skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it happens, I see it happening not as deliberate policy but as a consequence of consumer preference. The MTA was already on their way to fucked before this happened. Poor policing policies have reduced the social penalties for turnstile jumping. Ridership (and fare intake) has been on the decline. The high cost structure, coupled with lower fare collection means more money has to come from the city/state via taxes, for which there is already stiff competition.

IMO, I don't really see the MTA coming back from this. The unions won't let them decrease costs (construction or operational). They don't have the capital to make the improvements that would increase automation, and even if they did they'd have a hell of a time getting that through the operating unions. Making the stations nicer just means you're going to wind up with more police chasing more homeless people, creating more opportunities for police-on-citizen violence caught on video.
> we had to spend 2 months in the NICU. Writing took a backseat.

That sounds entirely like the right priority to me. Your book isn't going anywhere and kids change so fast at that age that it would be a shame to miss out.
I couldn't agree more. Growing up, my dad would tell me stories about 70s and 80s and 90s computing and it always fascinated me. I wouldn't consider myself a history buff, but when it comes to computers, I definitely am. More books on computing history would be great, the only one that comes to mind this very second is "Unix: A History and Memoir", which is fantastic.

I've considered writing one myself as a little hobby project, but I'm not sure where to focus.
Thanks so much for the feedback! I will make sure to add more explanation of how it works to the video or at least have more text on the landing page. I feel as though I am terrible at both video and written content, so I tend to procrastinate or produce the minimum amount required.

It seems like alot of us have had less than stellar experiences with traditional federations. SSC is my attempt at solving for the lack of value we've come to expect when we participate.

It comes down to why do we join a federation? There are a ton of reasons, but the two most salient in my personal experience are to win (or set records) and to engage with a community of like minded people to motivate myself to push more. Over the years, I have come to value the community aspect far more than winning.

Due to SSC being all judged via video, we will never have the rigor that a typical contest has--i.e., we cannot be assured the weight declared is the weight lifted.

My hypothesis is that 1) people rarely will do this considering they have paid to belong 2) the main attraction won't be your name atop a leaderboard rather it will be the interactions you have with the community (my experience).

That's my hope, anyhow. The space SSC occupies is somewhere between social network and traditional federation with a bias away from all the bs baked into the former.

RE: peaking. I have a feature idea whereby a member can "throw down a gauntlet" that would create a window for folks to submit lifts. For example, you could pick when is most convenient for you to peak and then create your own gauntlet to get some motivation when others sign up to join you. You all get your lifts in by the deadline and we can do a retrospective on it.

Thanks again for the feedback and have a great day!
oh yes, also for car racing the financial sacrifice from parents that are not rich.

And the sacrifice for the whole family in terms of time and money when one kid in any sport is good enough to go on travel teams (in the US/Canada this level is not very high) and the whole routine of the family around weekends and holidays are planned around those traveling sports events.
What were you intensely curious about at 12 years old? Do that.
Thanks for the kind words! Have a good one.
Noble-secp256k1: Learning fast elliptic-curve cryptography in JavaScript
We can actually measure how much was "choice" and how much was "defaults" because at that time there were versions of IE for Mac and Unix. They were, shall we say, not as popular as the Windows version. Even when there were a lot of websites that only worked in IE. Heck, you can still get Edge for macos/iOS and Android, how popular are they compared to on Windows?

And Chrome got popular in much the same way. For a long time you couldn't go to google.com in a non-Chrome browser without seeing a banner pushing Chrome, and it was bundled as a "you must notice and uncheck this box or Chrome will be installed as your default browser" option in a wide variety of popular third party software installers, and it's the default on most Android devices.

"Good enough" and "gets installed by the user not doing something" consistently beats higher quality options for popularity. Look at Firefox -- it's not doing anything like that, it's a better browser by a lot of metrics, and it's losing market share.
Boost your immune system with these techniques
I am learning Elixir and Phoenix. And to be honest I am not sure I like either. The lack of decent resources (I mainly use Python and JavaScript with some C#) so I am used to reading a lot of blog posts, I don’t really like the documentation and the answers in forums are over verbose. And then there is Ecto which gives me new respect for SQLAlchemy or even solutions in C#. Debugging is a bit rubbish as well and to top it off it’s not typed. Pattern matching is kinda cool though.
I think this is a pretty important point. Often times I think I'm interested in doing something or I like the idea of it, but it doesn't take me very long to realize that I'm completely disinterested because of the actuality of the thing. I'm OK with that.

