skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article: "Of the 137 cases that have clinical and epidemiological information, 61 showed symptoms again, the KCDC said."
You're not wrong, but, as an asshole, I clap my hands in glee every time someone promotes regulation as a force for good. Why? Money spent on politics is incredibly cheap. I can literally write the laws that I want and wait for an opportune moment to have a chosen, and paid for, representative, slip it in.

Yes, please demand more laws. Please ask Washington to centralize and increase its power. It's not that your motivation is wrong, its just that I own the institution.
Please see sfwem.org. It is not my project but I've pushed it heavily and recruited for it.
Basic was the Javascript of its era: a workhorse for people who just wanted to make things, without a care for the specifics.

In this model: psychopathy.
Uber, Dropbox, AirBnB, Slack, Pinterest.

Long term un-profitable venture backed software companies are practically a cliche at this point.
Anything could have been done in 30-year-old languages. Take, for instance, pre-STL C++. (The STL came out in 1993-4). You can do anything in it. But using the STL is a whole lot nicer than having to write all that by hand, and has fewer bugs to boot. Then you've got C+11/14, which is much improved.

So, your point is correct, and yet there is real improvement.
Considering that even North Korea has infections, isn't this false?
I may not have expressed that point very well, but it seems like the common law system would encourage less explicit regulation rather than more, so that seems like a bit of a contradiction. Does the need for more litigation drive a desire to be more explicit in how statues are written?
My feelings for Turbo Pascal are not unlike my feelings for the first ex who I truly cared about. It's hard to let go of that first love.
beggars can't be choosers
No government is my vision.

Existing apps would be optional to use, offered by competing private enterprises or not necessary at all
Automated contact tracing is not a coronavirus panacea [opensrc Singapore app]
> We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.

This is like saying we need to want to end poverty more than we want to prevent ending poverty. No one is for poverty, but very few people are against it enough to give up their money, power, or time. We need to want these things enough to make sacrifices

> We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare

Most of the problems he mentions stem from government. Our government is legacy software and
the author is right that lodged deep within the spaghetti code are leeches who benefit from the current system and fight against change. But they aren't the biggest problem...

Billions of dollars are spent lobbying and the % of that money that is spent pushing for causes like better healthcare or education for everyone is infinitesimally small compared to what's spent lobbying for changes that'll benefit a few at the expense of the many. But this isn't the biggest problem either...

The problem is that the infrastructure that powers our democracy -- the stuff and rules that exist to enable the people to exercise their authority -- is eroding. I asked my grandparents if people always felt like their government was incompetent. To my surprise, they said that when they were young most Americans were proud of the government.

What's the solution? The idea of democracy isn't broken, but our current implementation is. We need an upgraded democracy the way Wikipedia upgraded our old encyclopedias or Amazon upgraded commerce. These aren't new ideas, they're simply new implementations using new tools. Technology is transforming everything around us but our government is stuck in 1776.

You know what the right and left have in common? We all know things could and should be better, but they aren't. Right now we're pointing fingers at the other side, but eventually we'll realize the machine is broken. When enough people feel this way, change will come, and it will come from the bottom up. But it's not as simple as just wanting change as Marc suggests...

First, people need to get angry enough to do something. In retrospect, change seems obvious, but looking forward it's risky. People have to lose a lot in order to put their time, money, and future on the line to fight for something that might not work, and this is hardest for the people who are the worst off in society and most need change to happen.

Second, people will vote for increasingly extreme candidates to try and change the system from within. This will result in incremental change, but it won't reform the system.

Third, a new system will emerge in parallel to our current government. If history is any predictor of the future, this is almost guaranteed to happen eventually. I have no idea what the new system will look like or when it'll emerge, but this is the type of thing we need to build. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is building it already and we just haven't realized it yet.
>I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly.

It's like it was written to be the perfect example of SV myopia for the rest of the world. Some examples:

>Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard?

Because the main purpose of Harvard and other elite schools like it is to pick out the best ~18 year olds and set them on the course to be leaders in business, government, law, and other areas. Harvard isn't Harvard because they're better at education. Harvard is Harvard because they get the pick of the litter. Extending their enrollment to a million doesn't mean we get a million more elites.

