skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've taken pains to try to find the strongest arguments from each side. The limits arguments strike me as considerably stronger. You can find much of that covered in other comments in this thread, notably in this comment (again I emphasize Ophuls' work):

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius

And in the posts surfaced in this search:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...
It’s been a bit inconvenient but quite a stretch to say anyone “lost two years”. Life was basically back to normal in Australia until June. In my city we’ve had practically no restrictions for over a year.
Are they a proven tool? The article says that "despite five weeks of lockdown, infections in the nation's largest city continue to spread".
I was 14, in France, and as others said it was a hit like many others, even if a catchy one. I also don't know why Rickrolling took off but I distinctly remember the feeling of surprise, then joy the first times it happened to me. Being tricked plus the nostalgia feeling gave me really good vibes about this, I guess it was the same for many people and why it worked so well.
The lockdowns have been relatively short-lived and only in the city metros which were then or are currently experiencing outbreaks. So most people have only been in lock down for a few months, if at all.
That’s if you count only the 23 wards, with around 16M inhabitants. If you add the outlying areas to get the total to like 25M inhabitants (same as Australia) the total number of cases is more like 6000/day.
Australian lockdowns have been much more intermittent because of their effectiveness; there have been some periods of no restrictions.

(Would be good if someone had a calendar recording this)
In NSW you don't need a Medical reason to get AZ but you still need a GP note. I think... I can't find consistent information sources. But the advice is "Just get AZ if you dont have existing blood clotting issues".
But how to actually get it is left as a exercise for the reader.
I think the big difference is that Australia has managed to have zero cases for most of the last 18 months, which has allowed it to go on pretty much as normal for much of that time.

Although 170 cases is a lot less than 10,000 when you view it as a pure number, from an economic and lifestyle perspective the difference between 0 cases and 1 case is effectively more significant than 1 case and any number of cases greater than that - zero cases means that you can not only end restrictions, but also that people who normally wouldn't leave the house as long as there was any danger at all can go out and spend money without any fear of the virus.

So that's why there's so much emphasis on locking down even with only 170 cases - it's about trying to get back to zero ASAP.

There is an argument to be made for the fact that we'll have to live with covid eventually, but:
1. Vaccine numbers remain low
2. Given that people have seen lockdowns succeed in essentially ending covid before, and blame the government for both not locking down quickly enough in this outbreak and for the vaccination rollout, committing to living with covid now would be political suicide
They are a proven tool if you want to isolate yourself from the rest of the world yes and live on an island so you can.

They are not a proven tool for actually dealing with the endemic nature of this virus. Australia will realize sooner or later that they can't actually avoid getting most of their population exposed to covid.
I'm still amazed at how we lack both ergonomic and comfortable ways to use computers, it's usually just either one or the other, never both.

Imagine a large pillow that's shaped vaguely like human back should be when resting, which you could put on your bed to support your entire back, neck and head, at a slight incline. Then, add a keyboard support that can be moved around, alongside with one for mouse (or just a trackpad), as well as a VESA wall mount for a few monitors above the bed, angled so that you can look up at the screens directly, without putting too much strain on your eyes.

Essentially, it'd be the bed version of this: https://altwork.com/

And, because it'd be just a few pillows and some aluminum pieces for the mounts, it shouldn't break the bank like the linked item either. Otherwise, even with reminders to get up and walk around every hour, it always feels like my back is in the wrong position, regardless whether i'm sitting at a table with a chair, laying in bed with some pillows underneath or anything else. Even though i do stretches and daily exercise, the lack of truly ergonomic ways to work without having to constantly monitor my own posture (which will realistically never happen) feels like a detriment, or at least will become one in 20 years, when back issues start manifesting.

So here's my question: why are people so obsessed with office chairs and why don't we have such pillows be more popular, or just don't put more thought into working from bed?
Slide 20:

>Given increased transmissibility, lower VE, and current vaccine coverage, NPIs needed to reduce transmission of Delta variant

>Masking:

>• Source control 40-60% effective

>• Personal protection 20-30% effective

>NO ADJUSTMENTS FOR OTHER INTERVENTIONS

>• e.g., no distancing, no isolation, no gathering restrictions

I'm... not sure about that? Delta is infecting people who just walk past each other in indoor spaces: https://www.wsj.com/articles/delta-variants-spread-outpaces-...

How can you get to 40-60% effectiveness if you have perfect mask wearing, but leave restaurants and bars open? Even wearing a N95 when going to the grocery store and post office or whatever isn't going to help if you then go to a bar and spend an hour maskless with your 100 closest unmasked friends.
Ask HN: Decline in Web's Quality?
Recently I've noticed that my Google results for (notably) technical topics have gotten __significantly__ worse.

Websites riddled with ads to the point of unreadability. It feels that we've regressed into the BonziBuddy/Pop-up era of the Internet, but now it's EVERYWHERE.