I think the parent is probably trying to say that you definitely haven't done enough exploring on most subjects in a short time to find and glean all the interesting bits, and I agree with that as well. There are work projects that I would have abandoned long ago if they were personal projects that I have got A TON out of by sticking with them and working on them for years. But in those years there has been a lot of slog as well, and it's probably not the optimal way to mine all the knowledge nuggets...
> "I have been in wrong terms with my neighbors for years, and now just thinking they are next door is hurting my chest and making me hard to breathe"...

Not at all. Anxiety is hearing the boss music in a video game and not seeing any enemies. I'll often find myself so tense I'm holding my breath with no ability to rationalize why I'm in that state. It's a real bastard.
Anyone Hiring Interns?
I have looked around the board and found only a handful of intern positions. Anyone company hiring interns?
Mounting evidence for Covid-19 treatments
This is good advice, and both parts rely on being aware of your own mind and even tricking it a bit. This reminded me of a Moxie story about nearly dying while sailing [1]:

> Strangely, I could feel myself drawn towards the temptation of giving up, even though I knew failure meant certain death. In hindsight, I think it's because the act of giving up feels so similar to the sensation of success, at least in a superficially immediate way.

Over the years, the mantra that "giving up feels like success" has really helped me not give up simply to access that feeling.

[1] https://moxie.org/stories/brink-of-death/
Their initial announcements also banned Google Classroom, but I guess I'll just chalk this up to a mistake then. https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2020/04/04/nyc-forbids-school...
I hope it is useful and interesting to point out that both restic and rclone (as well as borg and git-annex) are supported at rsync.net.

This isn't that surprising in the case of restic and git-annex, both of which transport over SFTP, but we have actually built into our environment the 'rclone' and 'borg' binaries such that you can execute them remotely:

ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/some/bucket gdrive:/what/ever
I too would like to share my experience with both of you and see if there is still an opportunity to do something along these lines. Email me at mpesa@mlke.net
HCQ caused heart problems also? Afaik only CQ does. Most use HCQ (Plaquenil), not CQ, which is risky.
The mask thing is still a recommendation, and for very good reason - they can make things worse for healthy people.

I'm not going to wear one because:

* I'm cluastrophobic and am uncomfortable (re)breathing hot, humid air.

* I know I'll touch my face often to adjust it.

* It will give me a false sense of security, especially considering it doesn't protect the eyes.
You are essentially identifying the semantic divergence between Church and Curry style types. Church-style or Intrinsically typed Lambda Calculus does not give any meaning to ill-typed expressions and there for beta-reduction can not proceed for these invalid expressions. Where as Curry-style or Extrinsically typed lambda calculus gives meaning to expression that do not consider the type alleged to be possessed by that expression.
That video's author says he worked for Medtronic. Well... coincidental or not: Medtronic bought up Covidien, who have been alleged to intentionally sabotage a contract with the US government for a national ventilator stockpile back in 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
Have you investigated how you get your news as a result? How was Italy at the time of that meeting?
There is a hypothesis [0] that the virus attacks red blood cells and impacts their capacity to transport O2, and that the lung damage is actually caused by that, and not directly by the virus. Elevated heart rate makes a lot of sense.

[0] see thread and linked paper: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1244717172871409666
You are basically saying "do no harm"

If it becomes a battlefield medicine situation, what should happen?

I remember reading that during WW2 when there was no penicillin, nurses would inject milk I believe into patients, hoping it would stimulate an immune response and save the patient. Seems kind of risky, what are the ethics?

What should we do if we run out of ventilators?
"We are physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians, not epidemiologists or virologists. Therefore this should NOT be viewed as predictions on the crisis, but rather as a technical tool to test various theories and assumptions in order to make more informed decisions."

This really should be at the top in bold. This is not a prediction, do not treat it like one, this is just a thought experiment.
I like those "Watch me make a beat" videos on YouTube. And the ones I enjoyed the most used Omnisphere for strings/pads.
Ask HN: Should company use Discord instead of Slack/Zoom?
Many companies and schools in Russia started to use Discord as a free replacement for Slack/Zoom.

I've heard P2P is not the best choice for some domains and Discord might sell your data to their partners.

Is it really a good idea? If not, how to minimize possible negative consequences (like role management)?
https://highfive.com/
Could you please elaborate on what you said? I have no idea what you are talking about so I want to learn
It seems super shaky right now, but it's definitely something I'd like to see investigated further.
Looks good! Will try later
Agree. When I read Eclipse, I thought "icky" and scrolled down to see if maybe JetBrains will turn it into something usable. Since they're not in the list, I'll pass on this.

I'd rather rent a Windows Server so that I can remote desktop into IntelliJ than suffer through another IDE.

The productivity boost that you can get from using a great tool that you are intimately familiar with is just way too much to sacrifice in exchange for what boils down to less setup work for getting a new laptop ready for duty.
Whoever wrote this, hats off.

>chromium - web browsers on Linux spent a decade going through a cycle of slick new slimline web browsers gradually getting buried in creeping features until they were as weighed down with chrome grills and ornamental fins as a fifties US car, at which point everyone would switch to some new minimalist alternative. Meanwhile these GUI widgets came to be referred to as "chrome", which explains why Google would choose to advertise their browser as if it was manufactured entirely out of deadweight bling...
How Will Covid-19 Impact AR and VR Headset Shipments?
I'd say that's indirectly true. They have managed to largely contain it, and because of that, a large number of the cases are from the church/cult, which has a membership that skews heavily young female. These patients have a much better prognosis generally, so you see a low fatality rate.
Hydroxychloroquine Update for April 6
> This effort they're doing really doesn't seem like they're treating it like a "Hackathon" project. They're putting real engineering resources behind it.

Engineers can and do hackathon work, but real engineering work is way more about verification and validation than hacking stuff together. Products need to ensure that they will work reliably within all operational limits. You don't ensure that with an all nighter and a 3D printer.

That's one of the main reason why software development is not recognized as an engineering field. Verification and validation are the bread and butter, because if that culture doesn't exist and if these efforts don't happen then people die.
I don't know about national lockdowns, but there were plenty of predictions, not of SARS relatives specifically, but of flu-type pandemics, in 2019 and before: https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predict... .
The book "Programming Elixir" is by far the best resource I found for learning the language.
Amu Entrance 6,9,11
> We looked at each country’s trajectory in “phase space” – where we looked at the evolution of the daily case growth rate as a function of the number of cases (rather than as a function of time). Each country has followed a very similar trajectory in this space, where the disease begins on a theoretical SIR curve but then veers off course and decelerates after government intervention.

This has also been done here: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

Accompanying minutephysics video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715920

This page provides results by country rather than by US state.
> Why do they want to limit exports from certified companies?

Put some thought to it. It's China, the government here doesn't need to resort to any legal tricks to crack down on anything, especially now.

The sentiment that exports are being banned for fear of faulty tests being sent to export customers? One must be joking. That's, again, China, a country not having any problem with that.

On other hand, exploiting this convenient pretext to deny the West medical supplies, under a guise of an iron wall adherence to the process is unassailable from the West, when the West always poked China for its inability to control exports.

On other hand, the Chinese red cross (which is a 100% state ran organisation here,) has no problem buying, and exporting exactly the same medical supplies, and equipment.
Ask HN: Why the downvote mechanism for comments, anyways?
As a frequently downvoted commenter on HN, I've done a lot of thinking about this mechanism, and I would like to propose a change to it.

Since the goal of HN is to encourage discussion and debate, why not require a reply to a comment before you can downvote it?

This would change the negative, conversation stifling enablement into one that requires a person to contribute to the discourse before voting their disapproval. It would help to distinguish HN from other driveby, populist moderated forums.
This is overly dismissive and clearly just a “negative for the sake of being negative” comment. I’m not a Tesla fan, but these arguments don’t really hold water and are very insufficient to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
Get people using it. Period.

Result: with every user interaction you will get a refreshment of motivation. I've done it for 5 years.

Long version:
I was all about starting projects and never finishing, until one day I actually put one online and started spreading the word through discussion boards.

So step 1) Launch and spread the word.
You get 1 thing out of this immediately: you WILL finish it to the bare minimum, because what if someone actually tries to use your product?

You could argue: yeah, but when I give up on the project it's no where near ready to be launched. I would argue back that if you dropped it, it probably means you got something out of it - could someone also benefit from it? Maybe, at that moment switch your brain to: now let's launch this and spread the word.

Step 2) Put metrics in it
You want to see if there's people coming to your website. Crucial for step 3, read on.

Step 3)
You will see people coming to your website and interacting with your product. This is the best part, because it gives you such a kick of motivation that will make you want to continue working on it. It just keeps giving.

I've started a project 5 years ago and I put it out there and forgot about it.
2 months after someone used it and I got my first reservation. That was such a source of motivation!! It's magical and it's a cycle. As I continue working on it as my side project and as I start losing interest, I get a new user which then sources me with more motivation to keep going. This cye repeats

I've learned a lot in terms of business, technology stack and devops, but all this applied to the same project I started 5 years ago.
Yes, Dr Raoult is discredited at this point but it doesn't mean we know the treatment itself doesn't work. Here's a study with a control group, randomized selection, etc showing significant improvements not, in viral load as Raoult claimed, but in treating pneumonia caused by COVID.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v...
Elon's companies are also in parallel working with an existing manufacturer (Medtronic) to produce vents of their design (or more specifically to produce a part that is a bottleneck in their production). Putting a small percentage of resources to trying out a second model (this one) is just good risk management.

Tooling does not cost when they already have it, that is why they are focusing on ways to repurpose parts they are already producing as parts of the ventilator.
<i> They'll probably even require me to send them an f'ing paper check too. </i>

I've been temporary renting my old house, and I don't take credit cards, nor am I setting up a custom merchant/billing/etc system for one renter. Mostly because all the easy solutions eat a percentage of the transaction.

So, outside of the initial cashiers check for the security/etc depost, I've been willing to take direct depost, or any other electronic form of payment that can deposit money into a checking account I've setup.

Funny thing is, all of my renters so far have ended up sending paper checks. Including the first one who also happened to be a pretty serious software engineer. That is despite the fact that there are a dozen billpay/etc services and various electronic transfer/etc services in existence. Overwhelmingly they are ripoffs, and the few run by honest banks in a number of cases actually send paper checks if the bill isn't for a major credit card company.

Try it. Can your bank send a thousand dollar plus amount to a random 3rd party bank/account for free (or a trivial fee?). I doubt it. For whatever reason setting up a funds transfer between two arbitrary checking accounts is more difficult than it should be.
I'm scared of how accurately your second paragraph describes me. Well, there are a few differences (I don't lose things, mainly). Thanks for the glimmer of hope.
I struggle with these tendencies too. For me, I think it usually stems from being interested in the product not the process--that is, if I could snap my fingers and immediately produce what it is I was envisioning (even though that initial vision is usually fuzzy) I'd do it.

I think people who can stick with things long-term enjoy the process of what they're doing at least on some level. What enables them to stick with something is not the goal post, but the activity itself. They're motivated to spend x hours a day building a roguelike not only because they're driven by the vision of what they're going to produce, but because they genuinely have tons of fun and get tons of satisfaction from the activity of writing a roguelike and solving the problems that arise in that domain.

Personally, I've found that this love and enjoyment of process is usually an acquired thing. It's just like going to the gym. Once you make it a habit it becomes easier and easier and you become so dependent on the rhythm and little boosts you get from going to the gym that your dream body or whatever initially got you in there pretty much becomes irrelevant—it morphs into an activity that's fundamental to your way of life, you need to do it, you become dependent on it.

I've found that sticking to intellectual pursuits long-term is analogous to going to the gym. If you force yourself to be consistent and to show up every day and commit some time toward your project, you'll soon come to love the process and it'll be much easier to see it through to the end.

It's incredibly hard but really important to resist the idea that you can bring your grand visions into fruition within a short span of time--it just doesn't happen, and it's these sorts of fantastic expectations that lead to eventual disinterest and burn out. If you're constantly chasing the finish line and fire up all cylinders to get there as fast as possible you'll never make it, but if you run for the joy of running and do so consistently you're guaranteed to get there eventually (the tortoise and the hare).
You get what you pay (or don't) for, if the business is going to rely on it then pay for something that will meet your needs and come with some degree of actual support
+1; I’ve used that method so many times that I wrote a Python CLI tool for that a few years ago: https://github.com/bfontaine/wptranslate
I am not logged in and I always get UK search results even if I search on google.com.
> I don't really see the MTA coming back from this.

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? Are you expecting a different governance model?

It doesn't seem feasible to me to simply think 'the subway will stop existing'. The density level of the city has formed around the existence of mass transportation.
China’s “New IP” Sounds Like Orwell’s “New Speak”
So discouraging to see such low quality and cynical comments at the top level here.

It's been made very clear over the weeks here on HN how Tesla and SpaceX between them, with their overlapping engineering resources (Elon, for example) have deep experience with life support systems, at a level approved by NASA even. To diss their work as a hackathon project is pretty low.

It's also been widely discussed that this crisis requires us to try some new things, and think outside of the box.

Elon donates massive quantities of masks and various types of the specific breathing devices asked for by medical facilities, and then takes it to the next level, putting his company reputation on the line, and you call it... a publicity stunt.

But when Jack Ma donated masks with a lot of fanfare, you said...

>Kudos to Jack. ... this shows selfless entrepreneurship.

Seems like a bit of a double standard.

>The smarter idea is to ramp up existing proven designs, not reinvent the wheel

Reinventing the wheel has a long history of success. But that's another story. Closer at hand, they already addressed this in the video, and why they did not take the path you thought would be smarter.

Specifically, just to reiterate what was made very clear in the first few seconds of the short video, it would impact supplies needed by existing manufacturers.
It's also possible that Covid-19 provides a reasonable cover for a large case of "big bath accounting". Individual building owners might not want to (or be able to) reduce rents/returns. But if happens across the ecosystem, then everyone resets expectations enough that businesses can return.