skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not that clear that a lockdown helps

Thank you !
I am all for the lockdown. I am all for wearing masks. Contact tracing is great and d=should be done more rigorously. I am all for proven methods working well for a disease that is both more and less well-understood than we think.

However, amidst genuinely useful health policy, we also have a seriously large amount of security theater. As of this moment, any stance outside "covid is the next coming of the black death" is met with a lot of pushback.

The disease primarily kills and affects older people. We still haven't seen any age specific policy come out of any govt. Close down old age homes. Ensure social distancing at all costs. Let other things come back to normal slowly. It is near impossible for it to spread via surfaces.

WHO has claimed that truly asymptomatic patients (not pre-symptomatic, not making that distinction initially caused push back) patients rarely transmit, and another study found that about 80% of patients in the 10-30 range are asymptomatic.

From my POV, America failed with Covid due to the South, Republicans and many refusing to take basic covid precautions. Shouting at those who are already doing their bit, for not going above and beyond is not going make this any better. People need to stop with purity tests, and directing their misguided anger towards those who are already doing more than enough. This is knowing what we know from countries that have beaten covid.
If you are in SV, it can seem like the world is moving very fast (and within SV, the number of things that people are trying and call "technology" is much larger than the number of things that people outside SV either want or need). But we are still at a very early stage of the "computer age". We have definitely seen a small transition towards more modern ways of working but the process is still very far from complete.

And a lot of this is very prosaic. It isn't about designing some world-beating technology but finding stuff that works and doing it well. Neither of these tasks are particularly straightforward either, knowing what to do is usually not a big problem in business, knowing how to do it is far more difficult problem (ironically, tech is probably one of the best examples of this).

Just generally: believing in constant progress, believing in the mystical power of technology are common psychological habits of humans (Marxism, to name an example)...but it wasn't any easier to make technological discoveries two centuries ago. Literally, these people had none of the knowledge we had today, there was no way to share information, the barriers were huge. Innovation has never been easier.
Ah, yes, cheating. Yet somehow, we have competitive games on the PC. So no, I don't buy that argument.
There is nothing here imho. It's just mastery of crafts, how often/much you practice (not just rote learning) and I guess to a smaller extent, natural proclivity/talent.
> The fact that we are still following the same guidelines as we did in February makes it pretty obvious that governments are not really working with the new data currently coming out, but instead still trying to scramble to put a cap on any possible downside COVID has.

Who is "we"? My state went from "no one go anywhere, disinfect surfaces" to "wear masks everywhere, avoid groups of people indoors". We've gone through a lot of phases as more information became available, and while things are very much not yet back to normal, many restrictions have been lifted once it was apparent they weren't needed.
So they developed Edge (pre-chromium) but still losing shares for some reason.
IMO previous Edge's engine(EdgeHTML) wasn't bad but GUI is bad. I remembered that D&D support was added to Edge after a few years from release.
and in 1991, Gaiman won to date the only World Fantasy Award given to a graphic novel for exploring the same question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Dream_Country#%22...
Beating the S&P on a return basis is totally irrelevant. Almost any diversified portfolio will have a lower absolute return than the S&P and a higher risk-adjusted return. If a school's endowment had the same return and volatility of the S&P 500, that would be quite disturbing.

An endowment should be diversified across asset classes (metals, real estate, equities, bonds) and strategies (PE, hedge funds, VC, etc) and have a moderate but stable return stream.

A core component is usually the S&P 500, with the rest invested in assets and strategies that have low correlation to the market.

We don't know the volatility of the endowment, so maybe it is just shitty, but having a lower return than the S&P is to be expected. And if it did match the S&P, that would indicate to me that perhaps too much risk is being assumed.

Non finance people make this mistake all the time, thinking that return is something anyone cares about. Return is synthetic, in that any positive return can be trivially leveraged up to whatever number you desire. Because of this, what matters is the Sharpe ratio, because it gives you a blueprint of sorts: it tells you how your volatility and return will scale with leverage.
I haven't been counting, but HN has had lots of covid-related submissions and I'm pretty sure most have been from a majority perspective.