I've made a video to illustrate what I mean: https://youtu.be/a9nka506PEM

Is it just me or have you also had similar experience?
I'm curious how Detroit and Chicago are different.

It might be that Detroit residents have had more practise destroying their city, whose population has fallen from 2 million to 800,000 in 50 years. Stealig and selling bricks is literally sabotage.

The city was partially destroyed in the 1969 riots and never rebuilt, plus thousands of residential fires per year, so that's 52 years of dystopian living like Mad Max.

(Eminem's "8 Mile" album and film refers to the road where city taxes extended to. After Detroit imposed the tax, companies and workers migrated beyond 8 Mile Road to avoid paying it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Mile_(film)

Richard Wolff, the virulent Communist, has a lecture whining about how capitalism is responsible for the destruction of Detroit, and how the public (ie. taxpayers) should have paid to rebuild it.

His lecture is nonsense to people who lived there, as the real problems are city mis-management (taxation, education, leadership, city council, etc.)

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/25/richard_wolff_detroit...

Anyway, Detroit is a microcosm of what is happening in America today, where Democrat mayors are destroying what took over 200 years to build. The sobering reality is that if you encourage lawlessness, your city will get burned down and companies and taxpayers will flee in droves.
With startups, you're basically growing assets, and not profits. Some other company will make a lot more profit based of what you've built, or you'll have built something and acquired users cheaper than them.

The ideal time to sell is when the growth slows down.

If you have a great profit margin... why? Are you not reinvesting it into anything? Are you not using paid advertising? Have you already dominated the market? $4 mil ARR sounds like you could at least hire a team of 5 and put it into some form of R&D.

It sounds like a good business, but if you could get cash, say $20m, would there be a better way to invest that cash? It could well be that the best thing you could do with your cash flow is reinvest it into itself. In that case don't sell.

Related article: http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

Until you're going to sell, don't check the market price. It's a good way to convince yourself that you should sell, and probably at a lower price than you intended.
This has been my experience with Slate few years ago. The breaking changes were too frequent to stay productive and the project needed more baby sitting than we'd have liked.
There's a big difference between zero cases and one. When there are zero cases, you can (assuming a tight border and quarantine) act more-or-less as you did pre-pandemic. This is what most of Australia has been like, and what Sydney was like before this lockdown.

When you have a small number of cases, you still have to take precautions to keep the reproduction rate below 1.0.

It's up to each society to decide which strategy it wants to take. Australia has chosen eradication (zero cases) over suppression (a low and flat number of cases). The former lets you have periods of pre-pandemic behavior punctuated by short but extreme lockdowns, the latter means you get a constant set of restrictions until enough people are vaccinated.
a very underrated feature of Tailwind is it's excellent documentation with immediate search. Want italic text? In straight CSS, how long will it take to look up is it font-style: italic; or text-style: italic or text-italic: true ? Tailwind's docs make it virtually instant. Even more impressive with flex and grid layouts (is it justify-items or align-items, etc). I find that Tailwind reduces the time from "idea in brain" to "implemented on page" by about 90%, now multiply that by dozens or hundreds of individual page elements. (to be fair, I don't do a ton of front end so I forget the CSS syntax quite often)
ATAGI is an independent government body and they're pretty clear in their advice that the benefits of AZ only outweigh the risks for people over 60. Morrison has been literally pleading with them to change their advice but so far they're holding firm.

https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-statement-on-revised-re...

The government has messed up vaccine availability.
Up until June this year almost everything was back to normal. Even the economy was back on track. The government basically squandered a 12 month head start.
As of Wednesday you don’t need a gp consult prior to AZ.

Also, should be pointed out that it is not thrombophilias in general but immune thrombophilias that are of concern for AZ (ie factor V lieden and others are fine per ATAGI advice which is in line with the pathophysiology as I understand it)
U.S. drug overdose deaths rise 30% to record during pandemic

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drug-overdose-deaths-ris...
Costs $300CAD all in. Bluetooth audio coming soon(tm). I was excited but I’ll get the Analogue Pocket instead.
Some fun stats from the Google interview
Also called "Passaggio" if it's on purpose :)

As a side-note, "In English" is too broad as the English spoken in the US, Australia and the UK is all different. I always felt it would be better if people specified their location rather than the mother-language when talking about what something is called in English. Same for Spanish as well, as different words mean different things depending on if you're in Spain, Argentina or any other Spanish-speaking country.
Of course the military is used for other means. This time just isn't one of them and thus my point still stands.

