skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Google could afford to spend a couple billions more to fund the manufacturing and distribution of masks and ventillators, instead of announcing a support package with the bulk in ad credits.

Also, Google employs some of the best marketers on the planet, they should be showing ads for how to wear masks correctly and for practical safety guidelines, and leverage everything they've learned about human psychology to disperse information that could save lives.

That's what it means to actually want to do something, not just pretend with ad credits that ultimately boost your own business.

Right now I'm getting an ad for Milka chocolate as I watch news videos about the pandemic on YouTube, instead of being offered a chance to learn how to safely disinfect groceries.

Google does not need to give out ad credits to WHO to be able to run public safety ads today across all AdSense sites. They have the money and the talent to spin up a massive public safety campaign within days.
When you say profit growth was flat, that means that profit grew linearly, correct?

If true then that's pretty impressive and possibly much better than what the markets ~10 years ago expected?
People also vastly underestimate how hard it is to produce commodities. Like, if Amazon disappeared overnight then we'd just all switch to something else and no issues would arise. What nuttiness!
It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one thing, I don't have children and never will.

If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to live.
I personally think the FED is under political pressure to make the DOW look good because that is tied to certain politicians reelection. Perhaps I read too much bullshit or am too cynical but it seems like they are pushing for good looking but entirely bullshit numbers because a dollar won't be worth what it used to be.
Depends, but I personally think its comparable to the learning curve of Java, in fact, I found it easier to learn about than Java. I would immediately recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis, which goes into the design process of the language and the OTP https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

In fact, I would recommend reading that even if you didn't want to use Erlang, its just a good and interesting read, which offers some cool insights into concurrency, distributed systems, and message passing.
Well fear not: Boomer private retirement accounts don't hold most of the stocks.

What's really going to be challenging for capitalists is losing the whole "It's good for your 401K!" justification when nobody actually owns enough stock to care. Only 45% of millennials have retirement accounts and only 33% of millennials have one they are actively contributing to[1]. The median balance also shows them getting a late start [2].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-saving-for-retir...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01061...
Can we make an android version?
> So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit?

For me, it's one of the few video chat clients that works well in Linux. Skype may or may not work depending on the version and whether or not Microsoft supports the Linux client. And I have no idea whether MS teams works at all in Linux.
Lesson learned: Dont rely on American companies.
Both. Racking up domestic debt using offshore cash as collateral. It's like getting a low interest loan using your 401k.
>The goal of the assignment is to figure out whether an online community exemplifies or doesn’t exemplify ‘healthy’ behaviors, from the points of view of their own members

The culture of HN is also such that it tends to attract a certain type of person, typically from the upper end of the normal curve. Look at the highly technical nature of the majority of articles being posted.

What I'm saying is that community health is not just a reflection of the rules imposed upon the community. The individuals need to meet certain minimum requirements in various social and cognitive dimensions to have a truly "healthy" community.
I don't know, now seems like a great time to point fingers at the small percentage of the Chinese population that is obsessed with eating weird shit like pangolin(probably the same people who are driving certain African wildlife extinct as well). Or that the authoritarian government cover up of the virus helped take it from a local emergency to a global pandemic.

No one has any issues saying that the US bungled the early stages of response for coronavirus.
Even without that, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all have a no joke civil service. Them being able to come up with something in the time of crisis fast is a consequence of that, not the other way around.

Even if one or two piecemeal measures like that were to be implemented, it will not change the fact of terrific ineptitude of current, and few previous office holders.

Without fixing that first, you will never get to the level of trust needed for the society to function, and not to fall apart upon first serious crisis.

In comparison to East Asia, North America is a very uneventful place, where the apparatus of state has not been truly stress tested in decades. For every Katrina USA had, countries in Asia have like 20, and having non-idiots in the office is much more of an existential need.

Even in a patently broken country like PRC, it's the response to natural disasters which is the only thing that really tickles the CPC when it comes to public anger.
> These the so called "too big to fail" types of companies > which borderline monopolize market sectors like Amazon and Walmart.

