skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, personally, my goal is to maximize the amount of knowledge and understanding I can acquire per unit of time. As part of this I guess I'm testing myself to see how long I can focus for each day I devote to studying, and to see if once I've quantified it, if I can beat it.

I guess after thinking more on this, I'm not so much focused on "how many pages can I read per day" as I am "how long can I stay focused and study per day"

Also, since I wrote this I've started using spaced repetition flashcards (with Anki) to better retain details as I read through books. I've found that spaced repetition flashcards let me relax a bit while I'm reading because I don't feel like it's so important that I immediately remember everything as soon as I read it since I'll be revisiting it later. This seems to work much better than just taking notes.
So far, the highest estimates we are getting for antibodies are in the 20% range with dramatically flawed populations (NYC grocery).

Real number is less than that and could be way less than that.

Lockdowns create their own form of havoc, but I think they were the right decision at the time until we had more information.

Now we need to figure a low risk way forward
Yes and no. It's not great that people start the rat race so young now. Especially since it doesn't actually make that much of a difference: extra "accomplishments" in HS are only loosely associated with better colleges, and the college you go to is only loosely associated with how well your life actually goes afterward. The things that really end up mattering are a) choosing a field that the economy happens to want at that point in time, b) developing a good network, and c) being able to think for yourself and problem-solve (this doesn't only apply to STEM). But instead people burn themselves out chasing accolades that aren't actually all that important, sometimes neglecting these more important factors.
I'm not sure either that I understand this or that my point was clear.

The part of your comment that added information was fine. It would have been better to add even more information, for example if you had macroexpanded "really good" into what specifically is good.

Generic dissing of other commenters is one of the most common tropes that appears here. Repetition, and especially repetition of indignation, are the things that most lower the quality of the site, and therefore most to be avoided.
> You can choose to get the virus - but that’s a pretty silly choice IMHO. And if you do, please stay home and don’t give it to anyone else.

I don't think this is unreasonable. Most people on HN are under 65 and thus will only get mild symptoms and likely just be out for a few days. Considering we're all probably working remotely, it is also easy to not infect others. Alternatively, a government overreach can last decades and these typically compound. This is a classic marshmallow now or two later problem.

So a few days to a week of being pretty sick vs potential government overreach? IMO it seems silly not to take the sick days (if we're assuming gov overreach).
> Programming is a very demanding trade, and I don't think you can do it just for the paycheck, you need to have some degree of passion for it. If someone disagrees with me about this I'd love to hear different takes.

Consider that many people out there are doing repetitive and demanding physical labor "just for the paycheck". I'm sure those people would love to trade with someone who is sitting at the desk for 8 hours and earning 4-5x the amount, even if they had to do nothing but pressing the same button the whole time.
I think all this praise for people that go into the military as having “served” and whatnot is nationalistic brainwashing. I really don’t see any other option for Americans to start caring about what their politicians do than to make them personally feel it.
Wouldn't you then be telling them the same thing for every app? How many apps & platforms have you reviewed the code for prior to providing your assessment of the risks involved?
I've somewhat shifted my focus from plain note taking to making spaced repetition flashcards (using Anki). I find it to be a lot more effective in aiding memory retention of details.
Norway doesn't count its deaths in the same way Sweden does and in any case Sweden's hospitals are not getting close to being overrun. Remember, curve flattening isn't about avoiding infections it's about spreading our rhe infection rates to allow the healthcare system to better cope. Also, Sweden is doing better than a lot of locked down countries so in any cade it's weird to only compare them to their immediate neighbors. Québec is similar to Sweden in a lot of ways but still has a higher mortality rate even if the province got hit a lot later than Sweden did
I like sifting through Simon Carless' blog on Gamasutra [0]. He has a weekly curated list of interesting articles he's read about video games. I rarely read all of them, but there's usually at least a few interesting ones in the lot.

[0] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/SimonCarless/185740/
Interviews are (with varying degrees of efficacy) meant to gauge fundamentals - so I think you're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.

That said I haven't really solicited advice on either. My concern is more specifically related to how to frame my past employment and medical issues for a future employer - not so much making it through a technical screening.

I was, and am, curious about what others deem important to their career and craft (e.g. fundamentals), but like I said it's mainly curiosity. If you have something to share I'm all ears, and if not I wish you well.
> what the heck are we doing in lockdown...

Not overwhelming hospitals.
I often worry about this myself, and I highly agree with what some others are saying: find a problem/task that interests you or is worth solving - and work on it until it's solved, regardless of how difficult it is or inadequate it may make you feel by not understanding it at first. If you can't find a challenge, then maybe try going out of your way to add new feature /functionality to your CRUD apps. The challenges are always there if you keep an eye out.

