skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.

But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse.

The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment.

I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people.

After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.
Sure, but you have to weigh in the probability that such a strategic stockpile will ever be used.

As an economic investment, it may well be a real good idea to buy up cheap oil now. But that's separate from the stockpile argument.
Our app was quite clean and not taken down due to adult content creators, it was specifically the paid chat functionality they took issue with. And hey, I get it. It was a bit borderline. We took a risk with the business model. But that wasn't my issue it was the 30% fee that really killed us - bending the spirit of the rules to call a humans time chatting somehow a 'digital goods/service' to catch us in their IAP web. This stopped us from being able to pay our creators fairly and caused us to make less than Apple did from our own product after we paid creators. Creators expect more than the 70% so it makes it almost impossible to run this type of product/service on the app store.
I don't follow this logic.

Bird/lime own their inventory.

Airbnb is better off than the hotel chains IMO. The hotel chains have to keep paying their staff and rent while revenue drops, but airbnb just sees the revenue drop.

It exposes the people who bought properties to list on airbnb on aggressive margins or like the example in the article of someone buying a car just to put on the platform. I wonder how much rental prices will be affected when the properties that were bought to use for airbnb are brought back to the long-term rental market.
All the "sharing economy" businesses like Airbnb and "Airbnb but for x" (like this one with x = cars) have the same model anyway, be the middle-man, promise protection for both sides, take 30%, great if everything works out, but be slow to respond and offer a pittance if one of the parties gets shafted.
Most of the media zombie scenarios create very hostile environments and rapid breakdown of society. They're essentially engineered to create this situation. The zombies spread the disease actively. Near 100% conversion rate (immunities or asymptomatic cases are extremely rare). Incubating individuals will turn on those around them. And of course there often is a lack of genre awareness, the very concept of a zombie apocalypse is unknown.

This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie horde. So there's a huge selection bias.

This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of society are still working and the infected are not going out of their way to infect more people. And even now we're already seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-themselves attitude around medical equipment.
I've heard numerous times startups have had a hard time getting a smaller amount of funding from angels and VCs. As in, "I want $500k" and "no, we only do deals with $1M+", or something like that. I thought that was crazy. This is probably the pendulum swinging back, as pendulums do.

I am interested in how this situation affects larger companies. My guess is since they're so much larger this time around than back in 08-09, and since tech didn't really change all that much in the past ten years or so, there might be greater structural pressure for startups in terms of hiring talent and market direction, because the big guys have so much liquidity and are entrenched in many different verticals. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The alternate ending is way better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22780457 here is my follow up on this.
The US has nearly a trillion barrels worth of oil in the ground, but we should bail out oil producers by trying to fill a different hole with less than a billion barrels of oil at government expense?
Moderators, the title here is inappropriate and arguably linkbait. The article itself does not claim that the US strategic petroleum reserve is "hidden". The article's title, "What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?" would be better.
By that logic Mukesh Ambani is the richest person on earth by about 1.5 orders of magnitude because he's from India.
I'm not that sure about macOS, but on Windows that seems to be way more prevalent in my experience (had to deal with it when worked on clipboard redirection via RDP). The format also has some additional metadata embedded into it [1]. After all, Windows applications kinda pioneered "rich text" exchange via clipboard.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/html...

The format is actually negotiated by the communicating applications so it quite can be RTF too, depending on what formats the applications can produce and understand and the priorities they give to them.
Don't forget to include bandwidth costs, which turn out to be much higher than you'd expect. 1.5 hours of with 6 participants using simulcast corresponds to about 20GB of outbound (inbound is free on AWS). Which corresponds to a little under $2 (at $0.09 per GB).
I think they get bullied into larger deals that inflate their valuation beyond what they think they're worth. It works in a growing market to fundraise beyond your valuation and then grow into it. It doesn't work when the market turns down. If your runway is sufficiently short, you'll be fundraising a down round in a down economy which will slash your valuation and make it harder to get good terms.
Social Simulation
> The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity

Apple products are not a necessity but cell phones pretty much are today. And nearly all phones are made in countries with looser labor and environmental laws than we'd accept in Western nations.
What a great presentation. Thanks for the link!

