skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a very forced interpretation.

Britain was not challenging France. The height of French power in terms of relative polarity was the early 18th century, not Napoleon (by that point, Europe was multipolar). Spain imploded, the Netherlands were imploding (connected to the split and decline of Habsburg), England was still emerging...but the key point about Europe, geopolitically, is that it has been multipolar since the fall of the Roman Empire (in terms of relative power, Britain came closest to domination but never sought preeminence in Europe, the foreign policy of Palmerston was pretty important in this).

I don't think Germany was challenging Anglo-American supremacy in WW2. For one, Hitler assumed (correctly, for the most part) that America wasn't terribly bothered about Europe. For two, Hitler also believed that Britain was the natural ally of Germany...until war occurred. WW2 was far more about Hitler's bizarre theories about race and what was happening to the East (Napoleon was France's Hitler...right man, right place but trying to do something that was basically impossible in Europe).

WW1 is probably more unclear because Germany did things, like building up their navy, that are difficult to interpret as anything other than challenging the status quo. But I think there were a number of strategic miscalculations on both sides that make it somewhat difficult to divine intention from actions (i.e. did Germany believe they would trigger a huge war...well after 1870 and the relative peace of the 19th century, probably not). I think the mistake you are making (not one btw that is contained with realist theory) is assuming that agency is necessary...Germany did not need to "challenge", conflict was inevitable through changes in relative power...I wouldn't necessarily agree with that still but it is a fairly nuanced point.

The stuff about the Thucydides Trap is also pretty questionable. Classical realist thought, of which Thucydides is part of, says that war between great powers is inevitable but this isn't really said explicitly in Thucydides (the first seed of these theories really come with Hobbes...I am guessing Hobbes' trap didn't pass muster with the editor). Allison cites statistics to justify the specific statement but these are pretty hopeless (similar to the issues with democratic peace theory...you can define things whatever way based on what conclusion you need). It is a great catchphrase and sounds very impressive but has always seemed rather devoid of content (Allison's views generally are). I am definitely sympathetic to realism but the whole "conflict is inevitable" stuff isn't really credible anymore.
Seems like this is affecting more than just their camera business.

Do we know which division the PlayStation now falls under? This is a big year, with the next generation consoles just around the corner. So far, Sony has been keeping a low profile relative to Microsoft, and I think it's been harming their image a bit. I'd hate to see this sort of a corporate restructuring (perhaps forcing a change of company name?) pull the attention away from their new tech, new games, and plans for the next decade.
I don't think it's relevant in this case because it will be forgiven, as mentioned by another commenter.
Maybe a disgruntled employee takes down your database or copies confidential info onto their personal computer
They published an article after this on it, showing good results in 2017[1] with a large author list, and they have a new trial underway[2]. Would be a ridiculously cheap therapy.

[1] https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...

[2]https://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/clinical-trials/trx0237-m...
> If the choice is between locking down the country for a month ...

There's something fishy there. If anything you're saying is true, one month can't possibly be enough. I'll skip the napkin math, but if your numbers are correct, it'd be 5 months if you could schedule people to get sick for available hospital beds perfectly.

(Ok, napkin math: I'm assuming everyone will eventually be exposed, using your 60% infected, 10% will need hospitals for 1 week, and 1 million hospital beds in the US. So pretty wide margins for error.)

> your basic argumentation here is driven by what you want

You and your straw men. I think you're inventing things for me to have said/wanted/believed because I haven't written much that you can actually argue against. Look at what I write, and quit making up things between the lines --- The only justification I've given for my position so far is that in my experience, predictions of doom have always been false. Maybe I'm wrong this time, and I guess we'll know in a 3-8 weeks.

> .. and are instead trying to dismiss epidemiology

No, I dismiss statistics made by dividing small and uncertain numbers by other small and uncertain numbers, and I always doubt extrapolation, even when it's based on good statistics.

> Baby boomers are going to be hit especially hard by this epidemic if it goes unchecked

And younger / middle aged people (without savings/investments) are going to be hit very hard by the economy collapsing.
“Through the establishment of Sony Electronics Corporation, Sony will not only accelerate the integrated operation of the EP&S businesses,” reads the release, “but also aim to optimize its organizational structure, talent and business portfolio, while further enhancing competitiveness and creating new business.”

Man, this reads like someone got it from a corporate text generator.
I’m pretty sure this happens. When I was doing work with NetSuite, my roommate (who has no interest in anything remotely related to enterprise software, and doesn’t have any other devices that could have been listening in) started getting ads for them on his laptop.

