skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This building of field hospitals is just another stupid thing we did in response to the models. None of the models have been accurate and truth be told this whole thing is a debacle because we made myopic decisions based upon models that are never right and can not ever be right. These models are the modern version of a crystal ball; they remain attractive because they promise to predict the future; but these have been a false promise. Whether it be the models that predict who will be president, which stock to buy or how a pandemic will play out, the models will be wrong. By now - these models should be considered a pseudoscience as real life events have thoroughly discredited them over the decades. What to do then? Well instead of listening to experts - whose vision is that of their narrow field - we need wise leaders that can detach, see the whole picture and use wisdom. But alas...shall we ever have a wise person to lead us again? I don't know but it seems after a casual look over our modern history the entire living generation has not seen one of these kinds of men. It doesn't seem if there was a wise man among us all that we would recognize him.
That is true for some web sites (perhaps for FB, Youtube and the like Too — feels like it but I don’t know). Activity like you describe is really part of the advertising consultants. But there are a lot of other products beyond web sites out there.

My GF did her PhD work in AI/learning (world looked different in the early 90s) and has been Sr Researcher at Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, FB, Amazon and didn‘t work on Web sites for any of them. She also worked for some smaller companies, still big, and some of those were web sites but none ad-supported.

The issues ranged from “how do people use this feature” to “how do we find a way for new, different kinds of people to use our product? How can it fit what they want?”
Was i the only one who clicked through expecting to read about new monetary policy in Mongolia?

Oh, i was.

Still, this is a cool project, and i'm happy to have learned about it!
AMD's superior CPUs is why you should be buying them
So if TMobile or Verizon would drop your call, because you mentioned some political candidate's name, that would be completely okay with you?
I can Google medical terms until I pass out, but that doesn't make me the intended audience for a medical research paper.

Besides, I'm not suggesting (or "demanding") that all articles explicitly state their target audience. Just that this one does a poor job of indicating it.

So I think it's a poor argument when the parent comment (to which I was responding) assumes an exclusive target audience: "not introductory programmers... more experienced programmers".

You could argue that one was supposed to assume that from context. However, I didn't make that assumption whilst reading, so I especially wouldn't expect "introductory programmers" to pick up on that either.
a point nobody was confused about

a point that doesn't contribute to the conversation

fascinating
I have noticed that this claim (that our current system is a net positive) is not frequently uttered by indigenous Americans, or for that matter indigenous people anywhere.
At least 0.16% of NYC is dead from COVID-19, and that number will rise as both the disease continues and we go back and discover cases we missed. If those numbers hold nationwide, you’re talking about half a million people dying or more.

I personally wouldn’t want to argue for putting half a million in an early grave for the sake of opening up.
Because ultimately people in the USA who aren't oppressed don't even notice or have to care that other people are being oppressed. Then they are given various -isms and -phobias to not only make sure that they continue to not care, but that in some cases they actively cheer on said oppression.
Would it be uncharitable to suggest that perhaps that was the goal?
Our concept of “development” is destructive and irrational
That doesn't forbade loading shared libraries as function pointers though.

Even if you stay, lets say OpenGL only, there are multiple execution paths with driver and graphics card specific code paths.

3D libraries like OpenGL/Vulkan are only portable up to a certain extent.

When you are coding at the ultimate performance level, you are also going into that rabbit hole of graphic card specific code paths and driver specific extensions.

So, it is hardly different than having your own plugable abstraction layer.
Are you preparing for Devops and SRE Interview? Here is abook for you
Note: Tim Bray is Canadian. He’s not doing anything with this for anyone in America _qua America_, much less what you’re calling a “publicity stunt”. The affected workers he’s resigned in protest against the firing of may be in America, but this isn’t a publicity stunt.
This is the tradition of common law, and is not unique to the US. The job of the courts is to discover law. Even in the case where a sovereign dictates a law (older form, in monarchies) or a legislative body writes a law (modern form, in many republics and democracies), it is the duty of the courts to interpret these laws, both in the written law's specific verbiage, and its application in the context of other legal decisions.

It is effectively impossible to legislate every aspect of society. One solution is to empower the judiciary to create/discover law.

I am not making a qualitative judgment here, merely observing that this is not an instance of malfeasance or overreach in any way.
One development that the medical community discovered later on was that putting patients on the ventilator increased their mortality rate, and they moved toward treating patients as long as possible without relying on a ventilator. See: https://www.modernhealthcare.com/safety-quality/some-doctors...