The funny thing is that we basically do have the education system he asks for in some places. For example, half of medical students attend lectures rarely or never instead opting for online resources. But they still plunk down 100k for those two years because the knowledge is worthless without the credential. (And years 1/2 are the gate way to the clinical education in years 3/4 that must happen in person).

Go look at the a16z team. How many of them don't have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/et al type pedigree? So to answer his own question, people like him are the reason why 1 million students a year can't attend those types of places. Otherwise, their graduates wouldn't be as attractive to people like him.

>Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country

Because there's no magic factory you can build to make every conceivable product cheaply. Obviously we don't do it because it's cheaper/more efficient to produce stuff in single purpose factories. Contrary to his argument, we wouldn't get richer by manufacturing more stuff. We'd get poorer.

>You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?

Because none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. He seems to want us to live in a science fiction fantasy world.
How does this make any sense? You wrote this long, neatly articulated response, but your central premise is entirely flawed.

Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists don't have a monopoly over the future (or current) direction of our society). Hell, they don't even have a plurality of control.

The things that Marc speaks of in this article that are fundamentally broken in the US are housing, education, and healthcare. I see new startups funded in the US every single week that attempt to solve these problems. In the end, though, they are bound by the regulatory constraints that American government imposes on them, and in these three areas, there is a patchwork of laws that is impossible to navigate if you wish to build anything meaningfully transformative. It is simply impossible for Marc Andreessen to deploy capital in a way that can accelerate the pace of housing development in San Francisco, or accelerate the pace of drug development in the US, or make public American high schools have a lower student-faculty ratio. The amount of regulatory capture in these long-running, slow-moving institutions is simply too high.
When I saw the title I thought it would be the old Jack Ganssle article which is also worth a look if you're interested in this topic: http://www.ganssle.com/debouncing.htm
Show HN: Automunge (The Preprint)
Correct. Common law = less explicit legislature passed regulation. We have far less regulation of this kind in the US than in Europe BUT we have far more common law regulation.
Is it just me or the font on WikiWho really small? Also it doesn't seem to scale correctly with page zoom for some reason.
I've always wanted to play with one of these, ever since I heard about them as a kid back in the 80s. Always found the idea fascinating that one could put together one's own processor out of pieces.
This is what I will call the redirection or hypocrisy fallacy.

Regardless if you think that Marc is fulfilling the values that he claims to support, point this out does nothing to dismiss the actual point that he made.

So his point is still valid. And misdirecting the conversation to being about Marc, is not a valid way of disagreeing with the point being made.
Is C++ better or worse for the changes in C++11/14? Better, by far.

Is Haskell better with lens? Yes.

Is Go an improvement over writing concurrency in C++ or Java? Yes.

Are there no more improvements to make? I doubt it. (What are they? I don't know. I didn't know what would make C++ better, and yet I see the improvement in C++11.) I find it hard to believe that just because you and I can't see how to make things better, then nobody else can either.

I think, by the way, that the improvements aren't so much in what they let you write (though Go was), but more in what they make it so you don't have to write.
Viruses like this can spread very quickly and develop to pandemias only because we can fly from China to New York in one day.
> actual fatality rate is likely on the order of 0.1%

This is ludicrously optimistic. The virus has already killed over 0.1% of the entire population of New York City, and it's barely starting to wind down (i.e. will probably hit 0.2%). It's also approaching 0.1% of the entire populations of several of the hardest hit areas across the US (Bergen County, NJ; Chelsea, MA; Orleans Parish, NJ), with the most optimistic antibody and random sampling studies suggesting no more than one-third of the total populations infected at this point.

Some of the most reasonably optimistic numbers that are being bandied about nowadays are three to four times higher than that (0.3-0.4%), though I think the majority of the evidence points to a range more like 0.5-1.0%.
This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can't mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless the information was never before recorded in an online electronic system. Given that I have never seen a functioning typewriter in a corporate office, I imagine that would smooth things a bit.

Also, just as a matter of how the US legal system works, the presumption is that someone is innocent until challenged, whether by the state or by a private party. A prospective business could not file a petition with a court asking if their conduct was legal or not, since it's not really a controversy. But businesses will always do loads of due diligence with lawyers beforehand, who should help identify areas of legal risk.
I remember in the early 90s walking into the board room of a small semiconductor company who was building a chip I had designed, they had a photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip completely covering the table and a team of summer hires from UC Santa Cruz essentially doing what this article describes.

They weren't so much reverse engineering the chip to copy it, they'd already designed one from specs, they were looking for hidden undocumented functionality, features that might be released after they had built and shipped their design
Just look it up on dnssec-tools. As of March of this year, there were ~1.7MM signed domains in .COM. As of Q3 of last year, there were 144MM domains in .COM. Wherever you got that "30%" stat from, it was wildly off. Even I was overcounting.

And (I'm ninja-editing this in, so sorry if I caught you while replying), as you noted, much of the growth in .COM signings is attributable to Cloudflare auto-signing --- which is the same thing that is happening in places like .NL. But registrars auto-signing domains is security theater. Ironically: attacks against registrars are far more common than attacks on the DNS protocol itself; the recent spate of "DNS attacks" from the end of last year turned out to have been phishing attacks.
Pass...
There are other options. This is a place where the state has the opportunity to justify its existence
There is a different perspective that you could use (and I’m not necessarily advocating for it; hear me out):

Human driven cars are dangerous to the tune of ~36,000 deaths per year. Every year without the implementation of full self driving we pay some large percentage of that number in lives. Self driving cars won’t make it out of the lab without real driving on real roads in real scenarios. Taking appropriate precautions (a human safety driver, maybe two) and testing in the real world might save more lives overall than keeping the vehicles in a more lab-like setting for longer, and missing some of the complexity of the real thing.
You're assuming that edits made from within an organization are sanctioned and/or part of some propaganda or cover-up plot. I'm sure that many of the edits are just random people making the edits while at work. I have certainly done that when I saw some errors or vandalism while browsing at work.
You can't learn to operate in environments you don't train in. It would be great if we had a solution to the out-of-distribution inference/reward problem, but I don't think it really exists.

I'm firmly in the "Perfect for freight, questionable value for consumers" camp WRT autonomous cars. I also think it's irresponsible to do this but the reality is, they are doing all the socially "appropriate" things, like get approval from the city.
Why is the US Navy so active on such innocuous articles?
Have you ever driven a car, or been in a car? If so, why? Do you realize that by doing so, you are putting other people in danger?

Maybe you are the one who is being just as irresponsible by being a person who has even been in a car, ever.
In this case I think cobblestone is correct? They tested natural stones (Merriam Webster: cobblestone - "a naturally rounded stone larger than a pebble and smaller than a boulder") vs the hand made stones for this particular task.

"cobble" is more frequently a verb in my experience, to "cobble something together". The dictionary does say cobblestone as a noun = cobble as a noun though. So although they seem to be equivalent I think the original objection is that in some dialects / regions it probably just flows better in a sentence? Probably another subtle british vs american english thing. (I'm american) -- edit My brit friend says it's a stone until it's in a road, then it's a cobblestone.
> Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital.

This leaves out the most important problem though: regulatory capture and bureaucratic gridlock. Markets would love to build more housing. But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. Markets would love to build nuclear power plants, but they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state.

Which ultimately comes back to the democratic question of will. We need to elect people who will alter the regulatory state to make way for these things.
Speaking of number two, what are your thoughts on Zizek's theory of the Paradox of Toilets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXPyCY7jbs
From the amasci.com FAQ:

NEVER EVER move one single html file or change an URL. Don't you hate it when you click on a link and it says "404 file not found"? Well, I've been here since 1994, and all the links to my site still work!

He's full of what seems to me good advice, e.g. from the same page:

Make your website be your filing cabinet. If you have little projects underway, put them on your website while working on them. Reject the paper-publishing traditions of polishing an article to perfection before publication. DO NOT ELEVATE IMAGE OVER CONTENT. (Perhaps even keep yourself honest by cultivating a deep revulsion for "image.") Instead, let all your flaws hang out, and type things directly into your site in rough draft form (label them UNDER CONSTRUCTION if you really must).

Expunge the fear of embarassment from your life, and instead practice making foolish mistakes in front of thousands of strangers. Stop using your PC to store files, instead use your website as your main storage. Let people poke through your filing cabinet. It will contain far more than a perfectly polished website does.

http://amasci.com/faq.html
Simple - politics is about control. Laws are a form of politics.

