skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A provincal governor was responsible for tax collection, law, security, etc. They got to keep a percentage of the taxes they collected. So if you were the governor of a very prosperous province you made a lot of money. This also incentivized the governor to make their province to generate as much tax revenue as possible (good for both the governor and Rome itself)

But in turn you have to remember that it was a political position and in roman politics money was everything. They most likely paid a crazy amount of money to get the post and had to keep paying to keep it. And any further advances in politics would just cost more.

Another thing to know is that they were the leader of the provinces legion. If there was a revolt and you failed to squash it you most likely ended up dead way before more legions would arrive from other provinces.

This was pre imperial era. After that the power of a governor came from the emperor directly. They had exactly as much power and/or money as the emperor wanted to give them.
Ask HN: What still sucks about FP&A (financial business planning) software?
Hey finance professionals at HN,

We're building a financial planning tool for businesses in the 25-200 FTE range with a focus on real-time data (automated/swift input), an excellent overview of financial insights and powerful ways to model scenarios.

Working at startups, we've seen how the finance dept. often lags behind, with data scattered across multiple spreadsheets, software, emails, and files. We want to collect this in one structured flow, built with native collaboration in mind.

If you're working in finance, regardless of company size, it would be invaluable to hear about what works and what doesn't in your daily job.

If anyone is excited about this stuff and want to have a closer discussion, feel free to email me at chris at trycashflow dot com. (Incidentally, we're also looking for a finance professional to join the team shortly. I hope me mentioning that does not violate any HN rules.)

Thanks!
From what I read, a single lockdown doesn't work, as even 1 patient is enough to destroy everything, and a lockdown can't guarantee he wouldn't exist.

A solution seems to be selective lockdowns by area backed by a huge amount of testing.
> Very bad and innevitable horrors have been happenning for a while(i.e the war Yemen, Iraq) and the "large populations" that you mention had little to no insomnia.

And they’ve had very little effect on me. It’s not irrational to care at different levels depending on that.
All over the world houses are built according to available local materials and the degree of weather insulation required, mainly.

In America, houses in Maine can be built completely differently from houses in Florida.

The reason we don't build out of stone/brick, besides cost of construction, is that they're terrible insulators. So your heating or AC bill is going to go absolutely through the roof.

A wood frame stuffed with insulation means your home can be energy-efficient. This is a good thing.

We don't fetishize a house being "solid" and we don't generally punch our walls on a regular basis. :) "Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.
Why Having a Full Post RSS Feed Is a Good Idea
From what I've heard (could be wrong) the government literally just said to all the networks 'send this to everyone' and let the individual networks handle it.

Apparently they could've set up a system like in Japan where your phone gets emergency alerts (which I actually experienced when I visited on vacation a few years ago on my iPhone from the UK) and are handled specifically by the mobile operating system but the government were too cheap to set it up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/government-ign...
This is one of the best summaries of unexpected US oddities that I have ever read. Thank you to the author :)
Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other developers won’t
> Placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials have never been completed to evaluate the safety of thimerosal. Partly because it would be unethical to inject a known toxin into people to determine it's safety.

The safety of thimerosal is entirely possible to evaluate. It was in a bunch of childhood vaccines; it now is not. Has there been any demonstrable difference?

> But instead, through the actions they took, they made it clear it is not worth the risk.

Not necessarily. Could just not be worth the fight with the anti-vaxxers spreading bullshit about it. See also: Subway ditching azodicarbonamide because some blogger started a scaremongering movement around it.
Website translation process in 9 steps and how much it costs
Anybody semi-capable can easily modify a stick built house. And Americans _love_ to modify their houses. DIY stores are big business here.
I, myself, am adding some recessed LED lights into a couple bedroom ceilings this weekend. When I'm done, apart from the light fixtures themselves, you will never know the work was done 50 years after the house was built because there are no cable raceways and no external plugs.
I am not sure if this really fights corruption. It may also lead to a situation where official communication will be sanitized and the real stuff gets pushed to private channels.
Load balancers rule the world.
> Doing this basic formatting in ascii text is just mind-numbingly stupid.

It might be today, but many of us who are older used Markdown-like formatting even before Markdown was even a thing, because on BBSes and other applications, everything in those days was plain text.

I don't know Gruber's intentions when he created Markdown, but my guess is he created it for himself first, and then other people adopted it because they think similarly.
Beat you by about 16 years on that one, sadly the website is not around anymore and the CSS appears to be broken..

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210013005/http://trendwatch...

check out 'blog' https://web.archive.org/web/20070501172450im_/http://trendwa...

or 'youtube' which had just 80,000 results..

https://web.archive.org/web/20070501172450im_/http://trendwa...
Aesthetically, it's consistent with the article.

