skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The secret that is rarely revealed in pop science discussions is that theories of everything are cheap. To count as a theory of everything, you just need to come up with any mathematical structure big enough to cram the Standard Model plus a graviton in. And adding mathematical structure, especially when you're playing around, is easy, like snapping legos together. In this way, you can crank out ten theories of everything a week if you want to.

So how do we decide what is worth actually taking seriously? First, you need to establish that your theory actually reproduces the Standard Model plus gravity at low energies, i.e. that it doesn't blatantly fail to match the something we already know. (Most ideas fail here.) Then, you need to show that your proposal is actually mathematically self-consistent. (Most remaining ideas fail here.) Then, you need to work on the finer details, i.e. making sure you don't accidentally predict large deviations from the Standard Model that contradict observation, and match what we know about quantum gravity already at the semiclassical level. (Everything except for string theory fails by this point.) And then finally, you need to be able to extract sharp predictions from your theory -- and this is quite hard, because a complicated theory tends to have a lot of knobs to twiddle, making the predictions ambiguous. (Nobody has gotten this far.) And even if you pass all of these checks, there's a high chance the predictions will be wrong anyway, because nature's not our slave.

Weinstein's theory has not even gotten past step zero. He hasn't provided enough technical detail to calculate anything, there's just nothing there at all. Yet he made a huge media push to get recognized as "the next Einstein". It's like saying your startup is the next Google before writing a single line of code, and having the public believe you.
There you go. There are some so-called 'tech companies' out there that focus on too much head count and sometimes hype around on Twitter or blogposts pretending to scale like Google or Facebook with 'products' that generate close to no revenue.

By the time they start frequently raising capital straight past their series D on a 6 month basis, you can tell their burn rate is too high which is an early red flag for layoffs and cost-cutting like this. I would not go to any company that isn't pandemic-proof which is the new theme of this recession.

Just take it slowly, ignore the engineering hype and focus on generating revenue with less capital with a quality product.
Hey could you do lingxiao@seas.upenn.edu please? Thank you!
Which itself was modeled on the HEART act, the collaboration between literally Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation in the mid nineties created when they thought Hillarycare might gain steam.

All of the major pieces, including individual mandate and exchanges makes it's way back to that proposed plan.

It's some real wag the dog shit. Both that Obama's "compromise" plan was the far right position on the mid nineties, and that Republicans still characterized it as just left of Trotsky taking the major provisions that they championed all the way to the supreme court.
Masks to Survive and Surreal Portraits
"you won't kill me out of some misguided sense of self righteousness and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun"

I had the same thought
Consider an ADHD diagnosis.
No longer binding if the company breachs the arbitration clause. They're going to be sued if the issue is real.
I have had many devices where "minimum brightness" is brighter than the brightest I would have actually wanted.
Email the mods using the footer Contact link and they’ll do that for you.
Insurance companies don't dictate 'preferred repairers' where you live?
https://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2018/09/adhd-...
The article opens by stating: "Spain had almost 11,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic while Portugal’s death toll barely exceeds 200." My first thought was "Port wine!"

Life should be so easy! The true topic is the BCG vaccine and that "COVID-19 is less severe in countries using the BCG vaccine".

Another interesting hypothesis, that "COVID-19 is where Malaria is not" is provided by the complementary nature of the maps of (countries using antimalarials) vs (countries with COVID-19):

"Delingpole: Chloroquine/Malaria/Coronavirus – ‘Stunning’ Correlation Claimed":

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/20/delingpole-chl...
Wow. I had no idea.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/workers-fight-back...
Regardless if he’s wrong, what he’s saying sounds interesting even to a physics PhD I’d imagine.

The scientific community doesn’t know why there’s 3 generations of particles, heck I’ve barely heard anyone in my life even mention the fact. It’s a curious thing and his theory was at least infinitely better than 99% of the content on the Internet.

I don’t really understand what he said (and a paper won’t help me) but it made me think in different ways.

He conceded he may be wrong, that he may be crazy, but he also has a PhD in mathematical physics. A charlatan typically declares he is right, often by divine right or unreasonable skill level. Eric’s just exploring ideas from his perspective.