Again,I really believe its more about preserveerance and interest, not inherent intelligence. If you can build and maintain CRUD apps without an issue, then with time and effort I am certain you could progress to other more interesting challenges given enough effort.
What about quantum physics or something like that?
How An Algorithm Drives Suppliers to Favor Amazon over Other Retailers
I haven't used it in a while but Vagrant used to be great for "setting this up with apt and the language's package manager would be straightforward, but containerizing it would be a pain" one-offs, to keep it off your base system. And didn't require you to keep an entire image around to do it again, just the vagrant config file.
Do you have links to the Norwegian and Swedish statistics showing what methods they're using please?
The hypervisor migration features you mention are really powerful and stable. I founded a startup that does fast CI using them.

This is what it looks like: https://layerci.com/jobs/github/layerdemo/layer-gogs-demo/18

(in this run it restored a previous VM snapshot to skip the setup, and took a snapshot after the webserver started to give a lazy-loaded staging server)
The popular conception of "waited to shut down" is based almost entirely on the strength of the outbreak in a location rather than how long they actually waited. New Orleans was one of the first places to issue a stay-at-home order, and New York was relatively early.
I would be very worried if I started to see relevant advertisement (online or I also have the cheapest Hulu with commercials) : that would mean that somebody collects correct information about me and can sensibly interpret it. Luckily all the advertisement I see is barely relevant - at most I get banners for the sites I've recently visited.
That's really not true at all and I don't know why you've convinced yourself that it is. Obviously having connections can give you a leg up but most successful people in these industries don't have family in high places and it's not a prerequisite to ascend through the ranks. Why would so many people enter finance and consulting if they thought it was a dead end? Are you arrogant enough to believe that it's because they are dumber and less enlightened than you, and unlike you they don't know what they are doing with their lives?
Change your gender and give life another try.
if you're on HN you should probably just read all of Ian Bogost's articles in The Atlantic. I don't mean that to sound reductive; I'm an engineer by training working on a game design MFA now, his writing was some of the first material about games analysis that I found accessible. The Animal Crossing article of his I just linked is actually pretty boring for his work, but I imagine that The Atlantic specifically asked him for a piece about ACNH because it's such a cultural phenomenon right now. The stuff he says in that piece is the stuff academics have been saying about Animal Crossing games for a decade now. His pieces in The Atlantic are very accessible, and he comes from a technical background, so a lot of his work is written through the lens of procedurality (or
procedural rhetoric). I'm oversimplifying here, but procedurality is the study of how the rules of games create meaning. Since he's writing in The Atlantic, the stuff that's being published there is designed to be accessible to a non-academic audience. I really loved [Don't Play the Goose Game](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...), which is about Untitled Goose Game. The title is, of course, sarcastic clickbait that the author doesn't actually fully believe, but the content of the piece (which is about the relationship between labor and play) is very thoughtful. It also links to other pieces that you can read for some follow-on material. If you hate that piece, you might like Miguel Sicart's [Against Procedurality](http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap), which is something of an academic diss-track against procedurality as a critical tool.

> regretfully academics try to optimize different metrics

um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.

> insightful enough but not academic

based on what you asked for, Payne and Huntemann's [How to Play Video Games](https://nyupress.org/9781479802142/how-to-play-video-games/) might be up your alley. It's written specifically to bring the ideas of games academia to a non-academic audience.

edit: oh and to be clear, since you said "I have not read you": ummm if my first post made it seem like I'm Ian Bogost I should probably just clarify that I am not, in fact, Ian Bogost.
Unfortunatelly she's got her prize not because the book is good but because USSR is evil in it.

Aside of her book writing Alexievich is well known for her outright Russophobic comments.
Are you thinking of "Dark City"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29
Hard to tell without knowing what happened to other like companies. Perhaps they all went down on the news? If so it wouldn’t make me feel any better About those others.
People have been saying that about Sweden for about 2 months now yet we still don't see any catastrophe happening there. Their hospitals are doing just fine, they aren't overwhelmed and there is no uncontrollable mortality. Why would Sweden suddenly do much worst now? It's curve has flattened and they are even closing emergency ICUs they setup but never had to use.
Time would be a currency if had inherent value, and furthermore, if that value was normalized for all people.

Time has value, but the value isn't inherent to it, it how you use the time. And that value is relative to the individual, can't be traded between peers, sold or bought.

Time is probably a concept as far from currency as I could ever imagine.

(I once read that Focus is more valuable than time, btw. It's also not a currency, but it has much more value)
Thanks, adding this as a reason to visit Oceania. :)
It's the same as with git. Some people don't use git when they're working on a project solo. I don't get that at all, NixOS is a fundamentally improved way of managing your operating system. The only real reason not to use it is because you're in a company and your business needs to avoid risks like sysadmins not getting your tech stack, or some component not working because there's a bug in a less battle-hardened setup.