When you have to use military to enforce your policies you've lost the plot it's really that simple.
Don't get me started on the smear campaign started years ago by probably competitors, all figs are 100% vegan foods, there is no scientific proof that there is "wasp biomass" in there. We are not talking about a regular wasp, but an ant sized one, small enough that can fit in from the flowers lentil sized opening. Their wings are dropped upon entering. They get trapped and consumed by the tree.
Don’t do that. Don’t equate anti-vax and enlightened skepticism. They’re not the same thing.
I don't disagree with the article, and I don't disagree with you - I'm more of expanding the ideas you discussed.

I think the key here is indeed that technical debt should not be used as an excuse to write poor code.

But I think it may be hard to systematically tell apart code that was written intentionally fast and poorly, and code that just was written to explore the market.

It "is accepted" that the most of the cost a software comes from the maintenance period - adding bugfixes, new features, and just reading the code.

If the software can be moved from point A where these costs are high (including risk of things getting broken due to complex architecture) to a point B where they are lower, then I could say "technical debt is paid back".

Was the software in point A due to intentional shortcuts, or just because that's how we write software in an unfamiliar territory, is maybe besides the point in gauging the practicality of the term.

The "technical debt" gets anyway accumulated due to the empirical quality of most of software engineering process.

I think this is the most critical thing people should realize - don't take short cuts unless the house is burning down - but do try to explore the problem space fearlessly.

The exploration is due to incomplete understanding of the end user needs. And sometimes you can't really explore that space without delivering something to the user.

But!

I think the exploration phase does not necessarily need to incur technical debt if it's done using prototypes that won't end up in production (yeah yeah like that's ever happened but in theory...).

In this case the deliverable will be just used as a template for the actual product development, with the result that the product may be in a more mature state from the get go, and hence, have less debt from the start.

Should the exploration be done with prototypes or actual vertical slices of production software? I suppose this depends on the situation. Sometimes the problem is actually so hard that you need to deliver a build based on an actual production codebase no matter what.
Intel Announces NUC 11 Extreme Mini Gaming PC, Check Price and Specs
> A more user-friendly way to approach the problem is to foster an institutional culture that sees the avoidance of checkpoints as a value unto itself. This is very hard to do, and I am hard pressed to think of any examples of organizations that have managed to do this consistently over the long term. Even in the short term, examples are few, and tend to be smaller organizations embedded within much larger, more traditional ones.

As I am fond of saying: "People don't scale".

The only way one manages to synchronize large numbers of people on a task is through coercive, authoritarian means, e.g., the military.
>Enough alcohol will kill a cat

That's what intrigues me, Not played the game but this must because there were a list of things which could get the cat killed right? Then how come this is an unexpected bug?
For extra comparison, Greater Tokyo Area has a population of more than 37 million, 50% higher than the population of Australia which is 25 million.

The population of Greater Tokyo Area is approximately the same as the entire Canada.
The objective analysis is that it's an incredibly slow database with features roughly nobody needs or cares about in reality - a solution on a decade long quest for a problem.

Bitcoin is probably the least efficient system humanity has ever conceived of let alone reduced to practice at scale. It's an anti-efficient anarchocapitalist game of musical chairs with the safeties off whose sole job is to redistribute wealth from late entrants to early entrants. It yields no value, and once you factor in the miners, produces negative value from the perspective of the other participants. It's an MLM scheme for the tech crowd. 125X leveraged Herbalife meets a mob casino.

What I suspect the parent was saying is that the modern economic system for all its flaws rewards founders and early builders of businesses who create value for customers, not a random selection of ancaps on Reddit in 2010 who created a negative-sum MLM. It's a perversion - totally unjustifiable wealth inequality. At least you can point to Tim Cook and go, yeah, that guy created value. Giancarlo Devasini? Paolo Ardoino? Pomp? The Winkelvii? Really? Those guys? You sure?
This reminded me of The Queen of Trees[1] by Deeble & Stone, a mind blowing documentary about this wonderful tree. Indeed one of the most fascinating documentaries I ever watched.
[1](https://youtu.be/xy86ak2fQJM)
As someone from South Australia I'm pretty happy with how our state has handled things so far. As soon as there's been any sign of community transmission of COVID we've had hard and fast "circuit breaker" lockdowns (which has only been a couple of occasions and no longer than a week) to allow time for contact tracing to find and isolate any potentially infected people.

I know a few people who're unhappy because the lockdowns have disrupted their business, but for the most part everyone I know understands that it's necessary to prevent outbreaks like Victoria have been suffering, or a complete disaster like the USA. SA has only had 4 deaths so far, less that 900 cases total, so we're doing quite well overall.

That said there is probably some bias as myself and most of my social circle are in essential industry and have been busier than ever. You'd probably get a significantly different response from someone in the hospitality sector or similar.
That’s because abstraction enables a mental model and a language around the translation of your domain to computation.

When people dont understand or agree with a model, then you get these conflicting perspectives on what constitutes correct or incorrect expression.