I think hyper-criticizing him is more dangerous for intellectual thought than him inspiring millions of potential minds with fantastical descriptions that may be wrong. Some of what he’s saying is undoubtedly true.
The pandemic makes it easier to make layoffs you were considering otherwise. It gives both employers and employees cover by letting them point to big economic changes. I'm firing you because virus, not because I made a mistake when I created your department. I got fired because virus, not because I wasn't productive. It saves face all around, making jobs less sticky.
But the insurance companies still don't get to pocket that money if the costs are increased, how does it incentivize them?
:) the complexity theory and algos classes were some of my favorite.

They really rewired the way I think.
I have liability-only insurance, so I really don't know.
> Yes they did

If it was all so obvious, the stock market would have dumped weeks before it did.

Did you sell in early February? Did you take out shorts on the market? Why not?
Didn't know AngelList had a staff of more than 2
Drivers who drive rudely are being way more rude around here now that the roads are empty. Like, they used to hit 35mph because there was traffic obstacles in their way, and now they’re hitting 45mph (in our 25).
This is also true. "Your health insurance benefits for optical have reset, would you like to come in for new glasses?" "Well sure, my current ones are fine if the new pair is gonna be free..."
Big disruptive top-down initiatives to fix what isn't broken feel like politics on the receiving end too.
That would work. She sometimes puts a large cooler with ice in the van, then uses it to hold food so that she can go back inside for more. I could also give cash to 5 or more kids, then have each one go to a separate checkout lane.

All of that causes more person-hours of exposure in the store.

BTW, hackernews is saying the previous comment is 3 days old, and I have used 7 gallons of milk. If I stuck to a limit of 2 gallons, I'd have to shop every day.
> why does everybody care about Dark Mode so much these days?

Let me guess, you think wheelchair ramps are a fad, too?

Because we don't like our eyes getting blasted by brightness pollution from all white websites? Some of us have disabilities?
This makes me worried for what happens when folks are getting back on the streets. Everybody will have forgotten how to drive properly, and have to get back into the habits.
Gig workers trying to switch apps and check for jobs while driving to drop off a gig will look like this sometimes. I wish they’d not do it, even if I’m grateful to them for doing their gigs.
IIRC, the last time I checked (sometime back last year), State Farm actually had spent the last few years running at an underwriting loss— they were taking in less in premiums than they were distributing in claims. They were mostly remaining solvent (and paying admin costs) through investment income.

Which is probably about how they should operate. As a mutual company, if they’re routinely having to return profits to policyholders, their premiums are too high.
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The problem, in my opinion, is they know about hundreds or thousands of scenarios that could possibly happen. It’s not possible or prudent to prepare for every one of them. Only hindsight is 20/20.
2 weeks after ProductHunt Launch
thank you. =)
I suspect those people are always there, hence collisions occur.

Maybe they’re just easier to spot now?
I learned about the Io language from working through the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book, as I suppose most people did. In the book, it was suggested that you should take a look at the example problems on the Io website. At some point, those example problems disappeared.

I made a backup of those example problems here: https://gist.github.com/jezen/7972975
Fun game. Wanted to pass on issue I had. Safari on iPhone 7, couldn’t use touch controls on level 3 because browser chrome is in the way.

https://imgur.com/a/nN9YndX
The credit card companies don’t seem to have any trouble applying my cash back rewards to my account balance without sending me a check. But if I do cancel my account and end up with a positive balance, they do send a check. Seems like basic accounting to me, not some sort of wizardry like you suggest. Mailing checks is probably more expensive if anything.
Many commercial leases require the lessee to take out a line of credit sufficient for a few months rent too - no doubt landlords will be calling for those LoCs to taken out.
It's normally not a fixed amount. It's generally a percentage above costs. If all costs increase, they increase their revenue. They get the same percentage of a bigger pie.
Hm, lots of hate for AngelList here. Ive only used them once, but they were central to my last job hunt, and I thought they were pretty great. Being reached out to directly by serious founders or technical VPs/directors was infinitely better than wading through recruiters who have no understanding of the jobs they're hawking (or any other technical jobs, for that matter).
Ask HN: How to Practice SQL
Hi,