Why would anyone give up control once they had acquired it?
I do not. See section 8.7 in the link. Most of the bats are endemic to a cave over 1000 miles away. The bats weren't common in Wuhan. If they were, it was most likely as a part of some active research project rather than because bat sounded like a great idea to add to the menu. I'm not a local, so I'll admit to not having primary experience of the area. But the pile of circumstantial evidence is non-bloody trivial and bares being given the courtesy of a looking into in parallel with the Market theory.
It means power is captured by those who can afford lawyers, and lawyers are expensive. There's no way to plan your risks up front in an area with not a lot of case-law, because you don't know them - your business plan now gets to be "hopefully we win this case in our favor in the next 3 years, but if it goes all the way to the supreme court..."
From what I have seen among silicon valley there are two realities:

1. Very wealthy folks who are very removed from society, talk big, but are afraid to invest their money on things that aren't "proven" business models.

2. Normal people who struggle to pay their landlords so much that "building things" is completely out of the question. The east bay, one of the last places where a lot of on-site manufacturing remains, is currently undergoing a "transformation" where the last of these small businesses are being squeezed out by rising rents and are replaced with one-plus-5 housing for google expats.
If there’s anyone in finance who’s less focused on quarterly numbers than VCs, I’d love to hear about them. One of the bigger criticisms of VCs is that they encourage a high risk, high burn, swing-for-the-fences strategy, even in businesses where it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

So while I agree with your sentiments overall, I wouldn’t say that Andreesen is especially reflective of the attitudes that you’re rightly calling out.

Disclaimer: my company received funding from a16z. It’s worth mentioning that, if anything, they have been part of a board encouraging our CEO/founder to think about producing more grand, long-term value, and our CEO already has a strong bias toward long-term thinking.
How to deploy side projects as web services for free
One cynical take on this essay could be that Andreessen is bashing the West in order to please Xi/China and gain access to investments in the East.
> Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces.

Ok... What if I were to tell you that there is a solution to this?

The solution to this, is simply "dont drive in those conditions".

A self driving car can't get in a wreck that is caused by snowy roads, if it simply doesn't drive in the snow.

Self driving, during perfect conditions is still extremely valuable, because it turns out that there is a whole lot of driving that is in perfect conditions.

So, you would do things like prevent the taxis from running, if there is any chance of rain at all. I am sure that there are lots of places where rain is not an issue, and rain could be predicted ahead of time. Not everywhere. But still in many places.
I remember the real reason being the optimization of an operation for array access that is relatively obscure, but heavily used by JS.
Where's Rust and Swift?
Allmost (or all?) of those attacks are only possible, if the target computer is infected.
And the scenario is that the virus wants to send data out, to a nearby decice which is also infected.
Are you conveniently going to ignore the density of Germany compared to Texas and usage of public transport in Germany compared to Texas?
These are just toys while testing remains as sparse as it is.

Don't look at these and think it's over.
UK was slow to lockdown and currently has the fastest-rising death counts in Europe, so they're probably not the best comparison. Sweden has several multiples of the per capita death rates of its Scandivanian neighbors, and it's growing faster than many other European countries (passed Switzerland's total death count yesterday and will probably pass its per capita count tomorrow).

It's still possible it will look wiser in the long-term, but it certainly doesn't so far.
When you're younger you are usually raised in a leveled community of people trying to learn these things. Eventually you can age out of a like-struggling population. Learning requires experimentation in any discipline. Having a cohort allows for leniency.

Things like prioritizing physical health activities. Things like establishing work-life balance that includes hobbies, personal, and group activities. Things like starting friendships without a social broker (like work or other friends).
Since you are reading why nations fail I would like to recommend a pairing. How democracies die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The central thesis here is parties are the gatekeepers of democracies and when they put party before nation they erode the democracy that eventually fails. More often it’s a slow degrade than a sudden spectacular collapse. The erosion paves way for leaders that are more “spectacular” in every negative way than the last one. Makes you think if trump is the problem or merely a symptom. GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers. His presidency will lead to future leaders justifying behaving like him or worse and the “norm” Keeps degrading over time to the point where people are fed up and bring into power a person that they don’t fully understand and one who plays to their fears and portrays themself as their only solution. The book is amazing to read specially with the context of last 4 - 6 years of American politics.
Could be a fun little utility that produces magnetic HDD sounds when doing SSD IO.