It's dangerous to make generalizations like "every $foo that makes it to the front page of HN". Such perceptions are notoriously subject to bias, for example the bias where people are more likely to notice (and put more weight on) posts that they dislike/disagree with than posts they like/agree with. If you think about it, that phenomenon would predict that all sides feel like the site is biased against their perspective, which is exactly what we observe.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> That’s about a month’s worth of deaths.

Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.

If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.

> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.

People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.

> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.

It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.

Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.

Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.

Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
Wonder how Worksnaps work and what it's all about?
I think the only way the US government let’s asset prices drop is if a new superpower shows up with a more in demand currency. Until then, they will do whatever it takes to keep VTSAX and real estate prices going up and to the right. The USD will probably lose value.

If you assume the above is true like me, then 100% equities for any funds not needed for 5 years is appropriate.
That's a very interesting perspective. There have been many articles complaining about the "hype" behind ML, but I too wonder if DNNs could assist with controls, especially when it comes to reacting to sensor data. After all, it's just matrix math.
Gmail is the worst of the worst in email support: It has none.

Always had great support experiences with FastMail. Spamming them hourly seems like being a bad customer though.
I have seen a pattern in my life when leaving one job for another.

The most important part of the pattern is: 2 weeks into the new job I'm always "What was I thinking? I should have done this LOTS sooner!"
> someone very helpfully suggested just wrapping the plain text email in a <pre> tag to protect against XSS

This is bad advice.

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/occupy/
A Prius or Ford Fusion hybrid get better MPG in city driving than highway. That's because regenerative braking recovers most of the energy needed to get back up to speed. The improved MPG has more to do with higher drag at high speeds which reduces efficiency.
Districts are drawn more or less arbitrarily, and so their residents don't necessarily represent a single coherent political bloc. In practice, this means that you can have a party getting 30-40% of the vote in literally every district, and end up with zero representation.

Worse yet, because most FPTP elections only require plurality for victory, you can have a party get less than 50% of the vote in each district (but more than any other party), and still take all the seats. In which case you literally have the minority running the country - so much for "people have spoken".
How do the trackpad and battery life compare?
> Can you distribute Mac software over the internet without signing it, thereby avoiding Developer ID and notarization entirely? Technically, currently, yes, although Apple has indicated that a future version of macOS may not allow unsigned code to run at all.

I don't mean to keep beating a dead horse on this subject, but why are we acting like this is only a possibility? Apple is almost certainly going to remove the ability to run unsigned code in the future.

A day or two I wrote[0] about the timeline that took Facebook from guaranteeing that you'd never need to sign into an account on Oculus to requiring a Facebook account on Oculus. Different company, same story.

We spent a long time having concerns dismissed, and then once everyone was used to the idea and the uproar had been reduced to a manageable level, Facebook did it. People get told that they're paranoid when they express concerns about the future. Then those concerns turn out to be correct, but by then the concerns seems less dystopian, and we've moved on to dismissing other concerns even farther down the road.

I'm not going to find the other threads and articles, but:

Voice assistants: same story different companies. Concerns about recordings leaking, being distributed outside of the company to 3rd-party contractors were all paranoia until they weren't.

Facebook, again: same story different company. Facebook would need to be stupid to use 2-factor phone numbers for advertising and promotion services, the people worrying about that scenario were paranoid. Until they were proven right.

Browsers: same story different companies. You can not run unsigned extensions in Chrome. You can not run unsigned extensions in Firefox unless you are on the beta-version developer branch. In both cases, even though Firefox technically has an escape hatch, the effect is the same: normal no longer have the unrestricted ability to write software for their own devices.

I'm not going to argue that Mozilla's worries about malware aren't real, I'm not even going to argue about whether or not they made the right decision overall. BUT, anyone who thinks for one second that Apple isn't in a position to bring up the exact same security justifications for removing unsigned code from the Mac is fooling themselves.

We keep on taking these companies at face value, assuming the most permissive, conservative version of their policies, and then using that assumption to avoid talking about the real dangers of a corporate war on user-controlled general-purpose computing.

