skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding his/her: that was a dumb assumption on my part. Apologies. It should be her.

To the content of the article. This is what the author describes as the scenario to be avoided:

> Your choice becomes limited to employers who want a cog in the big machine while your career will fade into a 9-5 job.

As if this is per se a bad thing. As I said, if your career is your life then indeed, follow the authors advice. However if your career is just a tool to financially enable your real life, it’s great to be a cog in a 9-to-5 machine: you get to go home in time for dinner every day and you probably have mental energy to spare when you do.

Further down, this is written:

> If you're not paying attention, you lose precious years stagnating and being unhappy.

Below, signs of unhappiness are: lack of work accomplishments, lack of “resume worthy work”, lack of new skills for future employment, lack of overthinking work problems in the shower, lack of kinship with colleagues felt.

Again, for many people, work is not a goal in itself. I like my colleagues and I enjoy my job, but in the end the place I really want to be is not my office (but my home) and the people I really care about are not my colleagues (but my family and friends).

Final exemplary quote:

> You have at best 120 quarters left to make something of yourself. A year wasted at a poor job or role is equivalent to you throwing away 3.3% of your career.

Again, apparently “making something of yourself” is equivalent to not wasting time at a job and having a good career?

I fully stand by my points:

* It’s fine to be very career and job minded.

* You need to read the linked article with a lot of flexibility and creativity to come away with any other impression than the author is very career and job minded.

* It shows a lack of perspective (or an abundance of personal insecurities) to write a preachy article like this without even considering that your goals (the authors goals) might not be the same as everyone else’s.
The 2009 swine flu pandemic is one example.

We didn't actually realize how widely it had spread until later when antigen testing found that 11%-21% of the world population had been infected. Given that precautions weren't being taken to stop the spread of it, that % has to be similar to the real world herd immunity threshold. It's also a % similar to what seasonal flu infects every year, and we don't take any real precautions to stop that from spreading. In the end it turned out that the 2009 swine flu was much less deadly than originally thought, leading to significant controversy in the medical community, with it even being called a fake pandemic: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/01/facing-inquiry-who-s...

Note how the wiki page for the 2009 swine flu pandemic lists multiple uncontrolled pandemics with estimated %'s infected in the double digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic

Keep in mind that human societies aren't the uniform mixing vat that the theoretical herd immunity equations assume: the exposure graph of society isn't unform at all. So outside special cases with very high degrees of mixing and exposure, it's no surprise that these pandemics lose steam long before the theoretical maximums. Conversely, herd immunity isn't a magic barrier: infections can go beyond herd immunity thresholds in situations where the rate at which infections are happening is high.
“Completely inhumane” is one of those phrases that immediately raises suspicion that someone is not listening but rather had already made their mind up. Do you really think that someone truly has no humanity? Isn’t it more likely that you don’t get where they’re coming from? Even intuitively, war seems much more damaging than a pandemic if an equal number of people die in both.
Do we have any evidence indicating the likelihood of that working?
The UK did this once. It's probably not going to happen again, certainly not on such generous terms, and one lockdown was not enough to stop Covid - just to delay it until right on top of the winter flu season.
This chart is about covid in the US though so I suppose the global population isn't really the yardstick you want to use. US population in 1918 was around 100m [1]. If WWI deaths took place over 4 years it'd be around 30k per year [2]. With that as the basis the US covid death rate is quite a bit worse than WWI in terms of absolute numbers.

[1]: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&...

[2]: Assuming the numbers in the chart are accurate, and that the deaths were evenly distributed across the 4 years
True, but I don't see any reason to assume it will be worse this time round for a number of reasons. (The IFR that I am using as a measure has been dropping rather than rising, as tests show way more asymptomatic cases).

* Many of the deaths were in care homes, the initial strategy was to send them there (in the countries that got hit early on). I think everyone realised in hindsight that this was a bad decision.

* Many of the most vulnerable people will have died already, the population that is left will be fitter and have more immunity. (A study of Mardid care homes showed 61% of residents had antibodies a few months back, and ~30% of staff).

* A lot more is known about the virus now.

* Everyone's lifestyle has changed massively.
Symptoms over a month and “long term issues” are not the same thing. Severe COVID-19 can cause radiological abnormalities persisting for 3 months, but these heal.

Long COVID is unproven and anecdotal and seems to be more likely to be psychosomatic in most but not all cases.
We close schools for week when fly gets to spread in a city and that is enough to get it under control.
You value your life less as you get old; however, much like religion, we should not be forcing our own views on everyone else.

