alexandercrohde

Well, to point, at the very least the SRE post-mortem should have said "And we considered distributing monitoring software to all our datacenters for future alerting"

[Not to say that every company out there would do this, nor that this wasn't necessarily considered, but definitely questioning the merit/objectivity of a brag-piece that is trying to rebuild the waning google hype]

I would upvote this if I felt the source were reliable enough. Is Welt.de a well-regarded source?

The point is that the mortality rate estimates are going to be totally out of whack without accurate measurements. As well as estimates of the currently infected.

This matters a lot. The first number is obviously important. The second matters so Italy can plan for whether things have peaked yet, or how many weeks out until it does.

Nonsense/linkbait

This is great. One side-effect that might be missed is that people who know their work is going to be replicated are not going to fudge their results, so simply by existing this acts as a filter.

Well, that's only the constraint because the FDA disallows importing foreign kits, and has prevented private companies from manufacturing them, no?

So in a sense, the obstacle is (deliberately?) awful policy.

In a way that may be a good thing. I'm personally not very worried about this virus, and I think it does a great job of highlighting what various parties' motives are and efficacies are. (e.g. CDC, Bill Gates, NYC)

I'm hopeful change will come out of this.

1Pass is great, but it lacks the kind of advanced tooling I'd want for it to scale.

Password sharing controls are insufficient.

Well, out of kindness here's why I downvoted it --

1. Rambly/poetic 2. Doesn't really cite any sources or provide new information

Without defining the central term of its central thesis (let alone citing any sources) it's generous to even call this an article.

Did you even watch the video? The guy is comparing rust to things like Python which is a pretty silly comparison, relative to scala.

I don't know why you'd be dismissive of that comparison. Scala is more like Rust than any other language he discusses.

Can somebody please explain why Rust has so much buzz right now compared to scala?

Scala is a strongly typed, very-well vetted, functional programming language in the JVM. It pretty much has everything going for it. It's even adopted by twitter.

Right.

I can't blame Israel, given America's track-record of weaponizing all vulnerabilities.

I also can't blame America.

Without secure computing nobody can know whom to trust.

Fascinating. I'd love to see a system like that in America.

It's inaccurate because the US is not testing people with symptoms who certainly would have been tested in other countries.

South Korea has performed over 100,000 tests. NYC has performed ~ 35. [1]

I'm really curious what possible reason there could be for that. Regardless, there is no reason to believe "tested cases" is going to give a remotely accurate picture of "actual cases."

1. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/coronavir...

From my perspective, if (whoever is in charge) was really in the business of providing accurate numbers, they would test a statistical sample of these 2,300 people to estimate what percentage of them actually have the virus.

Unfortunately garbage-in -> garbage-out.

That chart shows US at 233 confirmed cases.

According to NYT, over 10x that number are self-quarantined in NYC alone [1].

Now it's technically true that those cases aren't medically 100% factually confirmed, because NYC has only performed 35 tests total so far. But it gives a very inaccurate picture of reality. Garbage in, garbage out.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...

Well good for you that your SPAs work every time, and you never broke production with kubernetes. Here's a cookie.

Now for the rest of us who work with engineers across all skill ranges and experience levels, we actually do need to care about such factors.

The question is -- you hire a guy off craigslist to run your site, and every minute of downtime costs $1,000. Are you going to want him to use Kubernetes or a braindead simple hosted solution?

I kind of suspect you may be the one lacking experience.

I've worked at at least 8 different tech companies, mostly startups in SF or NY. The vast majority used overcomplicated technologies that didn't fit the needs of project (most frequently microservices and no-sql).

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single time such mistakes got corrected. More often than not things would continue to be even more poorly designed with the addition of new unnecessary technology.

In short -- I'm annoyed about this stuff because I've seen it first hand and had to struggle with it for numerous years.

Your weird theory that people are inventing hypothetical situations to be angry about... well I think you're the one inventing hypotheticals here...

> Articles like this one, and even more comments on HN and similar sites, generally suffer from a perspective bias, with people overestimating the frequency of their own particular circumstances and declaring something outside of their needs as "niche" and generally misguided and "overhyped".

It's my experience the opposite is true. The blindness is people overestimating their needs (or resume-padding) and using specialized, overcomplicated tools meant for traffic in the billions (e.g. cassandra, kafka, mapreduce) for 20-person startups that haven't hit rapid growth (most of which never do).

Non-article. Tl; dr: Some people think corona is going to spread a lot, others don't.

One established possibility is that corona won't be contained. With 2009 H1N1 outbreak it spread quickly, eventually to an estimated 11 to 21% of the global population.

H1N1 turned out to be much milder than initially feared, causing little more than runny noses and coughs in most people. And H1N1 is now so commonplace, it's simply seen as a part of the seasonal flus that come and go every year among the global population.

If you're of this school of thought, then the panic may seem a bit much.

[1] https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2020/03/02/how-is-the-coron...

>> forbids the creation of commercial test kits and the importation of foreign ones

I was wondering about this... Very hard to justify that in my opinion.

Yeah, it's tough. But I think there are answers if we get creative.

I'd happily donate to a homeless person who was actively cleaning the street, for example. But for some reason people seem to prefer deciding who to blame rather than proposing solutions.

> All things that people who have houses are free to do without being punished. So yeah, anybody does care if you have a house, practically speaking.

I don't think so.

If I go to a restaurant and am refused service, it's not because I couldn't present a deed. It's based on whether your state makes everybody around you uncomfortable.

Maybe if you have a suit, then you can get away with yelling or more drinking, but that's a stereotype about attire (or really class-ism), not about having a house. Houses actually have very little to do with any of this.

I think this post is missing the distinction. People might say they hate "homeless," but I don't think anybody cares if you have a house.

People care if you are unshowered, drunk/high, schizophrenic/screaming, asking for money, going to steal, etc.

It just so happens that the two correlate a lot.

--

This doesn't negate the question of how to help these groups, but real solutions do require us to be honest with ourselves.

Is this comment satire?

>> I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest

PG admits he rereads some of his sentences up to 100 times in his revision process in the very piece you criticize.

>>The author could put down his morning coffee and instead describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the field responding to what could be an interesting topic.

His writing also addresses this in the same writing, advising people to specialize with a target audience... Did you read this piece?

This is either funny trolling (giving condescending essay advice to one of the most succesful essayists of our era, on the platform he created), or woefully lazy.

Observations.

This is one of my longest tl; drs, particularly for a short essay. This to me signals high content ratio (low compressibility).

As somebody who tried for years to get people online to pay attention to my essays, I am not super confident that we have good content-discovery mechanisms for essays online [except video essays, which seem to thrive]. Thus I don't take this essay as personally relevant, as I am not personally convinced that a good essay written by an unfamous person, would warrant enough attention to justify the rigorous revision process.

I notice PG chooses to view the essay through an artistic/historic lens that puts him in the minority. It seems to me he strives very hard to stay above the primal desires that dominate the internet-attention-economy. A very tough challenge.

tl; dr:

1. Sets the topic of "What is a good essay?"

2. Asserts that correctness is necessary, but not sufficient condition for a good essay.

3. Illustrates 2 by pointing out that by increasing vagueness, complete correctness is always possible. Characterizes correctness/precision as opposing forces.

4. Adds two more criteria for a good essay - telling people something important, and that they don't know

5. Adds the essential caveat that things we know subconsciously may be worth restating [crucially, as points 1-5 we all certainly subconsciously knew]

6. Adds a fourth dimension to a good essay: "as unequivocal as possible" [aka strength]

7. Highlights the inherent tradeoffs in satisfying these conditions. Increasing one dimension may reduce audience size.

8. Details an simple algorithm for only writing important/true things -- reviewing/revising one's own ideas heavily before publishing (up to 100 times)

9. Proposes a technique to find important topics: by examining the pool topics one cares about

10. Proposes a technique to find novel topics: By examining topics that you've thought about a lot [and surprised yourself with when you found a connection]

11. Suggests "strength" [6] comes from thinking well and skillful use of qualifiers.

12. Adds another quality to what makes a good essay -- simplicity

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13. Proposes that good essays (by this formula) are particularly likely to make people mad

14. Identifies one cause of anger is that some widely-held incorrect beliefs an essay calls out are likely to be cherished beliefs

15. Mentions the strength component of very precise writing (as well as brevity) can come across as incredibly confident, and exacerbate the ruffling of feathers

16. Proposes that being misrepresented is particularly likely with this essay style, and isn't avoidable generally, but doesn't think one should worry too much about disingenuous misinterpretation.

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17. Advises aspiring essayists to relax the constraint of breadth-of-audience/topics. Suggests publication isn't a necessity.

18. Provides some hopeful thoughts on the future of essays