When Mac signing came out, so many people were telling me that it was stupid to object, because this was just about stopping specific malware. It would never be used to enforce a ToS or directly punish another company. So when we have conversations about Apple's dominance in the space, about what walled gardens mean for Apple, we need to have those conversations under the assumption that the most likely future is one where those same exact policies apply to both Apple phones and Apple desktop computers.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24202879
Clear as mud. If it means "we can't make these instructions work at nominal clock" rather than "we won't let you", why can server chips do it?
He is a former chairman of the fund, so it's definitely meant as a slight. https://businessden.com/2020/07/19/former-chairman-donor-sue...
Don't we already have experience with this? In the workstation era, companies like Sun and SGI did hardware/software co-design. Sun was founded with expertise on both sides and an MBA type CEO in Scott McNealy. So I don't think think this is any insurmountable gap and that any dual PhD companies will have a generalist CEO.
Depends on the generation of Leaf. The older ones had a big problem with thermal management. Teslas on the other hand has a cooling loop that takes in excess heat from the motor (in some cases, intentionally running the motor inefficiently to generate more heat), to "condition" the battery to the ideal temp. Ideally this is done while plugged in if for short trips. The car essentially stalls the motor with just enough current to generate heat. On long trips, the heat generated during the drive is enough to take care of this and the battery stays at the optimum temperature even if it is extremely cold outside.
I always like the release notes from here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.9/...
What's in rootless.h?
It definitely does, and I can do this in Emacs with Org Mode. However, I cannot convince the world to use Emacs and Org Mode. I appreciate Noah's frustration.
Very similar experience here. It's been crushing to see how the remote is just draining for the kiddos. Seeing glimpses of hope and growth, but still painful at the same time.
I stand corrected, thanks.

Tells us something about the real price of that console, though. People don't see the price of the walled garden, since (i) it's always been this way, and (ii) it looks like the garden is providing flowers (in the form of a store). Such hidden (or externalised) costs are a bit of a lie. I'd rather be aware of the true price of what I'm buying.
Just yesterday I threw out a print of a DoE paper from 1997 that talked about lithium-sulfur as imminent new storage tech.

Impressed with the persistence here.
It's the very first point in the first link:

Stay hydrated: ... drinking warm liquids can be soothing, prevent dehydration and ease congestion.

The honey thing in the second link is not at all ironic. "Try honey in your hot beverage" is pretty straightforward. Honey tastes good, so try it in your hot beverage. Again it follows the common theme.
The problem with no inheritance tax is that it destroys individual merit. In an ideal free and liberal society everyone would start from the same point and achieve the things they achieve in life based on their individual merit. Such a scenario driven to its extremes would be a dystopian Brave New World-like horror, but we can certain level the playing field somewhat by ensuring that some don't start with millions in their pocket whereas others start with 0.

There is an absolute mountain of evidence that the economic status of your parents is a strong influencer of your own economic status. This is the cause of a great many problems, including things like the problems with the black community in the US for example.

Your entire argument on this is a contradiction; no one is entitled to anything yet you are entitled to the money from your parents? What right do your children have on the money someone else earned with their merit? Let them prove their own worth.
This guy sounds like an idiot. He's picking the last ten years and comparing it to the S&P? The foundation is probably more risk-averse and would probably lose less in a bear market than the S&P.
The key is crop diversity because brassica plants (cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, etc) are not helped by mycorhizal fungi at all, and in abundance it might even be detrimental to them. Some mycorhizal fungi types will destroy some species of plants in order to benefit their species of choice, going so far as to tap directly into other plant roots to use them as nutrition.
> I’m not all that educated on negative tax rate

Negative income tax is not a negative tax rate (it's a credit plus a progressive, always positive, rate.)

(EITC has a negative rate in the lower portion of it's range, but EITC is a weird thing.)

> what’s to prevent companies from just setting wages to obscenely low, knowing the government will just pick up the bill and pay out the difference?

People's lack of willingness to work for low wages, which increases when there is reduced economic coercion to take whatever minimal scraps are thrown at you because of the income floor provided by UBI or negative income tax (different names for the same thing.)
Yes, I think that works best. You need an engineering leader who has some understanding of all of the important problem areas the company faces, even though he/she is unlikely to be the company's leading expert in any of them, or more than one of them, so good decisions can be made.
You are greatly oversimplifying in response to paragraphs. Please expand on your point.
It happened during Coronavirus, but historically bonds have been counter cyclical. Some are worried that the paradigm has changed, and that bonds are no longer uncorrelated.