BTW, here's an interesting observation: if you normalize a schema to the max, applying CRDT techniques for eventually-consistent multi-master concurrency is relatively simple, and you can do it using SQL. With PG you could have each instance publish a replication publication of an event log, and each instance could subscribe to a merged log published by any of N instances whose job is to merge those logs, and then each instance could use the merged log to apply local updates in a CRDT manner. If you normalize to the max, this works.

For example, instead of having an integer field to hold a count (e.g., of items in a warehouse of some item type) you can have that many rows in a related table to represent the things being counted. Now computing the count gets a bit expensive (you have to GROUP BY and count() aggregate), but on the other hand you get to do CRDT with a boring, off-the-shelf, well-understood technology, with the same trade-offs as you'd have using a new CRDT DB technology, but with all the benefits of the old, boring technology.
What is the said company ?
I use Joplin too, and like it. I have never heard of MermaidJS before. That looks really useful. Thanks for sharing it.

The other thing I really like about Joplin is the side-by-side markdown and formatted view. I've taken saving half-baked blog posts in Joplin until I'm ready to post them, and it's nice to be able to grab the markdown and dump it straight into hugo's markdown-ish files.
Absence of suburbia != crowds and noise.

There's a level of isolation in the suburban US that's hard to put into words if you haven't experienced any alternatives. That may also be true for other developed nations, I don't have first hand experience.
I think that industry statistics show that many restaurants always have questionable business models.

It would certainly be ideal if Restaurants, Cruise Lines, Hotels, Airlines had the balance sheets to handle an event like this, so far a 2 month slowdown, especially as there are things like cancelled events, hurricane season, recessions reducing travel, etc.
https://archive.is/6YUOF
Iris is a modern IMAP based email client for MorphOS
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1597/
As for editing the files, VSCode + markdownlint extension covers the authoring, file handling and searching.
Sometimes Apple doesn't notice and sometimes Apple makes explicit exceptions; however, such "treatment of Developers is neither fair nor consistent" (and is something you aren't really going to find out about until after you plunk down the development costs on your app, at which point Apple pretty much has you hostage). I have, to be very clear about this, been in a call with Apple App Store reviewers explicitly running my nose in this clause and then, when I am all "but but but what about XYZ???" they simply tell me they will add XYZ back to their review queue to see if it is in compliance and whether or not it should be removed from the Store.
His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.”

Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.

Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the rabble.

The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.

The truly elite use that fear. They aren’t afraid themselves.
Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!) and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here: https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/
The whole situation is in my opinion much more complicated.

Here are some texts from the internet concerning this:

David Michael Roberts - A Crisis of Identification: https://inference-review.com/article/a-crisis-of-identificat...

Two Quora posts:

https://www.quora.com/Did-Peter-Scholze-and-Jakob-Stix-reall...

https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-Stix-and-Schol...

Also relevant:

https://thehighergeometer.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/taylor-du...
Yes, similar position with Messagebird. Lack of transparency in their reporting/insights vs Twiliio. That said, our Twilio pricing is 2-3x Messagebird.
Classpass was founded in 2013. Wonderschool was founded in 2012. Can we stop calling companies that age a startup? Or at least stop using them as examples? I mean, the article then goes on to call Airbnb a "home rental start-up". It isn't a start-up, it is over a decade old and has over 10,000 employees.
Se Libérer de L'Insomnie
L'insomnie, qu'elle soit récente ou installée, est le résultat d'un déséquilibre.

Car c'est en dormant que le corps et l'esprit se régénèrent et ainsi se maintiennent en équilibre.

Cela se fait naturellement la nuit; alors que le soleil est de l'autre côté de la planète, pour égayer la journée de nos amis lointains.

Certaines personnes devront dormir le jour, mais devront dormir de toute façon.

Il va de soit que si l'organisme ne se régénère pas, des ennuis se préparent.

Cela coommence par de la fatigue physique et morale pour évoluer vers des situations plus graves pouvant conduire au décès.

L'insomnie est un mécanisme de défense pour guêter absolument tout.
Car une atteinte à la sécurité s'est produite ou se produit et le cerveau reptilien se doit de surveiller.

Dans cet état émotionnel et physique, vous ne savez plus trouver le calme, vous êtes en alerte permanente, et de toute façon incapable de résoudre la cause de l'insomnie.

Le stress perpétue. Cela conduit aux idées sombres..... et à l'isolement.