When you're solo there's no such restrictions, you can just use the nicest tech that's out there. I've been amateur-adminning debian/arch/ubuntu machines for 15 years now, NixOS is such a relief to be rid of that mess.
There's also a project called CRIU that is used experimentally by Docker for container save/load: https://www.criu.org/Main_Page
Not articles, but a favourite Youtube channel of mine is Game Maker’s Tookit. It does informative videos on various game-design topics, like story-telling through level design, how multi-player games get balanced, deep-dives into well-made levels from various games and what makes them so good, etc.

Here’s an example (and the channel’s most-viewed video) - How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves

https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8
Figure out what makes you happy while you do the bare minimum and use your nights and free time to make it happen, It's hard to sludge you anything you don't like, and it's hard to tell someone "I hate my well paying career", without sounding ungrateful. Don't let yourself believe this is an intellectual fault, not being a technical person doesn't mean you're dumb.
What world are you living in that customers don't ask for software complexity? I've spent so much time shooting down poorly thought out ideas, explaining why it is just too complex and not what they need.
I’m fortunate to be near a microcenter. I’ve had stuff arrive DOA being shipped and it’s such a downer when you’re excited to get the new system online only to discover an RMA.
As someone from a coastal city, can confirm that the same things happen back where I'm from. There's always the friend with the chill parent and the college-aged sibling who can buy. Uber, Lyft, and/or a DD make it easy enough for the kids to make sure everyone can get home safely.
Diffusion of Innovations (1995)
I was quite clear I'm against the government leaning on corps to do this -- which is what is going on.
Disclosure: I work for Red Hat

I think you're missing the real value here of the support model and services a company like Red Hat can provide to large orgs.

It's not about having support for every package, it's more about having others do the hard, expensive work of presenting you a portfolio of projects known to work well together, so you can focus on adding your own business value rather than spending hours duplicating effort from others and debugging arcane issues.

To some extent you can't out-source everything (and I personally wouldn't recommend that. I think having some in-house experts is really important), but not everybody should roll their own OS, DB, container orchestration, etc.[1], and finding consistent options that work together can be difficult when you have huge, diverse, engineering departments with different values/priorities.

I don't disagree with you: I think contributions in either code or donations are a great way to support FOSS projects. I just think there is also a lot of business value in the support contract style method, because you're not just buying insurance, you're buying real value in the form of somebody presenting you with a portfolio of disparate open source projects that have been integrated and tested together.

[1] Note I'm not talking about "React v. Vue" which I agree support wouldn't make sense for.
I don't think you get that I'm citing specifically the culture of free software activism. A device that is hardwired to only load Linux kernels crytopgraphically signed by corporate entities doesn't fit the bill, nor is it great to have a bunch of proprietary stuff on top.

> It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd.

This is false and I think pretty naive.

On the Apple side, I'll cite that NeXT's equivalent of Cocoa used to run on Windows NT in the 1990s. They didn't need Mach/BSD or any form of Unix to run AppKit. I will also note that today many Apple features depend heavily on the Mach kernel interfaces and less upon the BSD layer.

On the Android side, note that many people are saying Fuschia will replace Linux in that environment.
The next day, when the patient in his 50's died, Reido's thoughts immediately went to the dozens of visitors the man had in the previous days.
Every bank in the US supports verifying identities in every country whether or not they have global operations. Your friendly neighborhood credit union can verify foreign identities. The only exception might be for individuals/entities in places like North Korea or Syria where it doesn’t make sense to bother with individual verification because their location alone prohibits an account.
Maybe heroes are needed just as much as people that do good designs. Maybe it's more akin to a dichotomy of people that build good houses that hardly catch fire and firefighters who put out fires; even in the extreme case that you build nothing but houses that hardly catch fire, it won't mean that you don't need firefighters; in the nominal case of an economically feasible amount (I doubt many MVPs could take on the cost to make them near fireproof) of almost fireproof houses, it might approximate to needing both equally as much.

Frankly, I've been on both sides of the aisle when it comes to projects that allowed for great design and projects that resulted in doing an endless marathon for 3 weeks straight to put out a fire because of poor design; I can tell you without a doubt that doing great design doesn't take anywhere near as much of a toll on your body and mind as doing an endless marathon; I've severely damaged interpersonal relationships (that I can't undamage) through these marathons.
Tbh. this sounds super dystopian.
> Combined with a long transmissable dwell
time before symptoms, wouldn't surprise me
if 90%+ of the people in NYC were
materially exposed.