It makes sense for them to target by IP, so if one person in an office is researching the product they can start targeting the entire office and maybe get their ad in front of an exec who can make a purchasing decision.
You may want to read up on depression-era programs like the WPA and the invention of social security.
I don't know about code quality, and I'm not ruling out privacy or security issues, but zoom must be doing something very right -- their rise to popularity regardless of there being plenty of free (!) alternatives has to come from somewhere.

It may be just anecdotal but their calls work flawlessly, regardless of number of participants, where other apps are just a laggy mess. So yes, their apps are just a means to an end and may be rushed and "low quality", but oh boy do they deliver.
It took them so much time. I can't even begin to imagine how money it cost them to fix this. 10 years * 500 full times at SV salaries, or something like that? That is one expensive bad architectural decision. Maybe $0.5-1 billion, in the end? Not counting missed opportunities during that whole decade.

Is the shame of this the reason Marc A doesn't want to talk about Netscape?
Great. Lets ban gig work and make sure that instead of a crappy income they have no income!
Somewhere out there must be a few firms with massive cash positions. Every time a company buys back stock, they're giving cash to the investor who sold the stock. Assuming the government doesn't inflate the currency to nothing, those firms are going to absolutely clean up now, with so much cash to deploy while everyone else is getting force-liquidated.
As Matt Levine explains, it was the optimal thing to do.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
China and Huawei propose reinvention of the internet
I'm not particularly impressed with their UX though. Stupid things like a filter to only show places that allow smoking, but no option to only show places that don't. As a non-smoker, it's far from pleasant to stay somewhere that's covered in tar. Same with pets. If you have allergies, you might prefer not to count on the place being cleaned well enough. I've reported this shortcoming years ago, but nothing has changed since.
> They'll just leave the United States, then?

American citizen expatriates pay tax.

>How is taking it back fair?

We live in a society. :)
Nobody's surprised
Sure thing. Fixed now.
That logic makes no sense. It's like the government taking your home from you to build a new stadium saying "well, I think the ability to enjoy the new stadium is payment enough!".
Exactly what I was thinking, if it proves to be true they will move whatever division the Playstation line is in before Holiday 2020.
> If your language can't even be formatted properly if it refers to code elsewhere, I have to wonder what the fuck compilers do

They are split into passes. With C macros it's totally fine to have a file that says

#define LBRACE {

And then in a different file the compiler necessarily have to access the first file in order to find the opening brace. It's not even invalid for an include file to contain unbalanced braces with the expectation that whatever code that includes it fixes that.
There was a sign at my local grocery store saying it's a union store, in fact there was one at most of the stores where I used to live (I live outside the US now). I've seen the workers striking outside the store. There were also news articles late last year where the union had won increased benefits / pay through a recent strike.
Presumably GFM would need to do the same (or it would be blatant fraud). So that doesn't really make it different.
I love that the author's final "gotcha" isn't even domain specific. It's a hard limit on recursion, just like all modern debuggers and most other formatting tools. It's crazy to me that they even tried to support formatting auto-generated code snippets, I know I personally would've created a much more naive/conservative bail out.

> If the line splitter tries, like, 5,000 solutions and still hasn’t found a winner yet, it just picks the best it found so far and bails.
Instacart's Web UI does not work. The search feature is completely broken and always shows a picture of the sad milk bottle, as is the update cart feature (before the shopper starts shopping) where you can search for an item and add it to your cart. I tried the same update cart feature in the app and while it is able to find items, tapping add to cart just shows the button depress animation and the item never gets added to the cart.

Not only that, they're using enterprise signed ios apps for their shoppers and deliverers which requires them to do the settings -> trust app thing to run the app. Seems similar to what made Apple revoke Google and FBs enterprise cert for a while, very sketchy. You're only supposed to use enterprise signed apps for actual employees. It seems these "gig workers" aren't considered actual employees by the company but when it comes to abusing the cert it's ok? Apple should revoke their cert until they get an actual deliverer/shopper app.

Edit: Seems I've angered some Instacart folks, care to respond about the issues on the web ui, app, and usage of the enterprise cert for signing your deliverer/shopper app?
For those uninitiated to the photography world, Sony, in the past few years has completely disrupted the entire profesional, and amature camera markets. They are ahead of the curve in mirrorless formats, and have forced other makers like Nikon and Canon to make the switch.
Until a black swan event happens...and now they need to beg the government to save their short sighted asses.
Is that really going to be the case with all coranavirus aid packages going around?
Needing an income is not the same as needing one particular specific source of income. It is nonsensical to assert that any particular gig or even gig work itself is the sole available source of income.
> They didn’t sit there and wait for the government to bail them out.

The government in the 30s took on trillions (in modern dollars) in debt to do just that; the only difference being they put people to work by pouring money into infrastructure projects because people could actually work without isolation.

