skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems I might not be communicating my thoughts on the topic coherently. My apologies! I felt that I have, but I think I’ll have to come back with a blog post instead of ad hoc thread comments. I appreciate the rebuttals for helping me refine my arguments!

EDIT: /u/HarryHirsch's comment here [1] explains succinctly what I intended to explain but did so poorly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22835580 ("You could nationalize the pension system. Considering the fact that on average the 401(k) balance is a few tens of thousands and that there is a retirement catastrophe coming, that wouldn't be the bad idea. The downside is that the stock market would be affected negatively since demand for stock would drop.")
Just as government finance isn’t like personal or business finance, business finance is not like personal finance. For one, the cost to borrow money is far cheaper for a business. Please don’t apply personal finance rules to businesses, they do not apply.

A business is not a household.
What was your behaviour couple of years ago? Have you worked overtime? Did you have older colleagues that time?

The answer is simple. If you don't want to work overtime then don't do it and see what will happen. Most likely nothing.

Think about how you can deliver move value to the company by working smart instead of putting more hours (hint: automate your job, try to bring new clients).
... I didn't say anything about malicious discrimination? That's an obvious strawman argument

In fact the problem is exactly the opposite -- it's the lack of awareness that people unknowingly tend to choose people based off "gut feel" that a man will do better. This is well studied and documented and only recently have women started to enter the workforce and based off the few studies that show women in exec positions often do significantly better than the average male who are in those positions.

A few articles:
- https://www.thebalance.com/do-companies-with-female-executiv...
- https://www.statnews.com/2016/07/29/women-in-science/
- https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/success/women-ceos-and-cfos-o...
It seems that in some cases, the way Firefox is calling those APIs is incorrect, or causes undesirable behavior.
> If you run an even-moderately-sophisticated web application and install client-side error reporting for Javascript errors, it’s a well-known phenomenon that you will receive a deluge of weird and incomprehensible errors from your application, many of which appear to you to be utterly nonsensical or impossible.

...

> These failures are, individually, mostly comprehensible! You can figure out which browser the report comes from, triage which extensions might be implicated, understand the interactions and identify the failure and a specific workaround. Much of the time.

> However, doing that work is, in most cases, just a colossal waste of effort; you’ll often see any individual error once or twice, and by the time you track it down and understand it, you’ll see three new ones from users in different weird predicaments. The ecosystem is just too heterogenous and fast-changing for deep understanding of individual issues to be worth it as a primary strategy.

Sadly far too accurate.
A Virus Conspiracy Theory Fueled Arson and Harassment in Britain
Another really important point I forgot to include is that not all artists are as financially viable as others, yet may still make really great art that is perceived as culturally significant.

Perhaps they make large scale installations that are difficult to sell, perhaps they are performance artists, or perhaps they are simply having a down period in the market.

A good gallery will leverage the sales of their more successful artists to support the production of work by their other artists
A million deaths is preferable to this.
I'm sorry you didn't have a good interview at Digg. My goal, then and now, is that even people who don't get an offer should leave feeling okay about the process. I clearly didn't live up to that with you, and I apologize for it.

We never made a no-hire decision based on one answer, and nobody ended an interview after one question, unless there was some sort of emergency. Site outage, fire alarm, that sort of thing.

> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy)

I didn't ruin Digg. Ruining Digg was an all-hands-on-deck multi-year team effort. I wasn't involved in the decision to rewrite it and didn't agree with it. I don't know for sure who was, or what pressures were at work behind it.

What I do know is that our VPE came to me and said that we were going to rewrite Digg from scratch, and do it in six months, because the code was a mess and it took too long to do anything. Which was true.

I told him it was a terrible idea and we should figure out the end point we wanted to be at, then incrementally refactor our way towards it.

He said we'd tried that and it didn't work, so we were throwing away everything and rebuilding it from scratch. In six months.

I said that if we wanted the slightest possibility of success, we'd have to cut features to the bone and ship a minimal version we could quickly iterate on. I suggested cutting the ability to comment on stories.

He told me he didn't think we needed to do that, and we were going to ship a feature-complete version of Digg in six months, from scratch.

It was a completely bananas project, doomed from day one, and I wasn't shy about saying so — I told anyone who'd listen that I gave it a 50/50 chance of destroying the company. The promises made about what would be delivered & when were completely unrealistic and unreasonable. There was nobody articulating what we were supposed to be building, or to say no to what shouldn't get built. Into that leadership vacuum flowed a torrent of well-intentioned but (in my opinion) misdirected ideas for what the thing should be, which ate that first six months in the blink of an eye.
It's been 9 days. Did you find something more current?
Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future.