Looks like you have a possibly important
point:

If so, then they would be well on the way
to herd immunity and, thus, essentially
at the end new cases and the end of the
epidemic.

So, for your point, at

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/23/andrew-cuomo-1...

is in part:

"Andrew Cuomo: 13.9% of New Yorkers
Tested Positive for Coronavirus
Antibodies; 21% in NYC"

The 21% is huge.

So, it looks like the virus spread much
faster than symptoms indicated and now
ballpark 1/4th NYC has been "exposed" to
the virus and is either infected without
symptoms or recovered without ever having
significant or any symptoms. Amazing.
So, if want to accept the usual situation
for viruses, then the 1/4 of the
population soon can't get or transmit the
virus.

Ah, but wait; there's more:
As at

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-four-us-state-prisons-n...

is, call it an exploitation of
a captive audience,

> When the first cases of the new
coronavirus surfaced in Ohio’s prisons,
the director in charge felt like she was
fighting a ghost.

> “We weren’t always able to pinpoint where
all the cases were coming from,” said
Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and
Correction. As the virus spread, they
began mass testing.

> They started with the Marion Correctional
Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners
in north central Ohio, many of them older
with pre-existing health conditions.
After testing 2,300 inmates for the
coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the
2,028 who tested positive, close to 95%
had no symptoms.

> “It was very surprising,” said
Chambers-Smith, who oversees the state’s
28 correctional facilities.

and the article has more such data.

Then if want to accept an estimate that
50% of the population immune means herd
immunity, NYC is ballpark half way to
herd immunity which would be close to
the end of the epidemic. E.g., even
people in NYC so far never exposed to the
virus would not get infected even from
infected new arrivals before they were
recovered or dead.

So, a guess is that the virus SARS-COV-2
is very strange in two respects: (1) It
is astoundingly communicative, that is,
spreads very easily and (2) has some huge
fraction of people with the virus but
without symptoms.

A guess at an explanation: In NYC, the
virus was often getting spread just via
the air, e.g., via building central HVAC
systems?

The good news, if want to believe all such
evidence and related common assumptions,
is that we can get to a fraction of the
population with immunity large enough to
have herd immunity and, thus,
essentially be well on the way to the end
of the epidemic, all surprisingly quickly.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17GuApb1fG3Bn0_DVgDQgrtnd...

(preview link might be more useful).
Something no-one else has mentioned yet is learning methods. Stuff might not be sticking because you're using the wrong learning method for you. Instead of reading a book, maybe watch a video tutorial instead, learn by doing etc, get a mentor to pair program with?

Also look up 'imposter syndrome', it does sound a lot like you're suffering from self-esteem issues too so maybe get someone to talk with?
Sweden also has various challenges that Switzerland doesn’t. They have a large population of Somalian refugees that live in multigenerational homes. Sweden also counts nursing home deaths in their public figures and not all locales do this. If you compare Sweden to the surrounding Scandinavian countries, they’re similar in terms of mortality once you adjust for population. These points are mentioned in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866. CNN also reported that more than half of Sweden’s deaths are from nursing homes for the elderly (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/no-lockdown-in-sweden-but-st...) and I don’t think stricter orders would’ve helped there.

Sweden is past their peaks like many other areas, all while retaining their liberties and economic vigor, and domestically their approach has been very popular (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8257353/Swedens-vir...). There’s a value to retaining some degree of normalcy and individual liberties, and it is not reasonable to claim that saving lives is automatically more valuable. As far as trade offs go, I think they’re doing a fine job, although I realize that’s a personal assessment. But leaving Sweden aside, others like Denmark are also taking a nuanced and thoughtful approach, rather than simply banning everything - see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52226763.
The open source port of OpenZFS on OS X
If you like to work by your hands, there are vast amount of opportunities out there. And it's perfectly fine to pursue a career as an electrician or a cook et cetera. It may not be rocket science but with the satisfaction of getting things done and having satisfied customers and good co-workers, it can be fun.

But if you really can't think of anything that suits you or motivates you, then I think the problem is your own behavior and thinking patterns, that you need to change. You seem to have gotten stuck in a rut, so a nice break from it in a form of say school doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Don't however, let the fallacy of sunk cost misguide you. Just because you have been doing software development doesn't mean you can't switch to manual labour. Or that your next job has to be somehow related to your current. Listen to your own emotions and thoughts, don't let the past weight you down.

For example, that one very good programmer and Youtuber, bisqwit, actually works as a bus driver. Which I think is really encouraging in showing that even if you are really good at something (or you like to do as your hobby), doesn't mean you have to pursue it as your career.
I think OP struggles with concentration, this could fix that.

Not sure what was condescending. And I am smart, my mother had me tested ;)