There are plenty of elderly who would love nothing more then to continuing to see their children, and their children's children grow up; and who would much rather not die intubated, or worse, suffocating.
Here is a rundown of attempts to quantify the statistical value of a human life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

Obviously, these methods don’t account for the emotional value to loved ones. Maybe they should. Attempts to quantify that could include factors like mental health, and future wages (e.g. losing a parent earlier in life).
It's pretty simple: at my age randomly dying isn't something I'm concerned about at all. So doubling those chances is still not something I'm concerned about.

It's certainly not an existential threat to society.
The Netherlands (where I'm from) aimed for herd immunity in the beginning of the pandemic. So no strict measures just enough to make sure our health care isn't overrun. This was perfectly fine in the first few months, now they are still doing the same measurements (no real lockdown or any strict measures) while our health care is being overrun because of a 2nd wave. This time herd immunity is nowhere to be found.

I can only imagine that NZ is indeed sitting this out till a vaccine is available, because if countries that had herd immunity as a goal in the first place to not have that goal anymore, it probably means it isn't feasible.

That being said, I don't see how _any_ country is able to do anything other than sit this out. Everyone in the US, NL, even DE (which is doing okay in Europe) or NZ and TH (with no local infections) cannot do anything else than to wait for a vaccine to be available or before we just accept this as a reasonable risk.

Personally I think accepting the risk is the most likely situation. I do not have much confidence in a good vaccine being available in 2021, personally I'll get back on the plane in 2021 and just accept the risk. I als know that this is something a lot of people will not accept, but we cannot lock up the world economy for a few years for a virus where the fatality rate for healthy people is so low.
Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough.

For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' -> Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem').

So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words into a language and completely disregard the orthography of the original language. I don't think you lose much by doing that, in fact.
Are there any car companies that have the auto-pilot capabilities of Tesla? I drove one the other weekend and was blown away, I’m not aware of any car companies that the same level of software integration as Tesla.
This village already exists. It's called all of New Zealand and has around 5 million people living in it.
On the Utility of Generalists
Emery Berger argues that the systems community should be doing exactly this -- improving infrastructure to run JS and Python workloads:

https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/10/12/from-heavy-metal-to-irra...

We need to incorporate JavaScript and Python workloads into our evaluations. There are already standard benchmark suites for JavaScript performance in the browser, and we can include applications written in node.js (server-side JavaScript), Python web servers, and more. This is where cycles are being spent today, and we need evaluation that matches modern workloads. For example, we should care less if a proposed mobile chip or compiler optimization slows down SPEC, and care more if it speeds up Python or JavaScript!
It's not 10ms, it's hundreds. GEO orbit ISPs provide a service that's complete garbage for desperate people with no other options. The latency is bad enough that voice and video calls are miserable, online gaming it out of the question, and just loading a web page takes 10+ seconds because of the round trips required.
What other numeric types would you like to see?

In addition to the existing doubles, ES2020 added support for signed integers.
I really like those. Verifiability and paper trail seem very important.

I’d recommending not using the term accountability if these are the things you mean. Generally it has the connotation of being responsible for outcomes.

I also think that there is possibly a false dichotomy between free speech and news here. As if regulating news is somehow the same thing as curtailing free speech. I’m not sure it needs to be so stark.

If we introduced some or all of these regulations, we could simply attach them to the use of ‘news’ as a product description. I.e. If you don’t do these things, you can’t sell a product called news.

This would be similar to not being able to call yourself a medical doctor or police officer without he right credentials.

As far as I can see free speech is a red-herring. We should preserve it strongly, but also introduce a category of media product that has certain guarantees or protections.
It increases the die area, power consumption, and instruction set size by a miniscule amount, so probably.
Your logic is actually backwards. Flu is extrapolated but it’s extrapolated fairly. Whereas for COVID-19 we perform mass testing and label every PCR-positive death a COVID death. I hope it’s self evident why that approach will massively inflate COVID deaths but if you would like I can break it down in detail for you.
SEPA is certainly one of the best options for a payer-originated transfer. We have something similar here in the UK as well, the Faster Payment system.

On the other hand, SEPA Direct Debits can be involuntarily refunded up to 13 months after the payment goes through if the payer claims the charge was unauthorised. From bitter experience, some customers are quite willing to lie about a legitimate charge being unauthorised in order to take their money back retrospectively.

In the spirit of the original article here, I wonder how many people appreciate the profound difference between those two methods of transferring money, both commonly known as SEPA.
> Toning down my outrage? We are talking about human lives

I would be great very grateful to other HNers if someone could point me towards a book or resource for how to effectively communicate with people who are in this mental groove. I feel as though my point was missed, and I can't think of any more effective way to convey it.