Cette souffrance s'installe insidieusement et laisse s'inscrire des croyances aux programmes invalidants qu'il convient de libérer aujourd'hui.
Are the working standards to a level you would feel comfortable working in? Would you personally be okay putting together smartphone products and/or pulling rare metals out of the ground?

The alternative to a smart phone is a feature phone made in a similar factory, and the alternative to that is a landline, also made in a similar factory, and the alternative to all that is maybe a laptop with VoIP, also made in a similar factory... It's exploitation all the way down.

When the markets only way to offer prosperity to some is to exploit and shaft others, while maintaining the position of elite classes, there is a problem.
https://devimaat.1tpego.net/devimaat/retrouver-le-sommeil-po...
Meanwhile, the old maxim "All programming is ultimately an exercise in caching" seems to have been forgotten entirely. This whole thread is just surreal.
This is awesome. Did you or someone else illustrate the icons? They're beautiful.
The rentier economy, aided by automated systems online, is now proving to be a total failure.

The downside risks versus the short-term gains are too asymmetric.

Car rental - damage is very expensive, margins are tiny
House rental - long term loans, short term lets that have proved very volatile in the pandemic. Office space rental - wework, again long term borrowing, short term rental.

The idea that we can endlessly slice and dice risk to get a "free" gain is rotting society.

Learn a skill. Create value. If everyone does this we live in a better society. We cannot all live off each other. Someone has to create value.
We’ve had many viral outbreaks. SARS, MERS, Zika, Swine flu, HIV etc. some of them have been with us for decades. Why don’t we have vaccines for all of them yet?

Also how likely is that COVID-19 will mutate like influenza and become a seasonal deadly killer ?
I almost teared up, didn't expect the thread to be so sad, but also wholesome. Thank you for sharing.
It's hardly unique to startups, and has more to do with the industries they're in than the company size. Mine is still hiring very aggressively but we are in the health research industry which didn't face the same sort of "unwinding", and have always been remote so there's no empty office we're obligated to pay rent for. Meanwhile I have friends in very established publicly traded companies who have been laid off or had their benefits cut already. One lost all company matching on 401ks this year.

VCs remember that there are some very successful companies that came out of the 2008 recession, and many are doing a lot more than usual to help the more promising parts of their portfolio weather this storm.

This article fails to highlight how any of these startups (on that note, how is AirBnB a startup) are worse positioned than their larger competitors. Not one of the ways that workers are impacted that are mentioned in the article is unique to any size of public or private company.
They aren’t making that argument, they are making the ludicrous argument that moving a fraction of 1% of our oil supplies from one hole to another at taxpayer expense somehow protects us from something.

Even if they were it’s not the purpose of government to gamble public money on market timing bets. Oil has a history of always getting cheaper.

Plenty of private funds are going to be spent in the energy market in these bets.
Yes and no. Certainly the unit economics for some start ups always looked problematic. But for others, it's not hard to see how they would have solid businesses in normal times, but have no resources to weather this downturn.

I mean, it's not like people are never going to travel again or eat out at restaurants. But I certainly wouldn't want to be a travel startup or restaurant startup (at least of the dine-in variety) today.
ISTM the editor wrote this headline. TFA only mentions Russia in the context of being a threat to Sweden. Also why present tense when "Sweden’s two A26s should be completed between 2022 and 2024, at which point it will be possible to gauge whether they can meet their ambitious performance parameters." Or at least that was the case in 2018 when TFA was published; do we have any idea whether construction even started?
Firefox is doing a lot of innovation in the privacy sector. One extreme example is the TOR browser.
And Apple too - I am constantly seeing this (traffic/congestion flags) on side and residential streets with no traffic monitoring devices in my Apple Maps.
You're not supposed to be vegan, that's what's wrong. And if you really have to, you should at least keep quiet about it.

It raises far too many uncomfortable questions in the brains of people who really know better but are simply too weak-minded to change their habits.
I saw this post and initially skipped it because I know how crypto threads go on HN. Then saw on LinkedIn it was from you. Can confirm, this gent is a great engineer and is actually a nice guy.
re: "designed specifically", I can see how suburban living might be an obstacle to labor organization, but who is doing the designing here?
COVID in the Counties: Tracking Coronavirus Across the USA
From what I've been hearing VCs are worried this is going to last awhile, and so they don't want to give small amounts of money to a company knowing it isn't enough to ride through this. If you only ask for enough funding for a year and the VCs believe the economy won't improve for another two then they aren't going to put money in.
Deep-sea tube worms get an assist from methane-eating bacteria
Coronavirus was the impetus for pricking the bubble. As Warren Buffet so eloquently put it: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.”