In some simple cases it’s clear that there is a problem, or debt, when there is a clear semantic violation, a code smell or similar. But often there are multiple ways of expressing the same.

Quantification of unnecessary complexity can only be done after you know what is necessary and how you express that.
This is spot on. The 'bottleneck' in programming is not the screen size or typing speed but the I/O of information in the brain.

I too stopped using multiple screens some time ago because it felt like being overwhelmed with information and experiencing fatigue, while not being more productive.
I would love to turn the FB fact-checking “feature” off for what I read, but I’d probably leave it on for what I post/share

Hey FB: Two checkboxes, problem solved. You’re welcome.
The point of the military involvement is that the normal police don't have enough resources to properly handle what they need to do. The military won't be arresting anyone in Australia, they don't have the power too.

The government has done a poor job of handing both the outbreaks and vaccination, but I don't think this has anything to do with expanding government powers, I believe they are up shit creek without a paddle and need all the help they can get.
The ultimate "Safety off" button is Undock.
Web, backend, mobile are the big ones. If you're after money, avoid: embedded, graphics, scientific, math-based, systems programming (aka the interesting ones).

Also, maybe it's anecdotal, but amongst my peers, its the devops folks who are currently getting most money. Might be because everybody is transitioning to cloud and there's a shortage of people who know how to set it up.
You are comparing an island with low-density population with huge continents, one of them with poorly enforced border control. The amount of confounding here makes it impossible to attribute Australia's success to its policies.
Except that you sometimes have to anyway (not for parameters, but to have dynamic conditions, filters etc.)

And since every question about such things get auto corrected to use parameters (which doesn't help, since it's something else entirely), You have millions of buggy self glued sql queries allover code bases. (but hey most of them are using parameters, so yay - progress)
From the ABC https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/adf-soldiers-to-arriv... , ADF is assisting police who are checking on those who are infected are actually staying home. Instead of 2 police knocking on your door, there is 1 police and 1 ADF.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/what-happens-i... has some detail on what each state does. In Queensland if you get Covid you are taken to a hospital. (not in article:In other states the case numbers are much lower so people are sent to medical hotels to ride out the disease and make also sure they don't infect anyone else) In NSW there are 2500 cases so they don't have that luxury and rely on infected people actually staying home. Hence the need for random checks to make sure the sick people aren't out roaming.
Parent is missing <sarcasm> tag, I think.
Get vaccinated early and often.
I wonder if that last part could possibly ever have happened.
Would be interested for a scientist to explain how the PCR test kits produce their results "accurately" indeed.
Dawkins has an excellent chapter/essay on the fig/wasp relationship. At the end of Climbing Mount Improbable I believe.
After 2 whole weeks, I don't think you should be offering "in the long run" advice about things.
How does that apply to Australia?
what does he do now? Toptal?
Yes?

Most people might have experience with functional-ish features like HoFs and lambdas in imperative langages but Elixir, through Erlang, is much more of the package: immutable structures and bindings, expressions-oriented, patterns, limited support for iteration. It’s not pure or anything, but it’s closer to OCaml than it is C# or Javascript.

“I’ve used Array#map” doesn’t mean you know functional programming.
This. I like WFH as a concept, but I feel like it would require a separate office room to really work, and right now I don't have the space for that. Working from living room just mixes up work and leisure really badly.
This argument makes perfect sense. The easy adoption that never gets updated in future sounds bland.
Sure, but that's a different country to the one that the article is talking about. That country has a different safety net, a different strategy for managing the virus, and a different set of vaccines available to it.

Australia shouldn't give up on its strategy of COVID eradication just because American drug overdoses are up.
“Beijing One Pass” Employee Benefits Software Exhibits Spyware Characteristics
I often see people try to use it as a lever to prioritize technical changes, migrations or refactorings against business features.

But the result is just that people outside technology think technology is clueless and "they have debt, whatever that means".
This is the endgame.
Watch as all property becomes leased instead of owned.
China will grow larger.
Why do think Australia is exception when it comes to mental health?
MariaDB-as-a-Service Hosting with Jelastic Cloud Platform
Well then, since we know that not only cats but also vaccinated people get ill and spread the disease, and some people can't be vaccinated not just because of personal fears but for valid health reasons, forcing everybody back to the office seems like an irresponsible cruelty.
Next article could be 'butterfly is not a fly; it is not even making butter.'
I believe in semantic class-names, I know one can transform tailwind into cleaner markup but it seems to introduce more work than just building from scratch
Thank you for mentioning that, made me smile!

Edit: Is there a list of such things?
There is a distinction between using the army for disaster relief and to enforce. Even in the case of extreme riots, this is an option most democratic countries are reluctant to entertain.
That question doesn't mean anything. It depends on where you live. The most common types of figs in France are not the same as the most common figs available in Turkey for example.
In NL, the suicide stats are basically flat.