(EDIT: I suppose I could say that outrage tends to shut down discussion by inciting emotion over reason. I feel just as strongly about these human lives, which is why I want to be able to talk about them clearly.

I do not think saying this will affect the parent's mode, and I'm wondering if there's some better way to do that.)
True. I don't dispute that absolute safety is impossible.

I'd argue that the socially accepted response to influenza in the west is an awful lot weaker than it should be, however. People who have flu should be self isolating and wearing masks if they must be in public.
You're right. If Trump tried to only apply a two week quarantine to people coming from Mexico people would be against it. If he'd done a quarantine for all people entering the US back when there were only a handful of cases we'd be in a much better place right now. I suspect that would have been viewed as an overreaction by many people but based on what we've learned since then I think people would've come around.
I’m not sure why some people conflate pandemic devastation with freedom.
It strikes me as quite dishonest to put World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, but not World War II on this chart. It's hard to imagine selection criteria that could generate that set of wars other than "don't put anything above the COVID line".
Open source is profitable in two ways:

1. If the work is ultimately for a company you are working for fulltime and getting paid from the start. This is the case with IOS support for DeviceFarmer. I work fulltime for T-Mobile. I am thankful to them for allowing the majority of the resulting software to be open sourced. The reason they allowed it to be that way, and wanted it from the start, is so that we can benefit from users using the software, finding bugs, and reporting them. There have been contributions from the open source community to it as well that have been very helpful.

2. By providing paid support for an open source project. There is a great need right now for someone ( and/or many someones ) to work with companies to get DeviceFarmer setup and working well for their needs. I do this a little bit on the side myself, but it is tricky because I don't have much time remaining after my day job to do so, and I have to be careful not to let it become a conflict of interest.

DeviceFarmer as a entity is a collection of key personnel who have been maintaining OpenSTF. I believe all of them are fulltime employees of various companies that use it internally and contribute to it to address their own needs. I joined the core team as a result of writing IOS support for it ( I say "writing", despite also porting in a large chunk of IOS support from other open source contributors; mrx in specific )

Right now DeviceFarmer isn't a legal entity. There is no company or non-profit currently. It is just a bunch of developers cooperating. We have considered creating a non-profit company for it, but it has not been done yet. The members of the group are spread out internationally.

The original main author(s) of OpenSTF formed the company HeadSpin out of it, and offered it as a commercial project. Very recently the company collapsed as a result of internal corruption, but the project itself lives on. Really they had abandoned OpenSTF 2-years ago anyway. The rebranding to DeviceFarmer instead of OpenSTF is to move the project to being open and no longer restricted by HeadSpin.

HeadSpin themselves refused to ever accept contribution of IOS support into the OpenSTF project, because IOS support was one of the main differences in their commercial offering. They refused to ever open source that portion of OpenSTF. Forking the project was necessary to allow this. Essentially the entire community has moved to the fork and abandoned OpenSTF. The crumbling of HeadSpin sealed the deal and OpenSTF is essentially no more.
Isn't it a lot of work to order, wait, and take delivery of a car, and have £100k or whatever on your credit report, and then reversing of all of that... just to get a test drive? Do they not do test drives anyway?

£100k or whatever is a hell of a deposit for a test drive!

I just wish Tesla did a proper SUV. The Model X isn't any kind of SUV - it's just a big hatchback. Doesn't look like it'd really be capable off-road compared to something serious like a Land Rover.
Well, perhaps this could be the first communicable disease of its kind that doesn't produce immunity in the survivors... Perhaps we should craft our response based on that assumption?

Oh, wait. We are...
and yet less people died. And those who lived are enjoying a higher quality of life.

Also, you need citations for everything in the first sentence.
Interesting - I find it usable on the iPhone X, but of course nowhere near as good as real hardware.
This seems like a long bet. What if we never find a proper vaccine?
Yeah, you are right. Sorry, I exaggerated there, HN is the best mainstream source for technical stuff honestly.

Still many posts that make it to the top feel like commercial advertisement and I am pretty sure they use (their?) sock puppets to get the first upvotes to cheat the algorithm.

