skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are democratic nations with many more parties than we have, and the quality of governance in many of these nations has proven to be as serviceable as the quality of governance in the US. (Some might even argue that many of these nations have displayed superior governance to the US despite the power being split up among so many parties that they need coalitions to accomplish the little they can get done.) I've never really found myself persuaded by the skepticism against split governments.

Now there may be a point of diminishing returns. As in 5 parties are as good as 10, are as good as 15. But that's an academic question, and we're not even at 5 parties yet.

On the other end, maybe 500 parties is self defeating, as you say. But we're nowhere near that either.
This is overly simplistic. There is plenty of great services that can be done in a weekend. And some very elaborate engineering projects with tiny traffic. When people wonder "why they need so many programmers", sometimes they are right. They hired them to stop them from building competitors.
Would mtr[0] help diagnose this?

[0] - https://github.com/traviscross/mtr
Change in stock price on earnings news tends to correlate to the performance relative to expectations. The estimated performance is already priced in, so the movement will be based on how much better or worse the actual results were than the estimated/anticipated ones. In this case, it was obviously a bad quarter for Tesla, but the bump suggests that traders expected it to be even worse.
papercut?
Could the union strike (after the bankruptcy proceedings are complete) and force the state to take on new debt?

Can states (or municipalities) not declare bankruptcy, and instead default on only the obligations they don't want to pay? That would be similar to how I as an individual can just stop paying one credit card but not the other. Or are those left holding the bag able to sue and force bankruptcy proceedings?
That is the basic premise of Policy Gradients for multi-agent models. Each agent is assigned one gradient, which they train on until end. This replaces the updating of gradients in distributed systems; and policies seem to work well for Reinforcement Learning.
Pupil-Dilating Nuggets
It might be a good idea to make that post or something like it way more prominent.
You might be surprised how many above a certain age have at least small (defined benefit) pensions. People who work/have worked for government as well as a variety of $BIG_CORP. But pensions used to be pretty common among the larger tech companies of the day. I have one from a 1980s/1990s employer.(It was discontinued when they were acquired and I left shortly thereafter.)
AI Workshop Will Be Held in ‘Animal Crossing’
Maybe it'd be better to just pay them a fair wage and let them go to the public library if they want to learn.

College shouldn't be a magical gateway to a fair wage, it should be where you go to study a specific subject.
Hi, to be blunt: You read the mind of the original article author:

> They probably thought it smart to use the same acronym pattern as SLAPP

Nope. Read the original article: FLICC comes from over a decade of research into the taxonomy of science denial. The author explicitly says that, in 2013, they coined FLICC as an attempt to categorize and simplify their presentation.

I don't see why I should be "constructive" or engage in "sensible debate" with you. Your approach isn't "simpler". I am not allowed to say that you did not read the original article, but I do think that you skimmed and did not engage with the bulk of its content or conclusions.

Do you have a position, other than the mind-reading dismissal that you started with?
Please go into some details. I'm on a committee evaluating firebase and I'm curious how it fails at scaling.
"I really don't see how we can avoid this."

Some viruses just peter out, but I don't assume this one will just because it's possible. Some virus become endemic, but why would we assume that about this virus either?
My initial comment was discussing speculative trading in general, but since you mostly brought up some common anti-HFT tropes I might as well address them.

> Many HFT jump out when things get volatile, when liquidity is actually required.

Do you have a citation on that? If you look the preliminary Q1 results of Virtu Financial [0] (only publicly traded HFT) they seem to be doing more trading than ever in these volatile markets.

> Ultimately HFT is doing nothing of societal value, the race down to zero is never-ending and we are wasting huge amounts of resources on a totally pointless march towards zero.

HFT is a mature industry. Latencies have mostly stabilized, and profitability is way down in the last few years. Many firms are merging/consolidating. So in the past few years society is actually spending fewer resources - both financially and from a human capital standpoint on HFT than it did in the past.

> Exchanges should introduce random delays to allow market participants who really want to hedge / buy / sell, then we can shift some of the resources to the real world.

IEX is doing something relatively similar to that for a few years now. They have ~3% of US equities market share. People have the option of trading there but they mostly choose not to.

> The system is hugely inefficient. The costs as latencies get lower are ever higher, for an extremely similar end result. The law of diminishing returns.

Due to consolidation, costs are actually decreasing. Could it be that the market is... working?

[0] - https://ir.virtu.com/press-releases/press-release-details/20...
You buy stocks based on what you think they’ll do next, not what they did previously.
> I think it's pretty easy to say that Google was doing more impressive things at the beginning of the century... Within the last five years, there was a moment when Google had 4 competing chat apps. This is pretty rank inefficiency. If you were to take 80k people (not all are engineers, obviously) and sit them down and ask them to use their talents to build separately, you'd end up with a lot more innovation and productivity, I'm pretty certain of that.

You're misunderstanding how large companies operate.

Their job is not to produce massive innovation -- that's what startups are mostly for, because most innovation actually fails in the market. Once innovation is proven, a big company like Google or Facebook can buy it to scale it larger and with less risk than the startup could have on their own.

Google's job has been to increase revenue, and they've been doing a great job at that. The productivity increase happens from building enterprise features, hiring gigantic sales teams, etc. Building Google Cloud.

And separate chat apps is necessary when WhatsApp and Slack and iMessage are eating your lunch. You can't risk having a single chat app that fails -- so you build one (Duo) that competes with WhatsApp and iMessage, another (Hangouts Chat) that competes with Slack, without pulling the plug (yet) on the legacy Hangouts.

So if you took all 80k people, as you suggest, you'd wind up with a mess of startups which will mostly fail. You're not going to wind up with Google's actual increases in revenues, that's for sure.
There are serious issues with the numbers coming out of India. For instance, some states which share huge borders with other states are showing far less numbers than the states they share the borders with even though these states didn't really implement movement restrictions at the border.
> when money printer goes brrr then prices of financial assets tend to go up

It takes a while to kick in, though while the numbers go up, the values don't.
I should point out, as I have no attachment to my karma, that the schadenfreude comes from the fact that those inflated asset prices were used to justify and fund gentrification and displacement. If a crash ruins a few of the entities profiting off that, well, chef's kiss.
QEMU Version 5.0.0 Released
> Oh, those Trump Bucks? the $1200? Not me or a single person ive talked to has gotten that money.

That's awful. In Canada, most people got their CERB money within a week. It took 2 days if you already had direct deposit info on there. Some people are refusing to go back to work after the relaxed lockdown because the CERB is more than they make working a few shifts a week.

It's a bit frustrating that part-time workers are getting more than if they would work, but I'm happy that everyone is taken care of.
That the flu is a reasonable baseline was obvious enough that I included it in the comment you responded to. The comparison is not reassuring. And the notion that "every individual that gains immunity reduces transmission rate" is exactly what "herd immunity" captures.
It reminds me of the Elcor from Mass Effect. The problem they face is similar to textual comments: Elcor cannot emote in a way that's detectable to non-Elcor, so when communicating with alien races such as humans, they have to prefix every utterance with an emotional descriptor. E.g., "Pleased greeting: Human, it is always good to see your kind."
Curious to know how Tesla will (if it will) repatriate China profits. Perhaps they don't, but just ship China-sourced parts to Fremont and Berlin paid for with China profits?

The political climate could take a very ugly turn, China will want to keep cash within its borders.
Interesting thing... Vitamin D is one of those things that, when vitamins come up on HN, you will often hear the refrain that "it's the one vitamin that large numbers of people are actually deficient in and ought to supplement."

I've heard that many times over the years and I have taken a Vitamin D supplement on and off (more off than on) over the years.

When this COVID-19 thing first hit, I had a physical scheduled (by chance) just about the same time, and I'd heard about this Vitamin D / COVID-19 connection, so when I went in for my physical, I asked my doctor to order a Vitamin D test as part of my bloodwork.

As it turns out, I was indeed very deficient in Vitamin D. I started taking 4000 IU a day and it's had a noticeable impact on my overall sense of wellbeing. It could, of course, be placebo effect even so. And I have no particular reason to think that it will make any difference one way or the other in terms of me getting COVID-19. But I thought it was worth pointing out one more anecdote that suggests that the old "Vitamin D is worth supplementing" refrain might just be true.

If you're in doubt, and it's an option, do what I did... just ask your doctor to run a Vitamin D test next time you go in for a checkup / physical.
https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

All we need now is a "this 'does not exist site' does not exist" site.
TFRT: A New TensorFlow Runtime
You're begging the question. Overwhelming market leader means nothing -- it doesn't automatically create any new obligations or responsibilities.

You actually have to make the argument that an overwhelming market leader in an otherwise niche market requires them to give up their free speech, marketing ability, hosting limits, income, etc.

Even having a monopoly isn't illegal; a company actually has to be convicted of abusing a monopoly position for anything to be required of them.
TypeScript vs Flow: Type Checking Front End JavaScript
Well, I had to honor a widow’s request.
Yes there is. Not having effective options against a new virus is the null hypothesis. So by all means do whatever research has promising leads but don't lower burden of proof for accepting something as clinically effective.
Do note that laid off engineers are typically from teams that have overhired and where we don't have plans to grow, as well as engineers who did not get a good rating and are less promising. It is sad nevertheless.
Just like the normal flu and H1N1 I imagine it may just become part of the yearly flu-shot - I imagine giving a large proportion of the population resistance changes the math considerably on how much it affects us.
Why is this the right time for SMEs to go Digital?
Bitcoin Implementation in Common Lisp
Fair enough, but I think even "generally" is too strong. There's a huge cost to splitting into multiple dbs, and I'd say it should be avoided by default unless the benefits clearly outweigh the complexity costs. Just to give one example, authentication gets way more difficult with separate dbs, and you get a whole new class of potential security bugs.