The difference here is that the money isn't going into infrastructure, it's going into basic necessities and healthcare; people are still being put to work as you can tell from the ramp-up in hiring for delivery, cargo, logistics, etc. The velocity of money hasn't stopped - if anything, it's actually increased in certain areas of spending. The problem here is unique for almost everyone alive today: entire quadrants of the economy have ground to a halt because of an external stressor.

TL;DR: your understanding of the new deal needs work.
Great. Look forward to it sinking without a trace, leaving all the people looking to exploit their local community for a quick buck in the lurch.

I also believe that non-primary homes are not covered by most mortgage moratoriums.
Isn't this Peer Space?
in other news: let's put a turbine on an open faucet!
Airbnb's initial allowing for cancellations for any reasons was started on March 14th and lasts one month, currently ending on April 14th. Based on their existing communications to owners, I believe they will most likely move to a location dependent version of this policy as we move closer to that date.

Also, as an owner with two short-term rentals, it has been very challenging for us as well. We are getting cancellation requests for bookings into May and June that are outside of our 90 day cancellation window. Vrbo is pressuring us to allow those guests to cancel, but this isn't easy for people depending on that income. We have been trying to allow cancellations if travel isn't allowed (our units are in Hawaii so incoming travel isn't really allowed right now), but many of the travel bans currently in place are for 30 days.
> I don't see why these companies are being demonized, the government should just let them go bankrupt

Well, they’re being demonised because they’re pushing heavily for a government bailout that will avoid them going bankrupt.
There was a Josh Hartnett/Adam Scott movie called August that's set in the dot-com boom. It's got fairly low reviews but I also don't think they do it justice. Some of the reviews seem to be about how it's impenetrable and hard to understand.

For some lighter fare that others in your family might also connect to, there's Ashton Kutcher's A lot like love but there the dot-com thing is just a side plot.

Also, Antitrust with Ryan Phillippe. Not specifically about the dot-com boom but roughly the same time period.

I mean none of those movies are masterpieces but I think they impart some sense of the time period.
Where all the money goes in the US Senate's $2T COVID19 stimulus bill
The actual reasoning has been listed already (you were close!), but I figure I might as well chime in to clear up a misconception:

Posts can't be downvoted, only comments.
Many? Can you name a city that they didn't exploit regulations to get an edge?

They just marched in and started setting up illegal mini-hotels. When this blows up I'd love to know how that came to pass. Did every mayor in every big city really just decide not to act? There has to have been carrots and sticks here.
Maybe. But there are way too many companies and leaders like this. They expect two week notice when an employee leaves, but have no problem firing people at 5 pm on Friday via email/text whatever.
They are being demonized because the government isn't letting them go bankrupt or letting the public buy up their assets. Instead the government is rewarding their greed and poor business practices by bailing them out and letting them keep all of the money they made.
But many American companies wouldn't have an issue borrowing money (at a reasonable interest rate) to continue operations since they're presumably profitable or at least approach break even.

Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?
From the Instacart post linked in the article:

>"As we previously shared, we’re offering up to 14 days of pay for any hourly employee or full-service shopper who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in individual mandatory isolation or quarantine, as directed by a local, state, or public health authority."[1]

So there is no benefits for workers who develop symptoms and self isolate? This statement reads like you have to go a hospital and be fortunate enough to be able to get a test. In many hotspots there is a shortage of tests. There also seems to be any mention of providing hand sanitizer, gloves, masks etc to these workers.

If you read the "previously shared" link in the above it states:

>"All Instacart part-time employees now have access to sick pay, an accrued benefit that can be used as paid time off if you are absent from work due to illness or injury. We’ve previously offered sick pay in select states — now, all part-time employees across North America, including in-store shoppers, will be able to accrue sick time to use as needed in the event that they become ill. All sick pay accrual will be backdated from the start of the year, so all hours worked by our in-store shoppers since then will count towards their current, individual sick pay balance."

An "accrued" benefit that will be backdated to the beginning of the year(we're only in month 3 of the year.)I'm guessing this would yield maybe 2 or 3 days max. That barely puts a dent into two weeks of self-isolation and no work.

This all rings quite hollow.

[1] https://medium.com/shopper-news/shopper-health-safety-update...
Yes to all that. No tears, no bailout. Nationalize out of bankruptcy instead.

Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.