It's somewhat interesting that when coming up with a list of two 'monopolist' companies, you came up with two companies that compete directly.
Are blue chips like Coca-Cola entering new markets so much?
a healthy amount of groupthink
I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did
Odd unit of measurement, as I assume jumbo jets are manufactured to be as light as possible.
It's better than most but it's still a bubble that doesn't match the real-world.
Before 2008 it was amazing how many people outside of economics, finance, and politics were able to see a disaster coming, but almost everyone in those sectors was completely blindsided.
Love Iain Banks, but this was just a missed opportunity to the much better name Subby McSubface
ISTM there could be some opportunities here? First, not everyone is talking at once (else this is a riot rather than a conference), so many of the uplinks could be "nothing new" packets for much of the time. Second, if any participant(s) (even a dummy participant) has faster uplink, that/those client(s) could forward to the rest of the group, in a fashion somewhat analogous to torrent.
You seem to have answered your own question.
AWS spot instance prices rising?
I see some signs AWS spot instance prices are starting to creep up. I am sort of guessing this is related to increased demand from COVID-19 induced app usage increases. Anyone else seeing this? Any one know if AWS is doing OK keeping up with demand?
Actually, submissions for certain controversial topics/opinions are often quickly flagged to death, not unlike downvoted to oblivion. To be fair, those topics tend to invite predictable “discussions” that aren’t very interesting.
The "might as well give away the ad credits" part makes sense to me, but the part about inflating prices and getting a higher tax deduction doesn't make sense.

I'm not an accountant by any means, but I don't see how there even would be a deduction here. From what I could quickly dig up, even if you donate your services to a nonprofit, you can only deduct your costs, not the price you'd normally charge a paying customer. And of course this isn't even a nonprofit; it's just a freebie to a business.

So while cutting supply might create higher auction prices for paying customers (than you'd otherwise have), the grants themselves don't seem like they'd do anything advantageous for taxes.

Of course, there are expenses with serving ads that they can take out after revenue to reduce how much profit they'll be taxed on, but I'm not sure there are many expenses coming from this giveaway. Seems they would have incurred most of the expense without doing the giveaway because they've already got the computer hardware up and running to serve ads. This is just a way to try to get some value out of the expense that you're going to pay anyway.
That's one theory. Another is it came from China from the transport of 96,000 laborers to the French frontlines.

There was a respiratory disease outbreak in China in 1917 that had symptoms identical to the Spanish Flu.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanis...
Issuing debt to buyback stock isn’t ‘financial engineering’ its trying to address the fundamental problem of corporate finance. You have two sources of capital, debt and equity. What is the optimal capital structure of the firm.

There is no moral component as to whether a firm should be financed with debt or equity. While EPS has a smaller denominator, it also has a smaller numerator as earning will reflect the interest payments on the debt.
Phone the New Epidemic That Has Taken over Your Relationship
How many other struggling businesses are facing the the same issue but don’t know about the “get on the HN front page” back-channel to human tech support?
I assume the free ad credits are to stave off cratering their own CPM market's bid prices? Conflating that funding with grants for assisting with COVID-19 responses is extremely disingenuous.
Not at all. Anger is a superb motivator, but difficult to manage. It's true many situations aren't well served by the brash actions we might take when angry, but with practice you can separate your action from the emotion. The anger becomes a trigger for thinking about and implementing solutions to all kinds of issues.
> Greed trumps racism, sexism, etc., every time

What makes you believe that? That seems like a very strong, very broad claim to me. Almost too broad to even conceivably be true.
Until you see some trash:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48230157
The post doesn't appear to be talking about the new Coronavirus relief bill, but rather the existing SBA Disaster Loans: https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela/

The two are similar but are different in a few ways. Such as:

- The SBA Disaster Loans require a personal guarantee, but it appears that the Coronavirus relief does not

- The Coronavirus relief offers forgiveness for payroll expenses, but the SBA Disaster Loans do not

This is moving fast and as others have mentioned, the Coronavirus relief bill is brand new. You should talk to an accountant or a lawyer to learn which is right for you.
I can't find the link, but an economist made the argument that college has gotten cheaper because although costs have gone up so has its utility. So it's a "more for your money" sort of situation. I personally don't subscribe to this view and it's not something one can simply state as a fact.

Similar to how say an automobile's year-over-year price may have increased by 5% but the adjusted value is 2% because last year's models didn't have side airbags as standard or something like that.
Thanks for all the feedback so far! Cardybot is now on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cardybot
Literally false positive and false negatives. In other words, if you test millions of people, there will be more people tested positive who DON'T have the disease vs. those who test positive and HAVE the disease.
As respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work.