This information simply didn't exist and was highly hypothetical at the time ventilators were being requested.
And the pandemic didn't make that better. "No human contact" is maybe the toughest part of sheltering in place for many people.
you can try workflowy
Astronaut urine for building a Moon base
Both titles are factual — but this one provides context to help evaluate the data. I don't think that's unfortunate, it just shows the impact & effectiveness of good writing.
I know you didn't assert it, but important to keep in mind it doesn't show the contrary either - ie nor does it show it's not [now] multiple strains.
Yeah, it's ingrained into the culture for lower level employees to call out people even in upper management for such minor safety violations as not using a hand rail on the stairs.

Also, I assume the complaints were for outside of any clean room environment since inside a cleanroom you are obviously wearing facial covering at all times. I do wonder about virus circulation inside a cleanroom though since there is a high volume of laminar flow and the filters are designed for particulates much larger than virus-sized.
The field hospital concept to increase capacity to reduce deaths was based on, in the UK, the Imperial paper which was based on, frankly a non realistic interpretation of the input data from China and Italy.

Meaningless admission/overadmission rates which are clearly vastly wrong/misinterpreted and in turn based on a huge percentage of over 75s being hospitalised and a majority of them in turn needing ventilation.

Except in reality patients of that age are rarely ventilated because they wouldn't survive such an invasive treatment and if they are the recovery is 6-8 months and long and painful and has poor recovery outcomes. That predicate was wrong in the paper.

Secondly the field hospitals built could only receive patients who had no other underlying or exacerbating conditions because the FHs lack the staff and equipment to care for them. Given that practically every person who died from a respiratory covid infection had such issues it rendered them fairly pointless.

The paper also didn't do much to deal with the fact this activity will cause a surge in deaths of non covid related fatalities. Whole other issue
Hey, we are building something similar. Please checkout https://metamate.io/blog/most_advanced_hackernews_api. For now, we concentrate on reading public data from various social sources. We just released a HackerNews service and going to add more over the next couple of weeks. Here's a little application build on top of a MetaMate http://showcase.metamate.io/hackernews-activity. Please let me know what you think :)
On an iPhone 11 it is such a waste though :-) Ported today some image processing code from Swift to Metal. Speedup factor: 1000.
State and local governments are about to fade into nothing. The report last night that California is projecting a $54 billion shortfall hasn't had traction anywhere. Note they spent years building up a $20 billion rainy day fund. [1]

This is serious, because the cuts they are going to be forced to take are incredible:

> Required funding for K-12 schools and community colleges will shrink by $18.3 billion, under Proposition 98’s constitutional calculation. That’s more than twice the $8.3 billion California spent out of its general fund last year on its university systems.

And even that article doesn't mention CalPERS, which is almost assuredly going start hitting its limits where it requires local governments to contribute a whole bunch more along with a bunch of other really bad stuff. The public pensions/unions are the single powerful lobby in the state.

I'm betting California isn't even the worst, and I'm also betting the shortfall will be yet higher.

I really do hope I'm wrong.

[1] Coronavirus blows a $54 billion hole in California’s budget. Here are the “jaw-dropping” numbers
Projected deficit nearly three times Rainy Day Fund

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/07/california-budget-to-...
Note: these opinions are mine

In terms of error-proneness, I would say the hierarchy is this:

Actors < CSP ~ Async << Threads

In terms of "getting started" difficulty, I would put the order like this:

Async < Actors ~ CSP < Threads

In terms of first-order maintainability in large projects I would put the order like this:

Actors >> CSP ~ Threads > Async

Async is on its face easy to grok, and saves you a ton of problems with locking and the like, and you can run it on a single threaded system with the right type of dispatcher. However, small amounts of complexity rapidly devolve into towers of async calls that cannot be untangled from a spaghetti pile, and there's not really satisfying ways of figuring out how to unwind error-handling in async, except for the basic case of "I truly don't care if this async fails".

I will say though, it's spectacularly easy to write messy and garbage code in all four of these concurrency models (I certainly have). My preference for actors comes from four opinions:

- some systems (if you want to be flippant, microservices architecture) use actors to encapsulate failure domains, which is really fantasic, and truly the #1 reason to use actors

- 99.8% of the time no need to write mutexes, and good actor systems basically won't deadlock unless you really try hard. (also true for async system btw)

- gives you an organizational framework to write well-designed and well-engineered systems.

- with a small amount of discipline "not having a spaghetti ball" scales with complexity (I find it takes a lot of discipline to not have a spaghetti ball with async in the more complex cases)
Yeah, it's quite fragile and hacky at the moment. A quick abstract from a portion of an old project. Will probably do this properly this weekend. Filter by region/country is doable.
Lot's of commenters in this thread are trying to draw conclusions about dev salaries from this data, but you really can't do that for exactly the reasons you described. It gets even more disproportional for some of the bigger, high price tag consulting firms. In the Big 4 it's common to have entry level devs making $80k/yr ($~40ish/hr) while being billed out to customers at $200-300/hr.
Kernel Sound ID decodes brain activity; quickly identifies what you're hearing
I didn’t dismiss anything of the sort, that’s what’s funny. I shared my actual experience of being chosen as a panelist and have a vastly different outcome and outlook than many of my friends.

