jnbiche

So the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct headquarters was just overrun, weapons seized, and burned down by hundreds of citizens. National Guard and SWAT are en route.

Are you still so sure about the idea of internal civil strife being "unsubstantiated fear mongering"?

And by the way, race-based civil conflict is only a small part of the structural problems I'm worried about. There are multiple deeper, more dangerous threats on the horizon.

For example, are you sure that Trump will peacefully vacate the office if he loses the election? If not, what exactly do you think will happen then?

Finally, not that this matters a whole lot to me, but to provide you with "substantiation" that you may accept, many mainstream media outlets have covered this in detail in the past year or two. Here are just a couple, Google keywords such as "US civil war 2" (just "civil war" turns up Avengers stuff) and "boogaloo" for more mainstream media coverage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-america-talk-turn...

https://www.macleans.ca/society/america-is-deeply-divided-an...

Modern warfare is very different than war 150 years ago. Look at Bosnia and Syria for typical examples.

And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.

No, no. Internal civil strife.

That question depends on how Brexit goes, doesn't it?

I agree. I'm surprised more HNers aren't aware of this potential. To be clear, I condemn those pushing us toward political violence, but it has a decent chance of arriving in the next 6-12 months even.

I appreciate this comment and mostly agree with the contents of it. But I take exception with the use of words like "evil", "monsters", etc.

I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.

I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.

If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.

I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.

And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.

(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).

By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.

In the comments, an educator references an excellent article related to this confusion, "When Can you Meaningfully Add Rates, Ratios, and Fractions" that implicitly suggests some pedagogical approaches: https://flm-journal.org/Articles/11019C10CF34E90DC5866E53E90...

I'm sure you think that's clever but there are plenty of respiratory diseases that don't require sustained contact.

Measles, for example.

The point is sustained contact, not the route of transmission.

I agree with you about parks and beaches.

But restaurants and hairdressers are known to be places where COVID-19 can be actively spread to large groups of people. And gyms are even worse.

We should be encouraging people to go outdoors, and to not congregate in large groups.

Finally, bear in mind that public officials, like scientists and laypeople, are just figuring all this out, too. It's a novel infectious agent, after all. But it's important to self-correct quickly.

Ironically, it looks like masks may turn out to be one of the most effective interventions, yet there's a huge political backlash against them that many pols are stirring up, so 20-30% of the country will never wear them.

The primary way to spread a virus via droplet transmissions is to spend a sustained amount of time around lots of other people in an indoor space

In some ways, very similar to TB, although a much shorter exposure time is sufficient for transmission.

I wish they had considered going back decades ago

Considered what? You've said they had a hard life.

Edit: Oh, I misread that (parsed it as "considered, going back decades ago", thinking you were implying you wish they had considered the effect of their actions). Yeah, I think for many older immigrants who were forced to emigrate from their homeland because of warfare or economic collapse, going back makes sense if conditions have improved.

They don't want to go back now? Or too old?

I don't quite understand the power imbalance here

There's only a power imbalance if workers are prevented from organizing, or if they (for whatever reason) refuse to organize. Or if they workers are very easily replaceable.

Obviously, if you're one of 200 workers, you can't negotiate evenly with the ownership as 1/200th of the company's workforce. Same goes if you're an unskilled worker who is easy to replace. However, even then, if you organize with all 200 of your co-workers, you are closer to a balance in negotiating power since it would be hard for said company to replace all 200 workers at once.

The most powerful movers are the most exploited and dispossessed people, but they don't want to risk what little they have.

By that logic, then technical folks, particularly devops people, are in a very strong role to make change. AWS is a very significant portion of Amazon's profits, and it will crumble to the ground if they mass strike just as much as Amazon's retail sector will crumble if the FC workers mass strike.

You think AWS can maintain 3+ 9s with 50%+ of their operations people striking? Look at what simply shifting to remote work has done to Github uptime over the past month: 99.6% after months of 3+ 9s. Their uptime would likely stop dropping quickly, particularly if strikes extended into weeks.

this point could hire more mediocre talent and function in more of a maintenance mode and continue to be successful for a long time

Eh, not sure about that. IBM went downhill fairly quickly once they stopped getting the cream of the crop. Oracle was able to stave off problems for a while, but only because of the lock-in issue. Amazon doesn't have the benefit of lock-in (with the exception of some parts of AWS).

Know that the actual laws relating to this concept depend entirely on what US state you work in.

I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files

There’s an outstanding and fairly flexible static site generator for rst files in Python that’s been around for quite a long time, called Sphinx. It’s basically a docs generator but I’ve used it as a generic static site generator.

For starters, this is a media company, so they would like to have instantly updated posts on certain parts of their site.

How are their posts instantly updated using a static site generator? Don’t get me wrong, I was sold on in static site generators years ago. But not understanding this argument.

Oh, my apologies. I read a few paragraphs and it looked like a basic tutorial about Swift protocols and inheritance vs composite, so I stopped. I'll read the whole thing.