Turns out there were a lot of unsustainable businesses like this. The Fed and government stimulus will not be able to reflate that bubble. No matter how many companies we nationalize.
What the actual fuck?!
He seems to insist on only communicating his ideas in Japanese though.
The apps/tools you use are not that important. The task of keeping a bunch of notes is technically trivial at this point, hence the myriad of note taking apps…

The important thing are the principles you use, your method of how you deal with that information.

Several posters here wrote that they never came back to their notes/bookemarks etc. They used all kinds of tools.

But how do you order and sort your notes in such a manner that you want to come back to them?

This is a good example:
https://shime.sh/how-i-apply-zettelkasten-to-roam
Sarcasm does not really work on the Internet.

See what I mean?
It's more complicated than that. In Monopoly, it's a combination of luck and not being an idiot. Similarly with life.
What this is most affecting is the service industry. If your company makes a product that can be put in a box and shipped to the customer's door, people can still buy it. Maybe even more people buy it because they're working from home but still getting paid or just got a $1200 check or both, and they're not about to spend that money on restaurants or theater tickets right now.

That may even carry forward somewhat. You have someone who doesn't have a washing machine, well the laundromat is closed or they don't want to go there and they just got $1200, plus there are lower interest rates and cheaper financing, so now there's a truck delivering a washing machine and they're never going to go to the laundromat again. Even if it eventually breaks they'll buy another one because by then it's the status quo.

It may be a good time to get into the business of making stuff.
That’s ridiculous, that volatile market has supported trillions in investment over the years. The market knows better than politicians and right now it’s keeping our massive supplies of oil in the ground until they are more valuable.
The problem is smaller funded startups create smaller returns, and take away money that could be deployed in more promising startups that would benefit from larger deals. The money isn’t going out because it’s just not worth it at those levels.
Plastic bags are making a comeback because of Covid-19
I use notion as my "inbox stuff". Whenever I see something interesting (book, article, whatever), I use the chrome extension and send it to that inbox. On the phone, I can also "share to notion" which sends it to that inbox. Once in a while, I review that inbox and then prioritize things in other notion pages or in more actionable items.

It works pretty well. The only big issue is how slow it is to cold start. My fix is to use google keep on mobile for very quick note (I.e. someone tells me something), and then I'll manually copy it to inbox later in the day.
Ok well that’s what her disability is - asthma.
Which programming language should you learn on this quarantine?
I haven't seen many people that say oil isn't useful. It's the burning of this valuable substance that is the problem when it could be used for all these things you list.
It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure that a VS code extension is a complete solution - When I code, it is rarely typing in the IDE for 25 straight minutes. It is thinking, taking notes, drawing, testing in the browser, looking at dev tools... and then a few minutes of typing once I have figured out what I want to do.

I also question the wisdom of breaks at specific intervals. Do I really want to get knocked out of flow because a timer expired? I take my breaks when I complete a task. Sometimes that is after 10 minutes, sometimes it is after 2 hours.

If I were in your position, I'd look for a different metric than just time. Maybe measure the rate of activity across all running apps, and provide a notice of, "Your typing speed has dropped, and you are taking more time between mouse movements - if you are slowing down, maybe it is time for a break?"
Still makes him look good in comparison.
I'm not sure what escrow means in this context. But if the server has the keys, I would say no, it's not e2e.

This aligns with the definition on Wikipedia too

> it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, and even the provider of the communication service – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.
If you are using webrtc in the browser e2e is not possible. Which is why it’s critical you have the ability to self host such solutions.
Observability and Domain Observability: From Understanding to Value
https://archive.is/EbF9b
Surely not the best example, but Terry A. Davis' (RIP) TempleOS was written in a very idiosyncratic style (he even invented his own programming language (HolyC) for this).
Probably this is focused on ownership and there's miscommunication. VCs don't care that much about dollars; they want 18%+ ownership or even big returns aren't material to them.