It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.
Yes, there are strong ideological echo chambers here. It is also left leaning.
Initially skeptical on your first claim but did find a source:
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-spain-says-rapid...
(https://outline.com/uBBJvY)
On the one hand I understand what you are saying, but on the other hand we've only had good plastics for a couple decades.
(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219)
leaving a heavier-than-intended slurry of what's left plus accrued moisture from atmosphere

You didn't mention ethanol but that's what you mean. Normal gasoline is very stable, it's just the federally-mandated corn ethanol added to it that turns into sludge after a few months. Fuel stabilizer keeps that ethanol from degrading.

I would advise anyone with small engines, like lawnmowers or snowblowers, to seek out ethanol-free gasoline and use that exclusively in those engines.
True, but wouldn't that incentivize people to seek out masks when the already short supply is needed for the health care workers?
I might be interested. Sending you an email.
Go to the wikipedia page for any of the elements. Look up what percentage of the earth's crust is that element. Multiply by 2.77x10^22 kg.
Careful now, calling it "tar sands" instead of "oil sands" is a big no-no in Canada. They don't want the world to know just how dirty it really is.
The issue is that making a mistake here isn't like making a mistake about, say, movie review sentiment analysis. Already there have been a few "I know stats!" posts that didn't do the right controls but still got sent around the internet as proof of someone's argument (see the "Viral advertising exec now knows epidemiology" post that medium took down). These data are confusing and difficult. It turns out there's a bunch of people who have studied this field for years and can help us avoid those issues (epidemiologists). We should listen to them. That's not to say we shouldn't open the data, but handle with extreme care, which isn't the modality of most early data scientists. A 4 week bootcamp doesn't lead to the most rigorous science, usually that's not a big issue (Pareto principle and all that), but when it's lives and active problems, it can become a big issue.

I say this as a graduate of Insight which is a kind of DS bootcamp.
Did you miss the last bullet point?

> Direct financial support and expertise to help increase the production capacity for personal protective equipment (PPE) and lifesaving medical devices. We’re working with our longtime supplier and partner Magid Glove & Safety, with the goal of ramping up production of 2-3 million face masks in the coming weeks that will be provided to the CDC Foundation. Additionally, employees from across Alphabet, including Google, Verily and X, are bringing engineering, supply chain and healthcare expertise to facilitate increased production of ventilators, working with equipment manufacturers, distributors and the government in this effort.
Startup idea: backup your google everything.
Have to say that with its latest release, Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox) have most of this in a _non-cloud, local-storage_ form.
You might want to avoid paying hefty municipal taxes or another impending viability, at which point paying less than taxes might sound like a cheaper alternative to get rid of the house.

Same with these oil producers. There might be too much crude sitting on trucks going to an already-full storage facility, and they need to clear space in order to empty trucks, even if production upstream has already shut down.
> if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel

And where you set the bar will depend on, roughly speaking, your prestige. Google can afford to be extremely selective when hiring technologists. Similar thing goes for Harvard and the Air Force.

> what a person works on (developers) outside of educational or work settings gives a ton of information on how they work as well as what they know

The usual counterpoint: nuclear engineers and surgeons tend to have hobbies with no bearing on nuclear engineering or surgery. Nothing wrong with a competent technology professional keeping it to work hours.
> Both Rust and Haskell wrap values that can fail in little boxes, and to get them out you have to check which type of value it is, and in C# there's nothing stopping you from returning null and not telling anyone that you can return null, and just assuming people will check for null all the time.

F# is the .NET citizen that does the equivalent of the Rust or Haskell stuff.

Either you use an option type (https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/the-option-type/) which is an easy way of making a function that says 'user says to find a record with the name of Bob, and you will either get a return type of Some record(id:1,name:bob), or you will get a return type of None'

let GetThisRecord(name) =
if SomeDatabaseLookup(name).IsSome then
Some record(SomeDatabaseLookup(name).Value) // not idiomatic but works and is faster than a match
else
None

Or you use the Success/Failure type (see railway oriented programming)
And it's equally emphasized, at many of those organizations, that all communication older than 5 years is deleted. Nobody wants to be burned by an ill-considered statement made in a decade-old IM conversation.
>simply describe why things are the way they are. It's complacent, and it's sad.