If this is true, it has large and significant ramifications on optimal portfolio construction.
I'm really getting downvoted without explanations here.

The Storm should have been a warning sign that their OS was starting to heavily lag behind. By the time it arrived on the market Apple already had the App Store and the 3G on the market. Anyone from BlackBerry taking a trip to the local mall would have noticed what was wrong with the Storm and the OS in the first 30 seconds when trying a (first gen!) iPhone.
Thinking you need infinite money to go for a walk is peak HN.
It’s an estimate based on the probability of a virus finding new hosts. the higher the proportion of potential hosts that are immune, the less likely the virus is to spread.
You could and probably should argue that Americans should take the flu far more seriously as well. Think of the amount of people that come to work/the store sick, don't get their flu shots (yes I understand it's not 100% effective), don't wear masks, don't take even the most basic precautions.

Preventable deaths.

> American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.

I would say it's deeper than that. American society has been poisoned by individuality to the point where no one wants to do anything to help one another if it doesn't benefit them. It feels there's no concept of civic sense or societal good. Everyone just wants to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences.

Ask me to inconvenience myself for someone else? Fuck you buddy I got mine /s
Regulations constraining housing like oning laws and hefty building codes are a thing
Chesky mentioned at one point he would look into this. I don’t see what’s so hard about computing the average price per day in the aggregate view though...
If they remove the ability to install software that I want to install they lose me as a customer forever. I don't have a problem with the warning. Windows has similar but it's super easy to turn off completely. I know you can do it as well on Apple as well but it's a bit more hidden. Mostly I use linux, but I also have a small mac pro that I like to travel with and has 90% of my development software on it.
You are right. I did learn this term in high school decades ago but have forgotten it. Thanks for the explanation.
A new NPM is coming
It’s not included in the list/map view for your search, so you can’t really compare the actual price without individually visiting each listing
> This is more or less what happens with tipping

The amount of tips isnt guaranteed,and you don't get access to them independently of whether you also choose the low-paying job, so I don't see how it's at all similar to UBI/NIT.

If people got the average rate of tips for a tipped job without doing the job, you think they'd take the job on top for the tipped minimum wage ($2.13/hr federally)? I don't think so.
> Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we’d not also engineer many varieties of food.

And yet tomatoes are getting more and more tasteless.

> You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive

Nowhere in my posts did I claim that - the terms "seed control" or "expensive" aren't even in my posts. I claimed that the requirement to use GMO seeds to remain economically viable will concentrate the control over the food supply into a handful of corporations. If you take the smallest glance at agribusiness, you'll see consolidation is exactly what's already happening, and GMO will make it worse.

> No, they don’t. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care about.

So.. genetic engineering is vastly faster than natural or artificial selection? I.e. my original claim? Oh, sorry, I forgot to add the important nuance of on average.
What a strange argument; you can most certainly quantify living wage for a specific region by looking at the prices in said region.
Windows signing isn't centrally managed through Microsoft, which is an important distinction I think.
Unfortunately large companies invest much less in longer-term research than they used to. Bell Labs was a thing ... once.
The key here is that Apple can also remove and retroactively revoke signatures on signed applications, which is why you rarely see Mac malware stick around after it makes the headlines these days.

When a piece of (signed) malware becomes even moderately sucesful, Apple shuts down all its installation vectors by banning every dev account that's ever signed it. If nothing else this makes it harder to develop malware that spreads rapidly through the App store, forcing bad actors to invest a lot more work into finding 0-days.
Great write up! I actually lol’d at step 0. The irony of hey.coms vision to simplify email and you’re first intuitive step.. hilarious

For those who are perusing the comments w/o reading (like me all the time)...

Step 0: “make the feature simpler”
I've only read a little about the idea but I heard that time banking has been used in some communities without work to keep an informal economy going. It turns out there are a lot of odd jobs which aren't high-value enough to be part of the formal economy, but are worth doing with basic time-tracking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

And then there's maybe the more traditional form where a local currency comes into existence which maybe not regulated like the national one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency