skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/

Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
> i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.

It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.
Remembering predictions and revisiting them is a superpower in risk management and decision making.

Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner is a good starting point if you want to learn this power.
Even “reputable” sources like the Financial Times have been putting out utter rubbish: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea0557...

My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as a coping mechanism.
His idea of credibity and mine are not the same. At minimum, he himself is not trustworthy.
Video games add 'stay at home' Covid-19 adverts
How Startups Are Managing Cost During Covid-19 Turmoil?
IMO this is deliberate mis-information, some type of info-guerilla, to stir and channel anger against the establishment.
Really a great list. Thanks.
Hi! I am a full-stack software engineer with more than 10 years of experience architecting and implementing web, mobile and backend solutions, primarily using Java, Python and React.

Location: EU

Remote: Yes

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I just searched "Lord of War" and the front page is entirely about the movie. Don't know what to tell you.
Agreed, I almost always find what I am looking for on my first search. It might be a few search results down the page, but usually what I'm looking for is found on the first search.

Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
HowApp for Parents in Quarantine
"Think of the Children" is when an issue that is only tangentially or tenuously anything to do with children, and may not even be a legitimate concern anyway, uses a notional impact on children as emotional leverage to gain undeserved attention.

This case is literally and specifically about the protection of specific children from a proven risk.
VW Provides Financial Relief for Customers, Makes Masks to Aid Covid-19 Pandemic
I’ve tried to understand them, their rationale appears include:

- 5G occurred at the same time as corona
- This is therefore “too much of a coincidence”

- 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus

- 5G makes our immune systems weaker

All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.
Mirror: http://archive.md/deJvJ
Yep. But I think the same happen with all kind of crisises. The past history shows, that lying or being incredibly wrong does not have any negative impact on a pundit or or politician or whole classes of commentary journalist.

It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
Well, if that's the standard now, then the entirety of the US press is not credible: https://i.imgur.com/HGcoZco.png
Common JSON Patterns in Haskell, Rust and TypeScript
Hmm I'm not sure if Zero to One fits into what Nintendo does - maybe the Wii was (arguably the N64).

Nintendo main differentiation revolves around their IP, which they manage to refresh with every new console release by making some console feature into a game mechanic (and the gameplay revolves around it).

You can see good examples of it in their hardware accessories for games, where they don't feel like gimmicks, yet on other consoles some accessories do feel like it.
It's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to check every search in my history. But it feels like the chances I'll find what I need are comparable to the chances I won't.

One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.

It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
> pure laziness in game development

Ah you're one of those "how do they keep getting away with making more Mario games?" people.

The secret is that they don't release mainline games very often. You don't get a new one every year. You get one every 3-4 (or Metroid 6-10) years.

And when you do get a new installment it's just as fun and joyful as the previous ones.

They do need to get their shit in gear with the online stuff though. And emulation. They could and probably should acquihire a few companies to deal with those. If they made their entire back-catalog available on an official emulator that works one this and the next generation console, they'd be set forever.

Though they've already got enough cash in the bank to run for 50 years even if they stopped all new sales.
Our nation's military takes priority over Covid-19
Tone Vays: Whatever Governments Call Crypto, It's About Dismissing Paper Money
New Jersey needs COBOL programmers urgently
Haven’t heard if that’s going ahead.

But I’m working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io which will be launching soon
Tax incentives are created to stimulate one behaviour, so using them is good - but abusing those tax incentives - avoiding the behaviour they were supposed to stimulate but avoiding taxes is the immoral part. I'm seeing a decent amount of this with the recent crisis tax reliefs
Another lower bound on death rate estimated from Bergamo (of total population): 0.44%

4500/1112187

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=https:/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Bergamo
But both sides are irrationally being confident. The doomsdayers at least as much as the "flu-bros". I think it's fair to challenge the massive interventions being taken and the economic damage.
How Can I Find the Best Uber Clone Source Code?
What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population.
The trick is to get them programming without them even realizing they're doing it.

There's examples of this working effectively: millions of people can use excel to perform computations on groups of cells - the formulae they're entering include basic programming constructs like assignment, selection, loops, etc - yet it's not presented as a "programming system", which otherwise seems to put people off.

I recall reading an anecdote about the TECO editor (or some other emacs predecessor). Where the editor was being used by secretaries and other non-programmers, but they'd have no problems configuring it with the documentation they had available - they were never told that they were actually programming when they were doing so.

Perhaps it's a bit much to give the user a full-blown programming language for their configuration and expect them to have no problems, but it seems like limited programming concepts can be learned by just about anyone if presented in the right way.
If you click the “search instead for...” then the non-video result was exactly what I believe you wanted.
On-Demand Golang Binaries
They did bungle this last Pokemon though. But that's just as much in the Pokemon Company as Nintendo.

It should have been a true open world, with real-time battles. Basically Breath of the Wild, but you can deploy Pokemon instead of different weapons.
Does pg never watch the news? Or did he just forget that "no worse than the flu" was the general tone until late February in pretty much all 'western' media and even MDs?

E.g.

https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav...

https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi... (kudos for correcting/updating later...)

Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions by the Fox/alt-right/MAGA bubble on account of one viral video.
> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
The flu, even with vaccines, does not overwhelm medical personel, facilities and logistics as this does.

And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.
Depends on the screw up, if it caused actual bodily harm and they didn't respond I would be inclined to call them evil too.

I will conceded to playing devil's advocate here though.
> You can technically put logic in XML using XSLT (https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-xslt-30-20170608/), but I would ask if one SHOULD put logic into your configuration.

Well, definitely not XSLT.
It uses size and/or modified time if the underlying backend doesn't have MD5s available. https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/
The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results.

Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
Can it will be done with "Scrape Similar" Chrome plugin?
Yeah, but Nintendo's don't leave oil stains all over the garage.
Why not just let the program get that value?
If my config has side effects I wouldn't be confident that my program would run the same each time. To me it seems like this would lead to poor reproducibility.
Ask HN: WFH because of the pandemic? What is the most challenging task for you?
If you just started to work from home because of the current situation, what are the most challenging tasks for you in your day to day life?
What is something that was really easy previously and became painful as you started to work remotely?
People don't care about the distinction.
I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff has never been explained in so much detail before.
Takes two minutes to install if you know what you're doing.

The whole point here wasn't to make a slick single click install, but a prototype that works. And then iterate from there.
Perhaps Google believed that nobody would intentionally look for a Nicolas Cage movie...?
So you replied to my response about the exact search term I used by telling me... this?
+1 on Twitter anticipating this. I'm not a regular Twitter user by any means (it really didn't catch in the parts of the world where I live) but this platform was the only one in the Western world where one could see some of the real videos coming out of Wuhan/Hubei as the virus had just began to do its thing, and those videos had some "punch in the face" effect on people like me (as in: this thing is real).

At the same time the traditional Western media was just publishing some numbers (which never tell the real story) and were insisting on the political aspect of it all.
How to Solve Critical Problems with Blockchain?
> "For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in."

Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.

> "For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"

They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.
Or they work with remote teams around the world, including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was coming.
Yes, we also need to get used to dealing with uncertainty in assessments, predictions, computer models. Media are far too prone to blowing unlikely extreme possibilities out of proportion, when we need to see the whole range of possible outcomes clearly.
How do you come to that conclusion? He literally said he would _continue_ to shake hands, so why is it unlikely that he contained it from shaking hands?

The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he ends up dying.
Aren't these just cult leaders? They'll just explain away the outcome as a new surprise conspiracy.
You might be interested in this chap's work. He came to prominence after his construction of a home was covered on a TV programme here in the UK. The link here is about that house - and the TV programme is well worth watching, too - and the rest of the site is about eco-building etc.

https://ben-law.co.uk/ecobuilding/the-woodland-house/
Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code
Just be aware this is a cultural judgement. In the U.K., many shelters will not adopt out cats to people planning on keeping them inside, as it is deemed cruel.

I live in the US with 2 indoor cats, and don’t let them out for the reasons you mention.

However, I understand the other side of the debate also. We do a lot of work to ensure our cats get enough stimulus.
Find Remote Jobs in DevOps
> The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belong; you will no longer be highly read and cited once it is clear that your results can't be trusted.