I just completed a master's in data analytics and trying to improve my SQL skills and looking for resources to improve it (I already completed Leetcode and HackerRank). Are there any resources where I can practice writing complex SQL.
Settlement is one type of resolution. A settlement is just an agreement for one party to drop claims against the other in exchange for something of value (usually money). Usually there is no admission of anything by any of the parties and the exact terms are confidential.
TIL. But there's a vibrant and competitive market for auto repairs in general. In-network shops can't be more expensive than out-of-network shops. There's no "certificate of need" system that can block the starting of new auto shops.[1]

Auto repair costs are capped at the value of the vehicle. There isn't a stream of indigent customers coming in for emergency repair that have to be subsidized by everyone else. There's far more visibility into risks - insurers have access to your driving history and can refuse to offer coverage based on it. You can volunteer even more information to lower your rates - from credit history, marital status, educational level, all the way up to installing a device on your car's OBD port to monitor your driving habits.

In short, auto insurance and repair really isn't anything like healthcare.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
On the short term, I will disagree. And we are all living on the short term now. The only thing that works is isolating people.

On the long term, it's even worse, nobody seems to have any idea what to do. But we are doing the opposite than we are doing with Global Warming, we are heavily funding the kinds of research that may solve the problem. All of those kinds.
Five Bullet Sunday – Best of the Web
Basically, if an industry is limited to “cost plus” profits (eg 5% of payouts) their incentive is to drive payouts as high as possible.
> Do you know Haskell?

> Ha ha, you ask me do I know Haskell? Haskell is my middle name!
I was discussing this issue with somebody that lead an engineering transformation effort to drag an organization of around 2000 developers towards modern development practices. They had accreted so much tech debt and bad ways of working that their velocity was too slow to allow them to thrive in a changing market, it took forever to get things into production.

I would have expected that at least the developers would have been on board with this change but the amount of resistance was surprising. They ended up closing 2/6 of their offices, letting the bulk of those employees go and then opening a new office.
> During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.

> The economy needs to change

The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.

What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.

> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently

Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.

Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.

There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22725829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331005

Other threads in the past year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883882

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053366

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20897029

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110253 (small)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694006

Other large threads can be found among various crystals:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
John Madden was the best screensharing presenter of all time.

He did it in real time, and every week during football season. He was incredibly good at explaining why a play worked or did not work.

In my view, more people should present like that instead of having tons of words on their slides. It has nothing to do with having control of the slide deck.

I mean, imagine if Steve Jobs sent his presentation out before his WWDC events. Not. A. Chance.
Well, good luck to the bank. Foreclose and enjoy owning a few acres of urban blight.

Banks are highly specialized, and that specialization isn't well suited to property management. Property management is highly specialized and that specialization isn't well suited to running a retail operation. Retail operations are highly specialized and blah blah blah.

So, you gotta pick. Either put things on pause, and hope it comes back, or let those with specialized skills wander off and do what they do in other places. I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of demand all over the country once there's a vaccine. 2 years?

Funny how organizations have an appetite for risk until they start losing. Too much avocado toast I guess.

This is glib, but, I think, has a kernel of truth. Economies work due to markets. The market is coming back either way. Hang on to the mall in the hope it'll bounce back, or unload it now.
I think this one is a little cleaner. I used some of the ideas in sbr464's code.

path = 'favorites?id=app4soft'
while path:
r = requests.get('https://news.ycombinator.com/' + path)
s = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
print([{'title': a.text, 'url': a['href']} for a in s.select('a.storylink')])
more = s.select_one('a.morelink')
path = more['href'] if more else None
A Crawler Admin GitHub Project Reaching 5k Stars in 1 Year
We have a free udemy account but we are too busy to use it. Workload takes an extra couple of hours per day and usually some im weekends too.
A lot of these types of posts about B2B assume you are selling a product >$1k... there are lots of B2B that are for less than that and so you can't really apply most of these approaches.
If you have done so many I think the next stop is to get a job. Plus data analytics usually don't require a huge amount of sql imo.
I mean yes SEO doesn’t allow for as simple entry into a market, it is something that’s essential for starting an online business now, but for the most part it’s fair. For information searching that’s all just anecdotal, while it’s true that SOME sites may attempt to “rewrite history,”I highly doubt they make up even 1% of the entire internet. So maybe its inconveniencing to someone who doesn’t know how to properly search for what they’re looking for beyond typing in words and getting mad when the can’t find exactly what they want in the first page, but in no way is it “ruining the internet.”