This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be.

I'm not saying I'm against contact tracing in the current situation. But that shiny new button that governments get to press will never go away.

Edit: Reading the spec, I found a piece of information that may be of interest: This technology allows contact tracing without necessarily revealing the location where that contact has taken place. So that could indeed be a privacy benefit over alternative approaches.

https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
Perhaps in the past, earlier in the virus's exponential growth, many people had it but still an order of magnitude less than now. And that order of magnitude is the difference between a slammed hospital and a regular day. And because an order of magnitude people less had it, groups like the elderly were an order of magnitude less likely to be exposed en mass.
That's not the whole story though. Public companies are punished greatly for making big bets that fail, or for making bets that take a long time.

For example, maybe Boeing has a design for a brand new plane that can carry 1000 people and go Mach 3. But it might take them 10 years to develop such technology.

The market would punish them severely for pursuing such a thing, so it makes more sense to buy back stock, otherwise they might get sued out of existence by their shareholders.

The market no longer values long term bets unless you are very special (Apple, Google, somehow Tesla). All those companies have mastered marketing their long term bets.
> I'd much rather live in a world where everyone is required to wear masks all the time

A properly fitting mask is uncomfortable. It hurts your nose, it hurts your ears. If you wear spectacles they fog up. People don't tolerate them, and so they fiddle with the mask, taking it off and putting it back, or dropping it under their chin.

Here's what happens when you wear a mask for a couple of shifts at work.

https://twitter.com/gabbyjackson95x/status/12479391789623255...

https://twitter.com/george_kerris/status/1241821041107906560

https://twitter.com/LeaBasra/status/1246467174589517825

https://twitter.com/CorneliaLG/status/1247309904106393608

https://twitter.com/paigeleigh95/status/1247509440405876738

https://twitter.com/gsmarri/status/1241845315587715073

https://twitter.com/molliemariaa/status/1246285482130059267

https://twitter.com/freyja_woolston/status/12472261992120115...

https://twitter.com/johnnynash69/status/1248278245914693639

https://twitter.com/TJGrundy/status/1247771125553065986

https://twitter.com/rosenorth_/status/1247235204957208577

https://twitter.com/erikalouxx/status/1245240263947227136

https://twitter.com/ilkahannah/status/1248395954102759431

https://twitter.com/LeanneThornex/status/1247587759025504256

https://twitter.com/drccr74/status/1247601616548769798

https://twitter.com/lauraworwa/status/1246469150735826944
Lots of business are converting to delivery. I think this is good. The warehouse style of store, prevalent since the 1960s is an outdated model.

Schools are moving more courses online. Another major upgrade.

The restaurant experience hasn't been rewarding for a long time. People should learn to cook at home. Experiment with fancier cuts of organic meat.

Movie theaters have been terrible for decades. Sticky floors, too many commercials, overpriced food. Now many film festivals are moving online.

Fast fashion was just a way of getting people to buy poorly made clothes from sweat shops.

So much of the crap people bought recently was just excessive junk; causing an environmental disaster.

We should just pay people to stay home and learn new skills. Why not pay people to taking online biology courses though the pandemic? There should be a startup that pays people to stay home and take biology courses. Exams can be online and for real verification done over video conference with an examiner. The startup then can get a % of your salary when you start working. Or, be paid through advertising from medical companies.
Also refers to viruses dormant without any host, for example https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26387276
whilst an edge-case and it does show that enviromental factors and how a particular virus responds and reacts are still things we are learning about this one.

Heck, may find out that frozen good with contaminated packaging can put the viruses into dormant mode and when you take them out of the freezer, and temperature and humidity level kick it into life. Details like that unlikely, yet still not been ruled out and much science still ahead upon this virus and caught many off guard and on the backfoot, but we love solving problems and the science is starting to get more detailed a bigger picture every day. But still, mindful of not eliminating aspects that have not been totally ruled out is a balance of risk/caution and fair judgement still plays a part.
I just completed a project using notebooks in production. Granted, it was as a stepping stone to a more traditional application, but for 3 months, our production system was readily executing notebooks and consuming their output.

Papermill (https://papermill.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) made it extremely easy, to the point where I question the real value of moving away from this model. But software engineers practically hiss when you mention Jupyter because it's too different from the rest of their tooling.
I'm reminded of that time a Nobel prize winner used the "authority" he generated from winning the Noble prize to convince everyone that Vitamin C was a magical cure-all for all disease.

Being an amazing HIV researcher does not mean Streeck has an appropriate background in coronaviruses to be an authority in that field, especially given that his team has (a) found outlier results at odds with every other study thus far published and (b) is making a broad policy pronouncement based on studying a single family's household without considering confounding factors, like say the family cleaning the house before the researchers visited.
Ask HN: Are daily SQL timeouts that common?
My team sees SQL timeouts daily, which prevents the end user from running reports or even just viewing their data... until the DBA clears procedure caches, or execution plans, or whatever he does. I'm a frontend developer and don't know much about SQL. All I know is that we see timeout errors, then someone on the team pushes a magic button and everything is fine again.

We used to host our SQL database on our own server, until recently when we switched to Azure. For a while, timeouts were not as frequent - maybe once a week. Thanks to the current crisis, we've had to lower our DTUs to cut costs (from 800 to 400, as far as I know) and timeouts are a daily occurrence again.

In the past, I was told "that's just what happens with SQL", and that daily timeouts are not that uncommon. I have never used any web service that would take 30 seconds to 2+ minutes to return any kind of data, nor have I ever used any software where server calls timing out are commonplace. The closest thing I've experienced was recently when Chipotle had free delivery for a day - I'm sure their servers were completely overloaded around lunch time, understandably. But a small software company with a service that sees maybe 80 concurrent users at most, and is backed by a 280GB database? Again, I'm not a backend developer, but something doesn't seem right to me, and it shouldn't be treated as an everyday thing.

I don't know many DBAs, which is why I'm reaching out on Hacker News. Are SQL timeouts really that common? If so, how are they usually handled? Is there a way to automate whatever it is that the DBA does to fix the problem? And if timeouts shouldn't be that frequent, is there anything we can do other than throw more horsepower at it? Is it something that the team should be focusing more energy on?
Young people will die not just from the virus, but from inadequate medical care caused by overloaded hospitals.

It’s a shit situation for young adults, but sometimes life isn’t fair.
I wouldn't say that game consoles use FreeBSD so much as that they use chunks of code from BSD; I mean, the Switch is apparently using a microkernel, so I doubt that it's all that close.

But yes, using permissively-licensed components absolutely is* a good thing, including for the users, who get higher-quality software with less dev time and lower cost of development. Obviously I'd prefer that it was all GPLv3, but given that the alternative in practice is probably fully-proprietary software from scratch, I think BSD is better than nothing.
Humans are efficient, blacksmiths actually didn't become chemical and material engineers, my uncle spent his career working at an aluminum plant being useful without being an engineer. Many people will obtain just the necessary amount of knowledge and skill needed to accomplish their goals, which doesn't bode well for precise mechanized Haskell.
I know. There's a document out there somewhere with John Adams signature telling a merchant captain it's fine to put cannons on his vessel. Privateers were even recruited to fight the British in 1812. That's what the 2nd amendment was actually written for. And the last time it was relevant.

And I think just saying it hasn't happened yet is like saying we haven't had a giant pandemic yet in 2019. I'd rather not wait for a catastrophe to decide we should do something about it.
> MongoDB has built-in auto-failover with replica sets. It is possible to set this up for PGSQL with third-party tools but it's hard to get right.

PostgreSQL documentation makes it quite clear how to set up HA, I don't think you need any third-party tools other than general OS-level support for failover.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/high-availability.ht...
Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.".

Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ?

(I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contributions to Free Software as Arnold Robbin does, just curious !)
I meant that once this capability is out there, people will point to it and say “see it can be done. Now do this, it’s law.”
"North Korea's missile program is an abomination and has to die."

"That eyesore art project that my local city paid too much for is an abomination and has to die."
I don't disagree, absent a well stocked National Stockpile, the Great States should build their own emergency reserve for Natural Disaster and Pandemic. Each state building its own stockpiles of some things that don't hit all areas equally could be wasteful. Keep close relationships with manufacturing firms who are prepared to be ready on short notice.

This is as much a failure of planlessness as it is policy.
> while The Troubles didn't induce the UK to give any concessions it wasn't already willing to give beforehand.

You're saying that the Brits would have agreed to let Northern Ireland vote to join rejoin the rest of Ireland at some point in the future WITHOUT force of arms? I don't believe you. And yes, that was included [0] in the Good Friday Agreement.

And even if most insurgencies fail, "let's not do that because it might provoke an insurgency" is valuable all on its own.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#Status_o...
Just optimizing for 401ks is going about it wrong. $500b from the stimulus went to corporations, which indirectly boosts stock prices, which indirectly boosts 401ks. (unless the market still crashes). It's essentially trickle-down economics. If we wanted to improve individual's retirement savings then it would more effective to just divert more of that $500b to social security.
"GOP Donor Class Handout Act" - Did people not see a tax decrease? My taxes noticeably decreased. Could be due to state taxes no longer being subsidized, but it still should even out for most
J. J is open-source.

Also, for K:

https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona
https://bitbucket.org/ngn/k/src/master/
It's more complex than that. Doing lazy allocation is not the problem, it's a common optimization. The problem comes when Linux does allow programs to (lazily) allocate a total amount of memory than is larger than the available RAM+SWAP before failing allocations. Then, when processes actually try to use that RAM, there is no physical place where to place that memory, and the only solution is to kill a process (OOM).

This may certainly seem stupid at first sight. I don't remember the exact reason why Linux does this, but I remember that it was said that not doing it would imply not using all available RAM efficiently and allocations would start failing before expected or something like that.

It's actually pretty easy to change this behaviour, there is a sysctl (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory) that defaults to 0, but you can disable the overcommitting behaviour and even tune it. "2" does disable the entire overcommitting logic and it's what some people use to avoid memory trashing situations (but you still can get OOM in some situations IIRC) https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/vm/overcommit-account...
Can we put the genie back in the bottle after this is over? I feel like once there's a precedent to do this, it becomes a slippery slope to less palatable things, even if not the worst possible things.
Many people, who work in those industries you list as things "you don't need" are without work and health insurance (if they had in the first place).
16 million more people are out of work in the US [0].

Those out of work cannot get care for usual issues that would normally be provided by their employer, and are now unable to get care for issues related to COVID.

They are going to struggle to pay rent next month (like 40% of New Yorkers by some estimates) much less food, utilities, and other necessities.

People who are able to work from home are in a tremendously better places than blue collar or service workers who make up a great deal of the economy. I suppose in office politics a remote worker might have felt like a "second class citizen." In comparison with many workers who risk being laid off if they are even a few minutes late to their shift, remote workers had things very good.

I think you need to expand your view a little. It sounds like many in your life are not affected by this situation. Many of us, or those close to us, are struggling immensely right now and there is not a clear path out.

For what it's worth, I agree with what you're saying about how this could refocus the economy on things other than luxury goods. I just think we need more support for the people losing jobs than a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

---

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/apr/09/coronav...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/nyregion/coronavirus-land...

(Apologies for being overly USA-centered, that is where I live and am most familiar with)
It would outnumber the Swiss F/A-18s by 50% (Switzerland also has Tigers; not sure they would be of any use).

And to further improve his odds, he could always attack outside office hours: https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
The loudest complaints are always from the groups in the minority. Lots of people have small businesses who are suffering, or jobs that are basically incompatible with social distancing. But also think: just Bank of America employs 200k+ people. Most of them are still at work, doing their stuff from home, receiving their normal paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of small Amazon sellers and still shipping packages. There's a wide swath of America that's not feeling the pinch and is more eager to consume out of boredom than ever before.
Cracking track, so may as well listen to it, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcW8VNwYvL0
That may be true, but if it is it would lead to "slightly less lockdown for some people," not "no lockdown for some people." But to your broader point, that nobody in government is considering the finer aspects of modeling and optimization: yes, I know, I don't expect anything more from them, and I think they're a bunch of nincompoops who only know how to write legal documents and strike deals. However if I saw any push for more technical and effectiveness-oriented adjustments to the procedure I would jump on board.
I would prefer my retirement savings are not wiped out.
I believe we both agree that locking down 20/30 years old people who still have to study, to meet people, to make experience, to find lovers and to find themselves is very different that lock down 70/80 years old people right?

Then there is no doubts that the virus hit hardest the elders.

Again, what I am saying is that younger people are hit by the lockdown much more than the elders while being the less concerned about the virus itself.

And we should talk also about this.
It was annoying to write shellcode for back then.
J[1], ngn/k[2], oK[3], kona[4], and GNU APL[5] are the big oss interpreters. The main closed-source ones are Dyalog APL, Kx k, and Shakti k (which are still free for non-commercial use).

1: https://github.com/jsoftware/

2: https://bitbucket.org/ngn/k/src/master/

3: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

4: https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

5: https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/
Yeah, you'll have to bypass all those securities if you want to download. We are working on getting our application certified with Apple, Microsoft, linux and all the browsers. If you're worried about security issues, the whole product is open source. You can check it out on our github. But, I promise, everything stays on your system.

If you want to be extra safe, you can clone/fork the repo and compile/build the dmg yourself. First, run `yarn` and then run `yarn package-mac`