It's easy to create 20 accounts and just switch between them (and IP) when you do your normal HN procrastination to validate them and then get those initial 20 upvotes to go up to the top.
There's plenty of incentive to skip quality somewhere in the supply chain, which is why we get these nasty scandals[1] on occasion. However virtually nobody concludes that it means you need to process your own meat, or check if someone diluted your booze at the store or whatever. Only when it comes to encryption or digital stuff people go full tinfoil

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal
Agree! Voted for her but thought one of the two big parties would get Auckland Central. Good surprise!
Some folks think NZ is paying a price for this but it appears to be a lot cheaper than the price the US is and has been paying, certainly in lives but also economically. Here is the relative performance of the US and NZ in 2020 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the US Commerce Department and Stats New Zealand. We're paying a price both in US lives and worse economic performance for the current US policy.

US 2020 Q1 -5% Q2 -34.3%
NZ 2020 Q1 -1.4 Q2 -12.2%

https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/gross-domestic-product-...
https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/gdp2q20_adv....
Any good repeatable use-cases around your GeoJSON that would work well for automated benchmark case? I"m always interested in adding more benchmarks... If you have any good test cases that would work well, happy to add them to the Phoronix Test Suite - report it @ https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/test-profiles/issues and will look at the workloads. Thanks.
Not a pyramid scheme... it is talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the section about it was at best loosely tied to the rest of the article. The article would have been just as good, and possibly better, if that entire section was simply removed. It's addition took what was otherwise a quite decent article and made it feel like they were trying too hard to hook people in with a clever gimmick of a title.
> A strong vaccine candidate within the next 6 months is a strong likelihood

There's zero evidence to support this assertion. First there's zero evidence that it's "strong", whatever that means. Second there's zero evidence that we'll have it in the next 6 months. Remember, it also has to be safe, not just "strong". Ensuring that takes a lot of time.
Allow me to be the one who posts an obligatory xkcd reference:

https://xkcd.com/2306/
Fair point. I agree - this creates a 2 tier justice system.
I worked in a customer facing role for a while it gave me a better sense for vendor relationships. I say it's worth it if you are curious.
That's right, we're not playing democracy here, go play democracy with php, ruby and javascript idiots. Do we need second ruby or lisp? Answer is clear.
Anyone have a ELI5 version of the architecture of lockless buffer? I'm trying to wrap my head around how something like this can operate without locks and I just can't grock it.
The plug-in hybrid volvo models have an extremely long waiting time, the average for a new XC60 T8 is about 9 months.

Funnily enough I also bought a Volvo instead of a Tesla, I tried to arrange a test drive of one but was having a really hard time getting anyone to get back to me and actually arrange anything, went and test drove a new XC60 T8, ordered one the next day. Fortunately the dealership already had a few in the pipeline so I waited "only" 3 months instead of 9, but yeah, well worth the wait and I'm very glad I didn't go with the Tesla.
Oh now that's much cooler!
If you find yourself in the only place able to grow food you better be able to defend yourself as well.
Reference counting is still GC, but I stand by what I said that the majority of all GC research goes into java. The GP was talking about using a tracing GC—like java uses—in nim; which I argue against.
An interesting listen to how human life is valued was published fairly recently. Quite sobering: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
They can also wait until there's cheap and effective treatments.

By not having an epidemic, they continue to have the initiative to choose next steps, rather than having to react to the virus
I glanced at the study and the fatality rates they use are absurdly high. They estimate .7% IFR for that age range which is way too high.

Anyway, my point was simply that if we took the same attitude towards risk that you all do with COVID and applied that elsewhere, we’d all be rolling around in hermetically sealed hamster balls until we died of boredom.
And then remember that Objective-C is, essentially, COM with language support.
What's the difference between Coral's production line of Edge TPU modules and chips [1] and Google's cloud TPU offering?

Note: I haven't tried sourcing these in production (100k+) quantities so I have no idea what guarantees that product line gives customers.

[1] https://coral.ai/products/#production-products
> That being said, I don't see how _any_ country is able to do anything other than sit this out. Everyone in the US, NL, even DE (which is doing okay in Europe) or NZ and TH (with no local infections) cannot do anything else than to wait for a vaccine to be available or before we just accept this as a reasonable risk.

Tactical lockdowns with a strategic approach of maintaining rapidly escalating procedures on a hair trigger is the approach NZ's been taking, and thus far, it's afforded them a much better quality of life compared to the rest of the world.

It's whack-a-mole, but shit, it's cheaper and more effective than whatever it is we're doing in the US.
In theory you could use a lower powered beam to cause the insect to turn around and stay out of certain areas. Or use microwaves instead.
With its climate and low population density, it should be able to do that quite handily.
At what point do you throw in the towel if a viable vaccine doesn’t come along?
No, I haven't. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever made a payment either way, and I'm not even sure that my bank account has the facility to do so. They're certainly no use for things like purchases in a typical online store.