Technically it's consistent with ordinary practice. e.g.

import naughtsAndCrosses as nan
It's really sad to see them lose their composition like this.
If you are going to be judged by the moral of all others non-billionaire, probably.

But yeah, as a non-billionaire, I'd say that when things get to that scale, you become less moral compared to the mass. People's life becomes just numbers.
You can also delete items from your backup. So like if wanted to delete Zoom from Time Machine just select it in a backup and then select the option to remove it from all your backups from the Action menu or a right-click.
Plus it’s fairly common to end up with more than one program, in more than one language, reading from and writing to a DB. The more you’ve avoided using DB features (in featureful databases, anyway) the slower (in performance and dev time) and riskier (you will have more bugs, and maybe some pretty bad ones) this is.
That you don't understand how to test something isn't evidence of anything at all.

> Some of the phenomena won't happen if there is too much disbelief in it. Do you have any ideas on how to experiment with stuff like this?

That right there is a testable proposition. Put somebody in a soundproof, lightproof room who can reliably experience the phenomenon. Randomly surround them with groups of believers, disbelievers, or nobody at all. Repeat until you have a large N. If the phenomenon happening is truly sensitive to disbelievers, you should see clear correlations.

More broadly, there's a long, long history of people making claims of mental phenomena and constructing tests of those claims. So it's not me you should be asking. It's the broader literature. And the rise of things like EKGs, fMRIs,and TMS means we're opening up all sorts of new ways to test claims about mind.

If you're serious about claiming these are objective phenomena and that your model for them has more explanatory power, then you should jump in and start doing that work. And if not, maybe just stick to being honest by using phrases like "I once experienced" and "I believe".
This implies there's not only an arbiter of what misinformation is and is not in all cases, but that the arbiter is your government / local authority over the internet.
Based on the environment variable naming, I'd wager it's Firetext and MMG, two UK based SMS gateway providers.

https://www.firetext.co.uk/

https://www.mmg.co.uk/
It’s not absurd to point out that the picture painted by TFA that almost all Americans spend a large proportion of income on rent or mortgage is not true for a significant chunk of the population, especially considering investment/skilled worker immigrants typically earn above average.

If you earn 10x while having to pay 20% of that as rent or mortgage, you do still end up with 8x. Not to mention non-home owners are also prevalent in most of the developing world.
Interesting, thanks for the comment!
What were holding out for is testing capacity. Once tests are readily available, we can isolate people who catch it and all they people they've been in contact with, and the virus can be held down in quarantine while the rest of society goes on.

This strategy has worked in China and South Korea, where life is now slowly resuming, but most other countries haven't caught up with their testing numbers yet.

The reason we're all quarantined now is that there's presently no rapid reliable way to tell who needs to be quarantined and who doesn't.
Have you tried any of those two?
I j know someone who replaced all their non-standard dimension windows on a 2500sf house with double pane windows and it was 30k. So 80k sounds high, unless it’s a really big house.
"...as even 1 patient is enough to destroy everything"

That implies we are trying to make the virus extinct, which we are not. We want the virus to spread, but at a manageable rate.
On a related note, I've been looking for a way of transparently tunnelling all internet traffic through a vps using KCP to improve an unreliable 4G connection and would appreciate any guidance.

To add additional detail, I'm currently using OpenMTCPRouter to bond 4G and DSL but it suffers when one connection starts experiencing packet loss.

There are plenty of guides out there that use shadowsocks which works well for web-browsing, but to be truly transparent need to just set a gateway to route via the tunnel. A docker image or a vm image that makes needs minimal config on both ends would be ideal. Has anyone done something similar?
Yes and this influences even the places at higher latitudes. I live in WA state and it's very clear that during the 50s-90s a lot of the residential construction here was influenced by what was going on in California. I know a lot of trades people that moves up from CA in that time.

So the houses are not built to adequately handle rain and are drafty due to colder temps here. WA state finally started instituting more specific build codes that match the region in the late 90s and 2000s
With none of the community support or third-party components that the React ecosystem has?
XAML just has to die.
Won’t happen, impossible to enforce.
Similar to Japan, the US has https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-emergency-aler....
None of my friends are family are being sacrificed to any of those things. Most are able to work from home or are classified as essential workers and are still working for that reason (e.g. I know some nurses and police officers), and the ones who were in the service sector are furloughed and are getting unemployment. None of this holds a candle to them dying.

What do you think is the overall right length of time for the lockdown? Do you think we should already be getting back to work now?
well framed
This is groundbreaking - and the very fact that it is possible, is mind-bending... I really liked the possibility that these 'machines' can be 'evolved' into agglomerating ocean microplastics into collectable balls!
The thing is, the USA is the country with most tornadoes in the world. A solid house with thick walls is tornado-resistant. Yet, you lose thousands of plywood homes per year due to tornadoes, while the rest of the world builds real houses with stone walls just because they are more beautiful. What it seems to me is that you have a weird, unhealthy fetish for paper-thin houses.
A home's worth of windows and labor for 8k? What market is that?
The house building quality like windows was a big surprise for me too when moving to the US.

Currently more and more houses do triple glassing by default in Switzerland. Double glassing is already done since the 80’s and mandatory for all new house since a long time.

Obviously its more expensive so energy saving standards and energy prices have a lot of impact on how houses are built or renovated. Especially in Texas energy is cheap and I can see that there are not a lot of incentives to invest in lower energy usage by building more expensive.
"What were holding out for is testing capacity."

Really? Because I have heard of no plan at the federal or state level to implement a wide-scale test and trace program to contain the virus. This seems like a very good idea, but not one being implemented in the US.
These races weren't hold at the Colosseum but at an oval track. The biggest one called Circus Maximus seated 150,000.

But in general these were free to attend. Some rich guy would pay for it to become more famous/get political power.
We don't know.

For most countries, the month before lock down was one where people acted as they always had. The months after lock downs are relaxed will not have people acting the same way, and there is a lot of middle ground between lock down and buffets at international conferences.

Enormous deployment of serological tests and rapid RNA tests can also change the way we approach day to day activities.
How can a binary-valued network be differentiable?
What app, out of curiosity?
What app, out of curiosity? SFDC?
Mail merge is mail merge, be it, to an email, letter or text.
Dental practices aren't usually big enough to have a person who devotes such a large percentage of their time to composing mail merge templates as to become slick at the task. Rather than being sarcastic you would be better being grateful that they were courteous enough to go to the bother and expense of writing to you at a time when their business was experiencing complete shutdown and they themselves were facing total loss of income. They probably had more on their mind than pleasing pedants who'd focus on trivia at a time like this.
I use a combo of Google Keep, Taskwarrior, Firefox bookmarks, my blog and my mastodon account.

And of course I use features like Gitlab/Github stars.

It's just then a matter of remembering what you're looking for to know where to look.
Why would you not want to share your CV?
Ask HN: Govt-issued wristbands for COVID recovered
Thinking out loud here.

How about the government issuing wristbands to people declared recovered from COVID-19?

Perhaps the wristband would include 1) Name and 2) QR Code to cross-reference with a large doctors' database confirming their positive test and recovery.
I don't think anyone would bother to port code from C# to Java in 2020, but I agree with your point. Not using a technology to it's fullest in favor of portability is not smart.

I think most things we build on top are sufficiently complex now that even with these self-imposed limits, porting everything over from X to Y is a major undertaking.
HpHosts ad/tracking domains list was shut down
There's a little trick a government can pull to at least make the death rates look smaller:

https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/

Simply classify the cause of death to be the virus only in tested and confirmed cases (U07.1 COVID-19, virus identified).

That's what my country's (Poland) government is doing and lo and behold - our numbers are relatively small.
I’m a resident of Gainesville and I was completely unaware of this. Now I know not to send anything sensitive to a local government email address...
Collection of Resources – Protect your Android app against Reverse Engineering
Two months seems like the minimum. The really hard problem is that even if you reduce spread to near zero, it’s almost guaranteed that cases will continue to spread among the essential workers who are still active during the lockdown. As long as that’s the case, the end of the lockdown will result in the cycle starting over.

It seems to me that what we’re really doing with the lockdown is buying the time to “mobilize,” in the military sense, our healthcare system. If we had the testing capacity to test everyone and contain only the sick, this would be less serious. If we had 10x as many ventilators, and 100x as much protective equipment, this would be less dangerous. If we had an effective treatment (like a Tamiflu for Covid), then this would be less dangerous. Etc.

It seems to me unlikely that we will be locked down less than 2-3 months. But after that, I doubt the public will be willing to endure another global lockdown of this magnitude. Thus I think everything we’re doing now is really about delaying the inevitable long enough for us to get a coherent response in place.

To the extent that anyone is a “winner” in a pandemic, it certainly appears to be Taiwan and South Korea, who responded fast enough to the first wave to keep it from requiring an authoritarian response (or, at least thus far).
For small functions / blocks and descriptive types I’m ok with it in Go BUT I always use descriptive names anyway. So much easier to keep context in my head.
Covid’s Other Casualties
The image rotation didn't work correctly on mine. Send me a PM with your e-mail if you want me to send you a copy. It left a dotted line around the rotated image.
Staying focused.
Or zoning your HVAC if you have a multilevel. I've heard that does wonders.
If real information about China were to leak out, my guess is it would happen through the vector of internet/social media. Chances are, some other source would need to copy + repost it before being taken down. This is what I looked for.

One such account which is purportedly doing this is https://twitter.com/truthabtchina. To summarize this, among other rumors:

- lots more people have died that communicated (there's an estimate of ~22m due to missing cell phone contracts)
- riots are happening between regions where lockdown occurred, and regions next to them)
- lockdown isn't practically over in areas where resurgence of infection is happening (pending other containment approaches)

edit: I've eaten dinner with some friends from China in the past month before lockdown started, and am in frequent contact with people traveling throughout SEA. I was trying to provide and summarize a potential semi-primary source. Added some more specific #'s, info, and removed inflammatory words. Sorry - I wasn't trying to be fear-mongery. However, I am trying to accurately reflect a harsher reality

I do think it's quite reasonable to assume some areas of China are getting back to normal.

I also think it's quite unreasonable to assume info _isn't_ being censored and controlled, especially post journalist-eviction.
He still failed to notice a huge red flag. Companies are not supposed to call people up and tell them your last 4 SSN digits, let alone the entire thing.

If your bank every does that to you, close your accounts and switch banks.

Why did he not realize this after the fact and point it out as a missed red flag? Has anyone had their bank read them their SSN over the phone? That sounds like a massive PII compliance issue.
Is VC Still A Thing?
The epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the 'Download' button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the browser-armour I'm wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don't know. The PDF link works fine.

Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub button on the main page, and add "?download=true" to the URL (mirroring the pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.
> Armenia did not spend the last few decades convincing it’s children that only losers go into trades

Doing labor has been stigmatized in most of the world for the last few thousand years. You could be excluded from "polite society" on the strength of a rumor that you personally produced goods you sold.

Of course, for most of history, there were a large number of people who knew they stood at the bottom of society and so were willing to do these sorts of jobs anyway, but that's not quite the same issue.
Aurora is indeed amazing. However, my experience with it regarding costs is that main cost you have running it is not compute, but IO ($0.2 per million requets [1]).

This cost is kind of hidden since to estimate this in the early stages of a project is an art. In one project on my team the IO cost is about 8x more than cost of instances. But imo it is still worth and I never actually calculated how much we would pay if we were running on RDS + provisioned IOPS.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. For example people proven to have been already infected can reduce distancing. Some distancing measures vs baseline can be left in place permanently (e.g mask wearing).
It's a big money saver probably.

FOIA laws usually make most of this stuff public anyway, except you run it through lawyers and waste alot of time and energy. PII shouldn't be in email anyway.
That might be true and if so well then I guess about 8 million people will die.
As others have pointed out, this only gets thing to a steady state while everyone is still locked down. All the countries that have loosened their lockdown restrictions had to tighten them back up after they had new "flare-ups".

We're in this for many, many months. Somehow a lot of people have forgotten that "flattening the curve" greatly lengthens the time period of the curve.

Also, the thesis behind flattening the curve is still that the same number of people eventually get it, and it's only once you get broad population immunity that the spread stops.

We will be fighting this with social distancing until there is a vaccine.
Six things I do when I'm overwhelmed
>How stingy do you have to be to only send back $300 every month

Is this an Armenian thing or an immigrant families in general thing? From my perspective that's a breathtaking level of entitlement. If I accomplished the difficult task of establishing myself in a new country and was then generous enough to donate money to my relatives on an ongoing basis, whining about how much I give them would probably result not only in the money stopping but me never speaking to them again.
Avoidance of Interpersonal Exposure Reveals What Great Photographers Are Really Like

[Partially-obsolete joke]
> markdown is opinionated.

This. If I were to guess, Gruber made Markdown to make writing for his blog easier. Then he made it available for whoever wanted to use it too, which was very nice of him.

Given how there are already multiple flavors of Markdown available that address various shortcomings, I don't know if there's a point to critiquing Gruber's original version of Markdown since it was likely created to satisfy his writing requirements first and foremost.
Why even use door handles at all? We're still using 3000 year old technology to enter buildings and rooms. Replace them with automatic doors keyed to voice or RFID.
pinboard, mendeley, and a versioned org-mode notebook.
Wow that’s tough. Can you and your wife check out separately to split the order?
UK phone masts attacked amid 5G-coronavirus conspiracy theory
Just in case you haven't seen it, I'm a big fan of this [0] chart, which plots new weekly cases against cumulative total, both axes on a log scale. It has a whole video explanation [1] if you're interested in the logic behind it.

[0]: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc