skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm a 24 y/o full stack engineer( I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now

It can be tough some times being a younger person in the industry, but know that there is no reason anyone here should be rolling their eyes at this. I was working full time in software development at 17 myself.

> What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?

There is a growing market for front end web accessibility. Especially for software that meets the needs of both sighted and non-sighted individuals. Not only do I think there is a place for non-sighted individuals in front end software development if that's something you are interested in, but I think it's vital to have these individuals having a role in developing front end software.

> Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?

We do not currently employ any blind engineers, though we would be very happy to hire one. We have customers that require visual accessibility compliance and right now this compliance is largely being implemented by sighted people. I would consider this a non ideal situation.

With this said, I also don't want it to be felt like you have to specialize in your own disability either. I have known some really badass back end engineers that are entirely blind. With the right tools and some experience, they are able to consume content at the same speed as any sighted person. Hell, in some cases... significantly faster.

> I'm really trying to get ahead of this thing

I think this speaks for your character. It's easy to get caught up in denial and to hold out until the very last moment.

I can't personally speak to how it feels to deal with going blind, so I'll let those with much more experience in this area speak to that. One thing I can say though, is to start using the available tools now and full time, even if you don't require them yet. By the time you find yourself depending on them, you will already be accustomed to using them.

I'd be happy to speak about my own personal struggles with disability (I am rapidly becoming deaf), but honestly... I'll spare you that unless you actually want me to. It's obviously a very different experience and I don't want it to feel like I am diminishing the significance of what you are going through. :)

> Since my diagnosis I've slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it's too late.

This is a very reasonable and understandable reaction to what you are dealing with.
Watch Out for China Buying Spree, NATO Warns
It's fine to post paywalled workarounds but please don't complain about downvotes. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. One of many reasons is that often someone will come along and give a corrective upvote (as happened here), but the complaints don't garbage-collect themselves when that happens. They linger on, adding inaccuracy as well as offtopicness.
Stores were running out of toilet paper because people antecipated they would run out of toilet paper. Just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bass Whistle in the Browser
I've heard screen readers going way faster (I don't know quantitatively) than what it sounds like when I listen to videos at 2x.

I also think it's important that the screen readers use a "old school" synthesized voice, instead of a voice that sound natural, because each of the phonemes is articulated distinctly.
These fountain codes are some of the coolest and most useful algorithms around. It really is almost like magic, even after you know how they work. I wrote an article a couple years ago about using them for an off-chain file storage layer for a bitcoin-like blockchain that gives a basic overview of why they are useful:
https://bit.ly/2Y0ut6X
I agree with what others have said about the value not being there given your current accomplishments.

If you are one of the rare few looking for the real value in attending an Ivy League college (relationships you’ll make with professors and other students), get a full time job - can probably even be a janitor if nothing else - at your university of choice, then audit your choice of courses as staff are generally allowed to do without any admission requirements.
> In other words the people pushing it are probably protecting their oil and gas interests.

Shell builds EV charging stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nst2RGtgzfk

BP builds EV charging stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSRn6hYOwc

Petro-Canada builds EV charging stations: https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/canadas-electri...

They're in the energy business. They don't really care what form it takes.
There's also the Stanford study of Santa Clara residents which shows asymptomatic infection/recovery 50-85 times the official numbers.
> When you get down to it, between cache coherency across CPUs and memory, disk flush delays and disk caches, every database is eventually consistent.

This is a false. None of the things you listed preclude consistency.

> And if you want to operate over a distributed network, which means you WILL have network partitions, then you are subject to CAP and will need eventual consistency mechanisms.

That's not how CAP works. Plenty of distributed CP databases exist.
I wonder how many people tried the same and succeeded. :thinking:
The next 45 days are the ‘most critical period in U.S. financial history’
Young people do die though and will with this.

Herd immunity without a vaccine is condemning thousands of people to die.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't do that, even if another comment rubs you the wrong way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Understood for the production of ventilators. But it's impossible to ignore the other ways we could have prepared: namely redistribution / production of PPE for doctors, and quite simply sheltering in place much much earlier.
Rich Americans Activate Pandemic Escape Plans
I've worked on several teams, but mostly solo in my programming career. I can tell you without hesitation that the times I felt the "best" were when I was shipping things every single day.

There were a few jobs I had where I'd work on a project for what seemed like an endless amount of time and almost never saw any sort of real-world feedback--it was sad and demotivating.

I definitely agree that if you want results, keep your team small, have everyone ship things, and be personally responsible. It's highly motivating and from what I've experienced, draws out the best in people.
Yeah ... but which way? (And I'm betting on the Aleutians)
I have this inner voice when reading English, which is my second language. However, if I am reading stuffs in Chinese, I can skim through without the inner voice.
I had a similar issue and the fix for me was the system "Getting Things Done". The biggest paradigm change from it was, "You can't work on projects. You can only work on actions related to projects."
WOAH! Online Town... Never heard of it, but that's so cool. Thanks for mentioning it. I'm going to reach out to the founders because I love this... THANKS AGAIN!!
And this from reason.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lethality-not-much-di...
This is an open problem. It might be surprising to find out that it's quite difficult.

CRDTs usually work as last-write-wins, meaning that if you have a key-value store, the last update to update a key 'wins' the value via the way oplog reduction works.

If you reverse that to a FIRST-write-wins log, you can grant permissions and ownership on a first-come, first-serve basis. Revocation, then, becomes the issue. What do you do with the records they already have? Questions like that are plentiful.

The approach most people take is to find workarounds or "good enough" solutions here, either by using encryption and allowing the encrypted data to be public, or by using some sort of other OrbitDB store as their ACL and management, and only giving select keys access to write to said ACL store in the first place.

Adding encryption into the mix though, particularly multi-writer, becomes exponentially harder.
OP mentioned things that exist now, your response seems to be that things are improving.

Those ideas aren't at odds.
Hey, can you please not be a jerk on HN, and especially not by putting down someone else's work? Things don't have to be perfect to be interesting. Actually it can be better for discussion if they're not perfect—then there is more opportunity for others to contribute. Nothing's perfect anyhow

It's clear that you know a lot about this topic. That's great! and impressive. But in that case please contribute by sharing some of what you know so we all can learn.

There was a similar case the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22903486.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can build this using 3Box, which has extended OrbitDB with DID-based access control system and user permissions. Check it out here: https://docs.3box.io/build/web-apps/messaging

3Box also has support for members only OrbitDB threads which can restrict posting to members, and encrypted OrbitDB threads to make posts private to the group. To Mark's point above.
I just posted a comment below that sounds like that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920256

Adhd feels like knowing how to do something and knowing you should do it, but not actually doing it. It’s like your inner drive is very weak unless there is an external consequence involved, like a deadline.

Dumb examples are

- your homework unless the deadline comes closer

- a amazon box that you know the contents of but currently don’t need it, so it stays packaged standing around until you need the item or the space

- dishes

- a todo list item that’s floating around for weeks that takes minutes to complete but has no deadline

Then at other moments something just grabs your attention and it becomes the most important thing right now even if you should be doing something else. Like finding a new tool or programming language that you really want to use immediately, or randomly cleaning your entrance area NOW even though you should be leaving for the train to make a meeting.
I’m a crazy cat person who also lives in a neighborhood of a major city (Jamaica Plain, Boston). I have 3 cats. I have often dreamed of building them something like this, but the insane drivers around here have discouraged me.

My neighbor let’s his cat in and out through a small door he made into a back window, and she is the fattest laziest cat I’ve ever seen, and has never been run over. But I just can’t get over the car issue.
While we keep pipe dreaming about full AI or home automation the number of people required to extract a ton of lumber, iron, oil, etc has dropped an order of magnitude in the span of decades. Likewise the number of people required to participate in the refinement of materials into, say, TVs has fallen by a similar order. And it keeps falling. More industrialized automation begets more as the pipelines scale up and justify the investments in maximal "dumb" automation.

One thing people miss out on is transport - the cost to transport goods has also dropped astronomically thanks to computerized and networked navigation systems for rail and naval lines. You would never reliably insure the traffic volume of many docks, shipping lanes, and rail lines globally without computers controlling and often operating them. Thats how you get ludicrous quantities of goods crossing oceans for a few percent of its overall cost to consumers.
Our government doesn't "move like molasses," it just has the wrong priorities. Look how quickly congress was able to band together to put together a $2T, 1400 page bailout for corporate America. It's obvious that the only thing that's important in this country is keeping the fat cats fed, and the rest of us aren't important as long as we keep stocking shelves and consuming as fast as possible.
This is fun survey. I'd never heard of anything like this before on a larger scale, but a friend in small city in New York has some ramps set up to let his cat out the window and down a story from the roof to let his cat roam. I'd love something like this for my cat but think I'd end up with a fox or a skunk wandering in uninvited.
Hmm. You seem to have repeatedly said that we should stay home, but didn't really make much of an argument for it, the one exception being this point:

> we have effectively zero buffer in many areas. A sudden increase in cases (which is what "easing up" means!) would push us right over the edge.

--

I think that this is not the best way to think about it. We need to contrast the benefit of lockdowns (decreased transmission of the disease) with the economic costs. And just to be clear, this isn't about investment returns, the stock market, etc, it's about the very real fact that poverty, stress, and economic uncertainty all eventually lead to deaths in their own right (either indirectly due to being reluctant to seek medical care, or directly through suicide).

If you're willing to discuss further, can we see if we agree on these points?

(1) This is a highly transmissible respiratory virus, and thus eradication is impossible

(2) Given (1), the purpose of lockdowns and other measures is primarily to prevent us from exceeding our hospital capacity, at which point the number of deaths would go up dramatically

(3) The vast majority of the globe will be exposed to this. Avoiding that is not possible, so it's just a matter of when

Therefore, we should work to mitigate the _impact_ of Covid (NOT with the goal of eradicating it, which is impossible), but there is a point where the economic damage will far exceed the cost of lifting lockdown.

BTW, it's not like ending lockdown means everything goes back to normal. We would still be banning large gatherings, at least for a short length of time, and we would still be advising at-risk individuals to self-isolate (and for a country like the US, I don't have any hard numbers here but that could easily still be 30-50% of the country who's considered at risk).

Last point I want to make. Many of us here work jobs that allow us to work from home, and so we kept our jobs during this. We need to recognize that not only have tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, but a significant chunk of those jobs will not be "coming back". Real value was destroyed. And those who lost their jobs are exactly those who are likely to be in lower socioeconomic classes and thus are much less equipped to weather events like this.

(Sorry, the above was pretty rambly, so I hope there's still some value you can get out of it :P)
I've loved s-curves for decades. Way back in the lab, to analyze ligand-binding assays. And not that long ago, as a litigation consultant.

> For technological changes, can the final level-off be reasonably estimated?

It helps a lot if it's 0% or 100% :) Given that, you get a decent long-term fit, after about half the time to plateau.
Oh wow... you just described me with frightening accuracy. I’ve never seen my issue described so clearly and concisely. Basically, if there aren’t negative consequences for me not completing a task, my brain simply never gets motivated. It’s almost as if my brain is saying: “meh... you don’t really have to do this... so go play on Facebook some more”. If I could resolve this issue which has plagued me for years, it would revolutionize my life and career.
Judo Turns Threats into Opportunities
> There are 3800 different types of potatoes in Peru apparently. Why can we only get like 7?

If you are willing to grow you own, the Kenosha Potato Project gives sources for a few hundred: http://www.curzio.com/N/PotatoCatalog.htm
Heavy use of hand sanitizer boosts antimicrobial resistance
I've had the same experience with audio books. I find it's easy with entertainment. In normal speech there is a lot of redundancy. You can miss entire sentences and still follow. I don't this would be the case with a screen reader.
China passed a law in 2017 requiring all Chinese citizens and organizations to comply with their intelligence departments in relinquishing any information it needs, as well as to keep it secret.

See https://en.pkulaw.cn/display.aspx?cgid=313975&lib=law

A US agency may put pressure on a US company, but the company would be perfectly within its rights to refuse to comply. The only exceptions are well documented and go through the judiciary which is separate from the executive branch of government.

A Chinese company has by law no choice but to comply.
It's about control.

They will take as many rights as they can get, because like anything else, once relinquished, you never get them back.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lethality-not-much-di...
> High Fidelity (went bust)

There are currently three forks of High-Fidelity which I'll be keeping my eye on. I believe two of them have former/current High-Fidelity staff working on them. An interesting blog post about Vircadia, a FOSS-focused fork. [1] The blog also covers the other two forks. [2][3]

[1] https://ryanschultz.com/2020/04/03/the-project-athena-fork-o...

[2] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/11/17/tivoli-cloud-vr-a-brief-i...

[3] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/05/27/opensim-virtual-world-pro...
That's still on call, though. If I'm expected to answer the phone and answer work questions, I can't be hiking in an area with bad cell coverage. I can't be drunk. I can't be in a theater. Perhaps I can't be on a bike ride if I need to have a laptop nearby. On and on - if it's a restriction on my life during non work hours, it's on call.
This was kind of hard to follow. I’m still not sure what the answer is. Is the milk viable? How much silk can they get? Is it useful?
It's so messed up to me that we would rather see food rotting on the shelves of supermarkets (ag output has barely slowed down at all), instead of just providing American citizens with the UBI they need to feed themselves through this pandemic. Why are we all so willing to risk our lives to prop up Q3 earnings reports for useless corporations that aren't necessary during this crisis?
Alright, now I’m definitely going to build a little web app for this
The "cure" is absolutely worse than the disease. What we should be doing is old/high risk people stay home, everyone else wear masks. The problem is most of our politicians are old so they do what is best for themselves instead of what is best for the country.
For me, the #1 thing was not going out drinking. I used to go out and consume alcohol 3-4 times per week and I had no idea what an energy drain it was until I stopped.

It's been a whole new world since then.
You're in the Twilight Zone.
There was a time when school was about teaching students and not protecting the staff first.

Janitors can work at night. Cafeterias can be take out. Profs can be on a screen or given early retirement. I realize it is an inconvience, but how about students first for the first time in a long while.

We collectively are safer if the college kids are away at school and not infecting grandma.
How do you differentiate this from laziness/apathy?
The US intelligence community was watching mid-November.

Singapore started screening incoming travelers Jan 3, based on the pneumonia cluster in Wuhan growing in size.

Xi found out about it and took aggressive measures ~Jan 21.

It was an obvious risk on Jan 3. Maybe not a high probability risk, but obvious enough for a country to make sure they had the first couple of steps of their response at least figured out. Human to human spread was pretty clearly the case when the Chinese government started taking aggressive lockdown measures.

So your timeline is pretty friendly.

And then the focus on ventilators is odd. How about masks and other PPE and testing and so on?
I have played with guitarix in the past, and having looked at some of its tube amp simulation code, I have great respect for the amount and quality of work that has gone into it. That said, in my opinion, its modeling capabilities are not on par with the main software sims out there.

My portable solution is an Intel Compute Stick coupled with a Vox AmPlug I/O for 24-bit/48KHz input, powered by a 10Ah powerbank. I use Bias FX 2, but one could use Amplitube or Helix Native just as easily. I attach these to my strap and it is completely out of the way when I'm playing. The whole setup on the hardware side cost me <$130, and in return I get the best modeling software can provide. It is however a pain to control.

Probably the "cleanest" portable solution would be the Boss Waza Air headphones. There are no wires at all!, and all modeling is done on the headphones themselves. At $400, they are on the expensive side though.

If one wanted a small amp, it is probably hard to beat Positive Grid's Spark, which can now be had for ~$200 and is also voice-controlled (a gimmick if you ask me). An even cheaper solution would one of Laney's Mini or MiniStack amps, which hook up to an Android or an iPhone that runs ToneBridge. That's a lot of effects and modeling for ~$60.
Young people can "die" from this in the same sense that they can also "die" from the flu. But the infection fatality rate is extremely low. Hell, we can start with the military, they are in great shape.

But my reasoning is that "condemning thousands of people to die" is the wrong way to look at it. You can look at it as "saving a million lives". Hell, by making driving legal "we are condemning 35,000 people to die every year". At a certain point, certain tradeoffs become reasonable.
I know, thanks for your response. I'm 42 so paranoid my tech skills are becoming irrelevant. What a pathetic thing to worry about during a pandemic. Anyway, I think you're really onto something because as a musician I always want to video chat but have everyone be responsible for tuning into a 3rd party, like for group jamming for instance. Keep up the good work!
> the populace incentivizes them to act

It's not "the populace," it's lobbyists that are funded by massive corporations that are trying to protect their revenue streams. What's the solution? Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for government officials to take comfy six-figure corporate jobs after they finish their term, overturn Citizens United, put a limit on campaign spending or at least try to level the playing field in some way. That would be a great start.

Regulatory capture means all of this is borderline impossible, though. We live in a world where even 100M people will have a hard time fighting the collective power of billions and billions of dollars. Money makes the world go 'round baby.
Anyone remember the “Make iCab Smile” campaign? The UI featured a little smiley face in the corner that would change to a frown if there were too many HTML validation errors.
Ventilators are a major shortcoming in the U.S. response to coronavirus only because earlier mitigation efforts (i.e., mass testing) were utterly ignored. South Korea demonstrated clearly that mass testing was the most effective means of isolating carriers, preventing spread, and flattening the curve. Had the U.S. pursued it with the same vigour, the ventilators would never have become a treatment bottleneck.

It would be absurd to ramp up production of ventilators early on because if you're taking action that early, you're taking completely different action.