It’s not an uncommon assertion that the Fed data is not accurate. Number 1 it’s political. And perhaps more importantly, it’s designed to obfuscate the individual and that, while statistically accurate for static data is anything but for this type of situation. People and specific employment issues are anything but static...
Scopetrex vector gaming on your oscilloscope
So you're fine with the fact that they are purposefully spreading misinformation? Then just say that you're OK with that (if it suits your agenda, of course) instead of downvoting.
For comparison, the BLS reports an all-time high for unemployment (one-year period) in the US was about 25%. It was 1933, deep into the Great Depression.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LFU21000100&series_id=LFU220...

Markets really don't care about this number because it occurred in the past. Everyone knew the number would be very, very bad and it was.

What markets care about now is what happens next. For their part, US stock markets are saying everything will be Ok. The S&P 500 is trading 16% from its all-time high.

Unexpectedly (for me at least), everything is riding on how well the Fed can butcher the raging US dollar bull. It seems impossible, but there's a substantial shortage of US dollars, which has been wreaking havoc on the world economy for some time now, triggering negative yielding sovereign debt and other imbalances.

If the Fed succeeds, the debts for this crisis will be eliminated through a weaker dollar (dollar holders will pay in purchasing power), and things can go on more or less as normal.

If, however, the Fed is unable to bring the dollar down and hold it there for a long time, the ballooning debt will begin to choke the real economy. We'll see it first in interest payments to finance the federal government rising and eventually forcing cuts to entitlements and defense spending.

This would appear to set up a situation in which the Fed will try to err on the side of "caution" - adding too much rather than too little liquidity into the economy.

It's worth remembering that the Fed always gets what it wants in the end.

See:

https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
I've often wondered if zip bombs are sometimes used in email attacks. I imagine they could take down some virus/attachment scanners if the devs have not anticipated them.

https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/
No, that's not what the article says. It says there was no planning or coordination between the hospitals and the field hospitals to get patients in.
I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of things have been going wrong in this effort and there was probably a lot of waste. This is to be expected when it’s required to act quickly with lack of good data.

I only hope the political systems will allow a serious retrospective of the measures and learning from that. I am very afraid that the partisans and conspiracy theorists will take over soon and no rational decisions for the future will be made so we will stay unprepared for the next pandemic.
He didn’t “leave” money on the table anymore than anyone else who works for big tech, is always getting RSU’s that vest over time.
How did we get here? What drove the worldwide populist uprising?

Speaking as one who never was in any danger of voting for Trump, what would be my alternative? The warhawk spouse of a womanizing politician I tired of 20 years ago? IOW, same shit, different decade? And then we're all shocked that the populist candidate actually pulled it off this time? Maybe the world collectively asked, "what's the worst that could happen?" Well, now we know.
> Police in the US are rightly very afraid when pulling over someone for something petty like speeding because that person could be upset and have a gun. Where I'm from cops are not afraid because nobody has guns.

this sort of begs the question of why direct, in-person confrontation is even necessary for petty offenses. there's always a risk that such an interaction could go south, whether or not guns are involved. to write a ticket, all the cop has to do is record the measured speed and identify the vehicle and driver. with the tools available in 2020, they should be able to do this without stopping the person to ask for their license and registration. save the confrontations and arrests for when the person clearly poses an imminent threat to those around them.
Sadly, no. At the beginning it was mostly random people. Unfortunately, you need very little to ruin things - most normal people will not play even with a 10% chance of getting a dong, and the more “normies” leave, the higher that chance gets, in a vicious circle.
Those would’ve been excellent suggestions in January, yes. But by mid March we’d missed the opportunity to use less intense measures.
The thing I can't get over, is that I know a lot of successfull, highly paid programmers who don't care about code at all. It's sad (to me) that they get rich, while not caring about their code.
I oversee the hiring of dev shops for a mid-sized company in the US and the rates for e-commerce/web development are all in the $120-$150/hour range.

The funny thing is that some of these companies outsourced to the Ukraine and India and the rates didn't change. I would have thought that we would at least see some of the cost savings.

Both companies that outsourced ended up being complete disasters (we are still cleaning up the technical debt 3+ years later), which happened before I was involved.

Since this is the case, it made no sense to hire any company that didn't hire all developers directly in the US or Canada (which is now a requirement).