Your concerns about versioning and deployments are certainly valid, but I don't think they outweigh the costs of turning your data layer into a distributed system until a project gets very large or those issues are actively causing you headaches.
There's a lot of spare capacity in personal devices, getting _anything_ out of that capacity is nice and means you'll have people gladly undercutting Amazon and friends. Maybe limited and not at the same level of availability but still competition.
I came to a new company and built a working prototype of something in a few weeks that apparently, a whole team had failed to do in more than six months of struggling. I didn't know that the project had already been attempted. Some people really didn't like me after that.
It all depends on the context.

There is no reason why your body should use the supplement vitamins or minerals if your diet is normal (not deficient). For example, a lot of people eat a bunch of animal products rich in calcium, D3, protein etc. and end up with diseases like osteoporosis, sarcopenia etc. Even with real food their bodies did not do anything with it.

Intervention studies with supplements on these kinds of people show that they rarely help or help very little (not long-term).

You need to make your body use the stuff you give it.
"Single party rule in California has been an improvement."

I just moved to California so I don't have too much of a personal opinion yet but that sounds like a bold claim. From what I've seen, people over the age of 30 seem split on whether or not it's an improvement. You look at mismanaged cities like SF where there's insane homeless budgets but very little action and results and wonder if the monopoly on political power has made politicians here complacent.

Then there's the whole NIMBY thing. There's a whole lot of Democrats (arguably DINO's) that are very anti-building. They run under the Democrat banner so they'll probably keep getting re-elected. Obviously a solution here is people getting involved in local party politics to primary these candidates out, but that sounds like a miracle that'll happen as soon as we get nuclear fusion power plants.

The whole thing makes me wish 3rd party candidates were more viable in the US. This flip-flopping really sucks and creates a lot of chaos but political monopolies, from what I've seen, are able to hide mismanagement and bad policies really well. (Texas is probably a similar example from the other spectrum.)
I still rely on books written by subject matter experts. Books are still the most dense for of knowledge, so you really get a good bang for your buck.

If you more general news type information, I would recommend a newsletter. They aggregate and summarize the information for.
Cool, want me to shoot you an email (from your profile) when done? You're also welcome to email me (in my profile) as well.
We can avoid it by developing a vaccine and vaccinating everyone. It would no longer be endemic in the population by the next generation. If there are no susceptible hosts because everyone is immune either from having it or from being vaccinated against it, it will die out like smallpox.

This really hinges on whether the vaccine confers long-term immunity. If it works like the flu vaccine, then being endemic is inevitable.
The history of America is the wealthy allowing just enough blue collar folk to make it big, so that the bootstrap narrative keeps propogating. The "I did it, others can too" is the fuel that keeps the facade of social mobility alive and strong.
It is known it comes from certain animals, like bats.

So, how can the virus jump from a bat to a human, either directly or indirectly?

Sure, you can randomly run into a bat anywhere in the world. I know a person that found a bat in her balcony some weeks ago.

But the probability that the virus jumps across species is low. You have to increase the odds, and a good way of doing that is creating a wet market full of them.

And it has been known for a long time that those markets were a disaster waiting to happen.
> It is very annoying to this post on a 28" monitor... the text runs from left to right with no margin spacing.

Rotate your monitor by 90 degrees for a better reading experience. If this is not possible, buy one that can.

Until it arrives, use the Reading View of your preferred browser.
https://ssd.eff.org is a good start, with guides on things like passwords, 2fa, and signal
I like these ideas a lot and if I was mentoring someone in leaving feedback I would strongly encourage providing examples along with suggestions. I like that the "suggestion" label provides a little mental prompt to do that. The easier it is to take action on feedback the better. A diff patch or PR would be ideal.

In the office environment where I find I'm often using MS Word with track changes to collaborate (horrors!) I'd much rather a reviewer make a tracked change and leave a comment in the document then send me an email.