Edit: Yeah, you're right. I read to the end and that's pretty much functional programming as you suggested. I'm not convinced it's always better than using interfaces. Like most things, I think it depends. For example, particularly when programming "in-the-large", I think being able to package up different contexts (like a TestRenderer) into different protocol implementations is often an advantage of that approach, not a weakness, as he seems to imply.

While most statically-typed functional programming offer some approach to composition similar to Swift prototols, the concept goes above and beyond the idea described in the article you posted, which relates more to the idea of programming with immutable data.

So similar compositional techniques to Swift protocols would be typeclasses in Haskell, traits in Scala, module interfaces in ML languages (which have to be used at the module-level via functors instead of at the value-level like the other examples), etc.

Edit: I should have read to the end. I stopped after reading a few paragraphs of what looked like a basic interface vs inheritance discussion. Turns out, at the mid-point, he introduces an "alternative" to that approach, which is indeed more or less functional programming. As much as I like functional programming, (his "Value-Oriented-Programming"), interfaces are often quite useful when programming in the large.

No, it wouldn't. They both account for years of early death, just in different ways.

In terms of a metric akin to "mathematical DALYs", Galois was perhaps the most impactful early death of all, followed by Abel. Both Galois and Abel founded entire branches of mathematics before the age of 25.

I can't agree with this enough. People are failing to account for viral load. I think that's part of what may be happening in areas like N. Italy and NY where the health system gets overloaded and the death tolls are high. People are getting such high initial inocula that they get really, really sick.

It's such a breath of fresh air coming on HN where most people are numerate and capable of understanding data.

I actually agree that most parts of the US should carefully open up - the lockdowns have a significant portion of the population in dire straights. Our society can't survive a long-term lockdown intact, I'm convinced.

But that doesn't mean the virus isn't extremely dangerous. It's far worse than the flu. It's irresponsible for folks on social media to insinuate that it's "not even has bad as the flu" based on a few memes they've read.

We have to take great care, or more areas will end up like the Tri-state area. As the GP pointed out, the viral load is extremely important in determining mortality among the younger ages. If there is tons of the virus everywhere, the < 60 mortality rate will increase, possibly dramatically.

Glad to be on HN where most people understand things like CFR vs IFR (as opposed to a vague "death rate" most of social media talks about) along with issues of bias, etc that can affect any of these studies.

The plural is virus is viruses, or "virus" if you insist on its Latin form. It's a Latin word, but it only occurs in Latin as a singular collective noun:

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/plural-of-virus.html

Positive predictive value, which is discussed in the article, is derived from Bayes theorem. So they do discuss that.

First, each patient coughed directly upon a petri dish 20 cm away, not once but 5 times.

I don't think anyone would rationally believe that a non-fitted mask would have a high probability of providing protection to a person directly coughed on by an infectious mask-wearer, all at a distance of 20cm. If they were going to test under those conditions, they should have used an N95 mask. Doing it with a surgical mask under such conditions was a waste of time and no surprise at all.

The argument has never been that non-fitted masks prevent 100% of all viral particles emitted by an infectious person from escaping into the environment (which is what that tests, since it only takes a few virions to start a colony in a culture).

The argument has been that wearing a non-fitted mask can significant decrease the amount of virus-laden droplets floating around in the air, and falling onto surfaces.

The more we find out about asymptomatic carriers, the more this makes sense. These carriers aren't going around coughing their lungs out, they transmitting disease by talking and breathing. A mask likely helps a lot with that.

I've really like to see the same experiment repeated, but with the patient wearing the mask and talking, and the petri disk held ~2 meters away. These are the conditions under which the disease is being transmitted now, outside of households and healthcare facilities.

With due respect, if you're in your late 40s and have been in the same job for "decades", then you don't have any personal experience with the hiring ageism common in our industry.

And I totally agree with and live by the 3 points you made (except the 3rd, in some circumstances). But that's the problem with ageism. If you look like you're over 40, then it doesn't matter if you follow that advice or not, younger companies will often still hold your age against you.

IFR is more like 0.02->0.05%, so even taking NYC numbers at face value COVID looks 10-50x more fatal than flu.

Exactly, my only point in mentioning approximate flu IFR was to demonstrate that it's significantly lower than flu CFR. And so the NY COVID-19 serological study suggests a CFR well above 1%.

The CFR will be much higher than the IFR. For example, approximate flu IFR is 0.05%.

"alleged ageism"

How long have you been in your job? How many times have you changed since you hit 40? Do you look your age, or younger?

Personally, as someone well over 40, I've found it not worth my while to even apply to a company whose leadership is in their 20s. I've very rarely gotten a job offer from such a team. On the other hand, I've had pretty good success getting offers from companies with older leadership.

Not sure what you'd call it, but whatever it is, most of the devs I know who are my age have had a similar experience.

(and it's not new technology or a rusty mindset: I'm familiar with far more new technology than the average 25-year-old software developer. I'm constantly adopting new approaches and paradigms.).

That said, as advice to anyone in my position, it's probably a bad idea to bring up specific instances of alleged ageism in a job interview. Try to avoid any negativity in job interviews.