I suppose I should thank these companies, because it's the reason I have a job today.
It's fascinating that you see the misguided impulse being prematurely adding more servers rather than fixing the code. I would agree with that, but I would also see the premise of this blog post as a similar misguided impulse -- rather than fixing the code, writing a completely new part of infrastructure from scratch in a new language because the old one wasn't good enough. Unless you've exhausted reasonable attempts to optimize existing code inside the language the original code was written in, I believe that following this impulse would be (as I alluded to in my original comment) borderline malpractice.
Except for all the times that they don't. If we retest the lows (likely,) this talking point will go away for this cycle.
World population growth has plummeted. You should be pleased.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Updated-World-Pop.... That drop in growth was not achieved by impact of war, disease or starvation but by economic activity of the kind you think is an 'issue'. People want to trade and better themselves. When they do this, dramatic improvements can result at all levels. You're hardly able to take an interest in protecting and nurturing your environment when you're poor. Note how it's the middle and upper classes in the West who largely comprise the environmental action groups across the world. The poor are too busy just surviving. 19th century families in the UK (one of the richest countries in the world at the time) were large because 15% of babies under 1 year, died.

Hans Rosling: bedrooms drive economies.
Click the timestamp.
That's the rub though. You want these to be used. The original goal we were sold is to flatten the curve, which means to use up all the base load capacity, but not exceed the base load capacity. Riding the line of base load capacity was going to be imperfect and we would see usage of these field hospitals as a signal that we are redlining our capacity and need to pull back.

The problem is that the only experts we're listening to are doctors and epidemiologists, when we should also be listening to economists. Both sets of people should be in a room together hashing out policy through an adversarial process that charts a middle ground between two bad outcomes.

Flattening the curve to well below capacity at the expense of further suffocating the economy, just means that we're completing ignoring economic externalities that is going to take years or even more than a decade to fully recover from.
Much of the crime going on is drug related, which is a manufactured crime that was designed to make POC criminals.

End the war on drugs and a large chunk of crime magically disappears.

Obviously this doesn't address poverty from other systematic discrimination but it does remove a key driver for criminal activity.
We were ready (mostly) for the worst case

This is false. Tends of thousands of people died and many more suffered unnecessarily because the federal government refused to take timely action. We did as well as we did for as long as we did through heroic efforts by state governments, local governments, and NGOs.

To claim that we were somehow prepared and executed on a preparedness plan is at best a dangerous misreading of the events, and at worst outright political propaganda.
One of the best things I can recommend is getting control of finances, instead of letting others and money control you, using Dave Ramsey's 7 baby steps: https://www.daveramsey.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps

I can attest it makes life better!

(...with or without purchasing one of his books/dvds/etc; no affiliation but customer; we bought some of his materials for our children. Some of them told us they prefer a free BYU personal finance course, but I dont have that link as handy at the moment).
Ask HN: What's your favourite software project you've worked on and why?
Thanks for feedback. I fixed that, have another try :)
Had to check the authors file[0] to realise you're one of the authors. Wow! I'd like to say a resounding thanks.

I've been looking at this system recently and I'm going to be including robust IRC access to my network (shameless plug[1]).

The code is clean, I think I have a good understanding of how it works and from my testing it does seem to work really well!

That said, have you looked at how much of your original problem space is solved by IRCv3?

[0]: https://github.com/robustirc/bridge/blob/master/AUTHORS#L10

[1]: ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience
How is Andorra the 9th top country for agency workers? A country of 77k people has 15k agency workers?
NextStrain is an amazing resource, it shows all sorts of viruses, not just Covid19. Really incredible.
This is a link to the actual GitHub repo. Scopetrex is an open source clone of the Vectrx vector console, with hard to obtain components replaced with modern counterparts. Uses an O-scope for a display.
>when Jeff Bezos is making almost $9,000,000/hour[1]

Please leave this type of intellectual dishonesty at the door. Hacker News is smarter than this. Jeff Bezos also loses $9,000,000/hour some months. He lost billions in minutes after the earnings report a few days ago. That's what happens when you have equity in something. He bore the risk when the company made nothing and was nothing and he continues to bear that risk and reap the rewards.

Amazon is attacked because it's an easy target. Warehouses have abused workers long before Amazon and continue to do so while flying under the radar despite being significantly worse than Amazon. If someone is unemployed and another person is employed but wants to get a raise with a new job, you help the unemployed person first. Your argument amounts to "well, just because this person is employed doesn't mean they don't deserve a raise". Sure, you're technically correct, but the net result of your efforts is less than if you find a job for the second person first. It's why a lot of people not in the line of fire don't take these initiatives seriously. It's also why workers from other warehouses flock to Amazon by the 100,000s despite these alleged poor conditions.