The flip side is reducing friction for reviewers by making your document easily accessible, and easy to change and comment on, pays dividends.
The Atlantic author seems deeply confused. Not unexpected for David Frum. Puerto Rico is a territory, not in any state. A city is under state sovereignty.A state or a city can default. A city can declare bankruptcy under Federal law.
There is no law allowing a state to go bankrupt and be managed by the Feds.
Bankruptcy is an option , not a Federal power. McConnell isn't playing 7 dimensional chess, he just doesn't want to return tax money to Blue states and was just using language loosely when he said "bankrupt".
Can someone explain to me how stock comp costs the company money, if it does? AFAICT it just creates equity dilution, but I might be missing something.
Yes, vitamin D is well-known to be harmful in excess [0] and to be fat-soluble, meaning that it can build up gradually over time. You might not hear of such conditions very often, though, since getting excess vitamin D usually takes effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Excess
Honestly think this is an interesting topic. It seems that today there are marketing advantages to being a public figure that comes off as a bit of a buffoon.

Of course its impossible to know if this is being intentionally done unless they are caught talking about it or something.
Yes, this.

The small subsets and super high Sharpe ratios look suspicious.

Further red flags in this particular case:

- Completely unclear what kind of data they're using. Are they assuming they can buy and sell one individual contract at the bid price each minute? Or did I miss some crucial information about bid-ask spreads?

- Abstract mentions a profit, not an information ratio/Sharpe ratio or anything similar.

- During training they need to tweak the reward function in order to not end up with "buy and hold"? How good is their strategy compared to buy and hold?

- Plots without proper labels.
Most people are satisficing problem solvers. Given a problem to solve they will come up with a solution that they consider to be satisfactory. Ask them to come up with a better solution and they will respond that they came up with a satisfactory solution, and a darn good satisfactory solution at that. If they can be persuaded to try, their brain will immediately head for the original, satisfactory, solution.

Truly creative people are the ones whose brains are able to avoid the trap of immediately heading for the original solution, and continue searching until they find better and better solutions.
That's an interesting and unconventional idea. If I remember Lilium's [0][1] numbers correctly, most of the motor power is needed for vertical take-off and landing and only a small fraction (1/10 to 1/5) is needed when they have transitioned to wing-borne lift. This means that supporting the aircraft for just 1 minute during take-off would give 5-10 minutes of extra vertical flight, which translates to 25km-50km of extra range at a cruising speed of 300km/h.

[0] https://www.lilium.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilium_Jet
Someone _please_ hire someone to follow EM with a phone jammer on. I can't take his BS anymore. Why do smart people like to have strong opinions on subjects they are not expert in?

(Disclosure: I own TSLA stocks.)
Why is it "misguided and a wrong use of statistics"? It's true that the flu kills far more Americans than the last 50 years of war has. If a new disease emerged that was just the flu in a different form, and we retained the mortality rates both from the flu and that new disease, that alone would be extremely alarming: a new cause of death, displacing none of the other deaths, that exceeds most other causes!

Honestly, I think we don't do nearly enough comparisons between disease mortality and other causes of mortality. A "War On Cancer" would have done us far more good than the wars we declared in the 2000s would have.
> The idea behind moanalytics.com is to replace the well-known google sheet companies are using to organise their tracking events for a product.

I... don't know what google sheet you are referring to. Google analytics?
That's more than "somewhat" more lethal.

Er, yes.

Project those C19 stats out across the whole population, and assume (generously) herd immunity effects at 70% that halt the progression, and you're looking at (a) mortality rate that swamps that of all wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters faced by the US for the last 50 years, right?

Yes. "Flattening the curve" just means keeping the hospitalization rate below what the medical system can handle. The curve stays flat near the peak rate. See the curves at [1]. The Financial Times has been updating those daily since early March. Some countries show a decline, but other than China and South Korea, which did heavy testing and lockdown, most countries peak and decline a bit, then level out above 50% of peak.

That continues until "herd immunity", either via vaccine or exhaustion of uninfected people. That's somewhere around 70-80% for this.

The vaccine situation is looking up. At least two vaccines are already beginning clinical testing for effectiveness. One from Oxford, one from Germany.

[1] https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
Not really sure why you're so worked up about this? I thought a 401(k) was a pension, since it pays you money when you retire, which is what a pension is to me. I went looking it up on Wikipedia which said it was as well. Can you see how I'd think it was a pension?

> If you need help defining the words in that section let me know

Well I must not understand the word 'pension' then, because it says multiple times that it's a 'pension'!

If you don't to explain it to me you're not obligated to.
Enforcement of the health care mandate was shut down by trump. Without a mandate, the ACA doesn’t work
Would that be the last Republican governor who actually tried to prepare for the pandemic with ventilator stockpiles and mobile hospitals?
From wikipedia it seems Ci is a curie.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope, just releasing it in the atmosphere where it will float up and eventually escape seems a possibility. Not suggesting, just asking, really.

OTOH I thought tritium was rather valuable. I guess finding a buyer might be the difficult part.

Out of interest, I have a beta light (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nite-Tritium-Keyring-Glowring-Colou...) and it's still glowing well after a couple of years. I've wondered how much energy it actually contains, were it released at once - any one know?