>It's not a very helpful comment

I would think understanding the problem would be the first step to solving it. I'm not sitting here pretending I have all the answers. I saw an opportunity to shed some light on the situation so I commented. It seems weird to me that your critical of me for not contributing thoughts related directly to a solution, when you haven't contributed any thoughts about a solution either.

To each their own I suppose. But consider me thoroughly uninterested in discussing this further, which, seems to be what you wanted from me anyway.
This reminds me of a paper I read in the Quantitative Finance section on arXiv.org, in which the author claimed stock markets are being manipulated by big portfolio owners, because the gains happen overnight, while the intraday returns are negative. I'm not endorsing this idea, but I consider it a fun conspiracy theory and maybe it's a good time to throw this into the discussion here.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01708
This is reflected in the Canadian dollar which has been behaving like a petrodollar. Alberta is in for some hard times, I think its GDP will be about eventually become equivalent to that of the slightly more populous Alabama, provided the exchange rate holds and Alberta GDP makes the anticipated drop.

I think most Canadians recognize Alberta as a have province from the perspective of transfer payments, but that may change quickly if oil prices stay at this level for long making Albertans net recipients of transfer payments. I'm less sure that most Albertans realize just how badly managed benefits from oil resources have been used in the province. I'm talking Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund compared to Norway (Government Pension Fund), or even Alaska (Alaska Permanent Fund). It's bad even when you consider the high price of oil sand extraction, never mind the higher clean-up costs.
Exactly, the Fed has artificially held rates low so companies are borrowing money for practically 0 to keep the price up and keep CEO compensation high. The only way to really fix the buyback problem is to outlaw stock based compensation for the C-suite and BOD. Then they might start focusing on long term corporate health instead of stock price and short-term quarterly numbers.
Not allowed by law.
For a more balanced view, you can turn to JP Morgan's Guide to the Markets. It's a reliable summary of actual data so you can draw your own conclusions.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/blob-gim/1383407651970/83456/MI-GTM_...
People who invest in Coca-Cola are interested in dividend growth. People who invest in Amazon, Apple, Google, MSFT are interested in them entering new markets.
Nordstrom too, is offering 20% off any purchase of $1200 or more to help Americans weather this crisis. (joke)
I'm sorry the truth of the matter is considered "unsubstantive". Judging by the comments below, I'd argue there is a clear truth to my statements. Feel free to ban me at any time.
Except that they aren't conflating the two. They call out each individually.
HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.
I mean... shouldn't those systems be running Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded)? That branch doesn't have auto updates, AFAIK.
If debt is that cheap it would be irresponsible to finance the firm with equity.
I agree that this might catalyze awareness. But the people in power know they need the mass acceptance to stay in power. Which is why every new medium that reaches a big enough audience is infiltrated with agenda pushing content. It is absolutely critical to divide the masses to stay in power. It doesn't matter which side, as long as you have one side to identify with and another side to blame in this post-factum society. The percentage of people dropping out of the belief systems and trying to rationalize again is IMHO too small for large scale effects to not allow the people in power to continue. Its a handful of swing states that matter.

That being said, I have more hope for smaller, local circles, because then the partisan lines get blurry due to a common local identity.
Tying up $ in assets that are sitting in warehouses instead of using that $ elsewhere is a not benefit to society. One premise of lean is to match variation in demand to supply as quickly as possible, you should be calling for capacity to scale production and lower lead time, not hold inventory. You might not even hold the right inventory.
The security gains of multi-factor authentication are significant. They are so large that choosing to forego them might at this point in time be deemed negligence. That said, you're absolutely correct that it's wildly unreasonable that so many of them require you to make use of your personal phone - which you are wisely and responsibly trying to ignore

Fortunately, there are a lot of good ways to do 2FA that don't rely on your personal phone! A second device, physical RSA tokens, and U2F keys are all viable options that let you both be responsible by ignoring your phone and be safer. Some password managers will also do your TOTP code generation.
Growth only matters to the degree that it will eventually lead to higher dividends though, from the perspective of shareholders. At some point companies (or the companies that acquire them) need to yield a dividend or else it's all a Ponzi scheme.
Could you run an emulator that uses an authenticator app? Or you could get a physical authenticator fob perhaps.
I back up all my gmail locally with "gmvault". I am not affiliated, other than a satisfied user: http://gmvault.org/
They don't have to. There is no problem. I am glad they are doing something.

However, if you come forward and pledge to provide "800 Million funding and grants" and all you get is Google Ad credits, that's disingenuous.