But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.
Like cheaper housing where you live and work!
If your WASM application makes use of any kind of XML or HTML content you need to parse it or it’s just a string.
You go Matt, don't let this Pleb get off thinking he sacrificed nearly enough time or life experiences to be one of the l33t! Get him bulldog! He was probably spending all that extra time doing namby pamby "personal projects" or "relationship building"! He's not a REAL engineer!
Forget money. You can run at capacity so long as you don't have to run at capacity. This is global, savings cannot help you. Money is just deferred work, you can't eat it.
The problem is when they all do it it becomes systemic risk.

The new meta is "if we all do the same stupid shit we'll get bailed out when the crunch comes"

The penalty for a bailout should be bankruptcy and nationalization. Taxpayers should profit, not lose.
I don't think people are against masks. The message is that we don't have enough masks for everyone. Because they are so limited, doctors and healthcare workers are at the highest risk, since they are exposed to the virus the most. Please make masks available for them as they'll have the best use for masks. They can save themselves and other people having the biggest impact.

Singapore is a small country and had capacity to distribute masks to everyone. US is at a much larger scale. I'm sure if we have a billion masks, we'd be giving a couple to everyone.

Masks are definitely effective, but US is so grossly underprepared for this pandemic that we really have to make a tough choice. Our manufacturing economy has been going downhill as we've been offshoring things to China and other countries. This is a huge blow when we can't build things that are dire to save us.
I layed of 7 employees (mandated closure of non-essential business) and we called them each individually over FaceTime to do it.
by your logic everyone should have been living pay check to paycheck when interest rates get low.

but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.
It's a website with pictures of the inside of a house, a calendar and a payment system.
Bird as a company needs to fail as soon as possible. Their scooters have totally overrun my community — they are strewn like trash on every corner.

I sympathize and wish all the best to its employees, however.
The Next Black Swan Event: Adam Baratta
thanks for bringing this up. I'm interested by the way you characterize this 'vicious cycle', and wonder whether you see 'dialing back' to be as much of 'contribution' to the dynamic you're articulating since you are also suggesting that people doing so, 'stop contributing'. I'm also wondering whether you would be willing to share more about the how it was that the shared experiences you heard offline (i.e. IRL tech community that you respect) shaped your decisions as a member as to whether to or to not engage as much with HN, as an online community?
I'm not necessarily ascribing agency to the actors. The verbiage I used was for brevity.

I too see these events as mostly the confluence of bottom-up trends outside anyone's control, with occasional pressure points at which "great men" can exert unique influence.

I do however see conflict as inevitable.
Not necessarily. A humane call with, "Please don't discuss this until 4 pm, as I want to tell people personally" would go a long way. And if people do talk about it, you can still have the rest of the discussion, which is not just about revealing facts.
Sort of. The high end pro market is barely starting to turn a page and use mirrorless bodies Like the Sony a9/a9II. Nikon and Canon are following a bit behind in mirrorless tech, but are still very much on top of the pro market (for now), mostly due to professional services, support, and glass.
Well Apple just got into credit card business maybe they can use their massive cash reserves and enter the banking business.
That's not the way it works. For instance, over the last 10 years, Boeing spent 45 B$ in buyback out of its 60 B$ profit. Now that the situation looks grim, Boeing does not have enough cash to live through the crisis. But it won't go bankrupt, it will get 60 B$ of cash from today's federal government bill, and probably more later on.
> we'll be living with the repercussions of shutting down the economy for many, many years

We'll be living with the repercussions of Coronavirus for many, many years. Shutting down the economy was just one of many ways the virus could have done its monetary damage.
It is when the options are limited and tend to move in lockstep - this is likely the best job these workers can find. If this were a functioning market, we'd see undesirable jobs commanding higher salaries than most desk jobs.
Seeing nature flourish as humans pull back... I wonder if we are the virus
The communications I've received from IHG, Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton have all indicated very flexible cancellation policies due to COVID through the end of April (24 hrs notice), even for new reservations made during this time period.

Can't speak to Booking or Hotels.com, I always book directly to not get hosed when changes are necessary.
oh, I have. Full on per-project style guides, determined in multiple core team meetings at kick-off.

And these people were excellent engineers...or at least they were when they weren't focused on minutiae.

Even with automatic code formatters, I've gotten into style discussions or been witness to them. At Google! In code review!
Ask HN: Should the government do door to door testing for Corona Testing?
There isn't a shortage, yet. Cuomo was put on the spot today over thousands of ventilators sitting in a warehouse. He said they don't need them yet, but they "expect to" in the future. Any claims of a current shortage, therefore, are a lie.
If anyone is looking for a one hour history lecture, I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AGe2V0qHo

> The Battle of Kadesh, ca. 1285 BC, is the earliest military encounter that can be analyzed in detail. This conflict between the Egyptian forces of Ramses II and the Hittite army of Muwatalli
That's a dumb take.