That's a feature, not a bug. A system which depends on people being saints, isn't going to work.

> changing what kind of news people want to read is surely even harder than changing what kind of news journalists write and publishers publish

Agreed, I think that's the root here.
Got an idea for dealing with Covid-19? A Taiwanese supercomputer could help
That or just acceptance that their levels of tidiness differ and awareness that the tidier person will have to keep their environment tidier if he/she keeps wanting it because that's only for his/her benefit.

Trouble pretty much always stems from thinking that your standards and wants are or should be universal and ascribing them to other person.
I am in Spain and Bloomberg is just translating the comments of a far left party that has no ability to do that. Bad reporting.
There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture.

Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a pattern for SEO or ads.
I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it..

Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
Why is that rubbish? It was created by a team just as credible as that at Imperial College.
Yes exactly. Most people don’t know or care about how Governments and Corporations really work. All they see are memes and conspiracy theories and latch on to them.
The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something.

Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word:

https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23se...

There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example:

https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424
Having recently experienced a similar issue with "filler" words that mysteriously disappeared in a transliteration pipeline, I'd guess that this is due to an artifact in the training data. Most likely the STT engine was trained on transcriptions created by lazy humans who simply wrote "4" when they heard "four o'clock", so the engine learned that "o'clock" is a speech disfluency just like "umm" that usually doesn't appear in writing.
Yes, you said it was happening currently, so I tried it. The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively.
> https://fibery.io

I've clicked through all of their product overviews and I still don't have a clear understanding of what it is.

If it just launched -- have you actually used it enough to get value out of it? The whole point seems to be that it evolves (??) as a company grows but like I said I don't fully get it still.
Is the proven risk that China is snooping on American children? If so, I'm sure I'd have read it everywhere. If not, it's sensationalism. The case is literally and specifically about Zoom having the ability to snoop. Children are ancillary.
Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless
That is a fantastic idea.

Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
The problem is that the WHO was lying multiple times, and other organizations parroted those lies as they were afraid of confronting the WHO.

Now we are in a stage where there's no good information source (except HN comments, though even there we must be selective).
That would be ignoring the extent of the economic/societal damage that is caused by the disease itself, would there not be any intervention to try to control the spread and its consequences on the medical infrastructure as well as all the other ones.

The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
The Switch isn't supposed to feel premium. It's a toy for children. I think there's a quote from someone at the company to the effect of "our audience is children (even if their age indicates otherwise), we want to give them something that feels fun enough, but it shouldn't get in the way of the games"
1, 2, 4, 8 isn’t that different from 1, 3, 5, 7.

You need more sample points, larger multipliers, or prior expectation of seeing an exponential curve to see that as exponential growth.
The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon.

In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks.

It's not the flu.

P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.
If it was not Paul Graham this would never has made it to HN front page, but ok...
One of his point is that people should not talk about things they don't know about. So maybe he should start applying that to himself first (and maybe this to myself right now).
The question is, how do you define the threshold of expertise require before you start talking about a subject?

The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still being studied and will be forever.

Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
I think the KN95 issues is also a legal/health standards one. I don't know if the FDA can waive that unilaterally but they should prob think about it.
Show HN: Golang Chrome Headless Driver
Why? He's an academy award winning actor who is hugely popular or else he'd be out of a job.
Here's one possible answer why: https://scroll.in/pulse/957883/did-india-overreact-covid-19-...

Having given this link, it can be proven to be (tragically) wrong...
I'm "learning"(calling functions) opencv(using cv2 with python3) to find the coordinates of a string inside image.

Even though it's useless in the industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/axvjfb/do_i...
More worringly, this epidemic is also destroying the layer of benevolent hypocrisy that kept globalisation together among young people worldwide: the Chinese virus, the Italian siesta, the Northern stinginess, the British take it on the chin, the American insurance or die, and so on are the latent prejudices now rubbing salt into wounds and adding insults to injuries. It will be extremely difficult to have that utopian, dreamy benevolence back soon.
It could be perceived quality, since Nintendo is notable for their build quality. There are many stories of their devices having survived years of abuse (I’m talking Gameboys that still work after falling out of a bus).