in those other states, like New York or Illinois, that have people but not oil, and you can get rid of most of the demand because most of the people with oil jobs aren't in those constituencies. And the people who gain jobs from replacing them would be -- solar installations are inherently local. So would everyone receiving the dividend, even though part of it would be paid for by suppliers.

And it's really the same in Europe -- Eastern Europe has most of the supply but Western Europe has most of the demand. And China and India have negligible oil production per capita.

Texans can buy as many pickup trucks as they like, but if you stamp out 80% of the world demand like that, nobody is going to buy their oil. And once the jobs are already gone and the industry isn't interested in making ICE cars just for Texas and Russia and Saudi Arabia, there won't even be that.
1 - you said it as was it was current, it is not.

2 - still, in 2013 is not 1 server. It's also more than you said now ( add a tag engine server, elastic search, redis, load balancer) and an insane amount of memory on a lot of those servers. Even then, the stack exchange network is more than that.

Saying 1 server, as you did, is not correct and it never was :)
There's a 15 min interview on YouTube with Fauci being interviewed by Trevor Noah today. Strongly recommended: https://youtu.be/8A3jiM2FNR8
Vescovo's original proposal to Triton (the builder of the submarine) was essentially a steel ball on a cable. No portholes, nothing fancy, just drop him and reel him back up.

With this proposal, he was trying to anchor the engineers (pun intended) and ensure he'd get a workable end product instead of an expensive flight of fancy that couldn't achieve the mission, and also it fulfilled what he wanted out of the exercise — he's a goal-oriented, mission-focused individual and getting himself to those faraway places was/is job one.

Triton refused and engineered the viewports as well as other compromises that ensured attention was paid to the scientific uses of the submarine and its trips into the deep.
He needed an editor. Those books had a lot of fat which should have been cut.
I've been wondering if there is any way to improve this as well. Say we get the new ventilators but now we're short on people. You can't overnight train nurses, but can you get people just enough training for this specific task? Is there any inefficiencies in the process of dealing with these patients that can be improved? Can some of these tasks be delegated to less experienced people who can be trained quickly, while the processes that need in depth knowledge and experience can still be performed by the qualified health care workers?
Finally, Deno 1.0 to launch on May 13th
The first book is more character driven and the plot moves slowly, glacially compared to the next two. I don’t want to ruin the plot, but I‘d say they exceed Dune’s vastness without the long grinds.

The author described how he approached the series as wanting to write about the “the worst possible universe”.