Also why did you post this to an economy subreddit??
You might want to look at commercial mortgage-backed securities. The credit default swaps on them could be a way to gauge their likelihood of default.
I once came across a "world's most amazing curry recipe" that had two ingredients; rice, and a jar of storebought curry sauce. It was actually kind of tragic.
Well, let me assume you're a software engineer. Suppose that one day you heard of some smooth talker who was going around pushing their vision of an AI-powered cloud blockchain as a service, or whatever. And everything they were saying just seemed empty: they would deliver the same polished, mindblowing speech about how this would revolutionize the world and topple all other software companies, but they hadn't written a single line of code, or even a whitepaper. And yet they were eloquent enough to end up with an audience of millions and billions in funding, exceeding the sum total of everybody doing real work in the area. And every time you tried to tell anybody about the real work you were actually doing, they would ask "but what do you think about the block cloudchain thing?"

That's what the situation is like for actual physicists. There's people who do the actual work, there's people who are famous for claiming to have done great things, and there's very little overlap between these two sets.

(Also, there's an "imprinting" effect here. For example, in the scientific community, we talk all the time about why there are only 3 generations. It's one of many, many mysteries that everybody is always aware of. You might have heard it from Weinstein first, but people really have spent enormous effort investigating the question. And a flashy self-promoter tends to erase those people.)
If you know more, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. It's less helpful just to talk about what someone else doesn't understand.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well for example, one of the most interesting applications of OCaml in finance (well, fintech) is implemented in OCaml and open source: https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos

Then there's Bloomberg: https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html

> Bloomberg employs OCaml in a advanced financial derivatives risk management application

Press release from Bloomberg announcing BuckleScript: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/open-source-at-bloom...

> We are not currently using BuckleScript on the Terminal, but stay tuned…

This seems to suggest that they were looking at programming Bloomberg terminal applications in BuckleScript, compiled to JavaScript, at least at one point.

There's also LexiFi: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-OCaml-language-used-in-quantita...

I think if you go looking, it's not hard to find OCaml in finance in certain niches.
It’s odd watching the news about BCG spread, because the actual paper looks fairly weak to me: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042937v...

But I guess lots of medical science is messy... Disclaimer: I’m an armchair scientist with a passing interest in biology.
> but not if you take your own car

Do you not stop to get gas? What if you yourself are asymptomatic and spreading it every time you stop.

> the added risk to town people should be minimal because no additional interaction should be taking place

except people need to go to grocery stores still, the amount of food going into local stores is meant to sustain the current population
For one thing, the problem of thoughtful monetization of social networks is a very large one, and Hacker News comments are not my favorite medium to conduct intellectual debate and analysis on large problems.

The community on HN is awesome for getting really nitpicky, but the audience for discussing these sorts of problems is only a small slice of the larger HN audience. I started VC3 as a community formed around a specific purpose (discussing "building meaningful community") specifically to try to build more engaging and valuable discussion, and I personally think that a smaller, closed forum of enthusiastic individuals is a better way to do that than a public general-topic forum.

There's a question in our FAQ [0] that goes into this in even more detail. Look for the header "Why is VC3 its own site?"

[0]: https://vc3.club/#faq
EBITDA is not profit
I don't like this. It seems to set a precedent that in the opposite situation (I dunno, a haze that pushes up auto-accidents?) then they might take the opposite tack. People pay insurance to (massively simplified) even out payments for unlikely events, and messing around with that -- even in a direction that short-term seems good for consumers -- seems questionable.
or when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked.
Sadly no, but I don't think there's much of a ping difference on a good network. With WebRTC (datachannels in UDP mode) you just get the benefits of UDP (or lack thereof :)).
That concept already exists, but instead of charging customers, the insurance company calls on its own insurance company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance