catears

I would suggest "The Big Short". It mainly focuses on the huge disaster of the 2008 financial bubble, and what led up to it.

Before watching the movie I had this feeling of how impossible it could have been for so many normal people to be screwed over so royally. The crisis obviously happened, but I lacked the understanding of how something like that could have happened. After the movie it was clear to me how systemic issues can be institutionalized if everyone is willing to look the other way.

Also, if you watch that movie and start hating everyone working with finance I recommend watching "Margin Call" and you'll only hate some people working in finance.

I think I understand your argument, but I think you misunderstood me. I agree that just looking at credentials isn't the way to go. It does create these echo chambers where only those wearing "my colors" can be correct (when perhaps people need to see and hear those without "their colors"). But my argument was never to resort to pure credentialism. Looking at someones background is an important tool in our toolbox for finding the truth. My argument wasn't that a background check should replace scientific debate.

> I think that those not capable of defending a position scientifically shouldn't attempt to do so and should leave it to those who can.

Exactly! And to the 95+% of people who commented or clicked the opening link who do not have a background in bioengineering, how could they take a critical and informed stance to what the paper claims? The claim of the pandemic being man-made affects them, wheter they can fully understand the scientific discussion or not! I never meant to say that there is no-one on HN that cannot have the scientific discussion. I meant to say that most people simply have other skills than bioengineering in their toolbox, but they do have the ability to judge someones character if they find background information about them.

Maybe I should have put more emphasis on "generally" when I wrote it, but I hope I have clarified my point here and that you see it is very much in line with your thinking.

Most things that climate change deniers post are factually accurate. If you would target the basis of their claim with the data they provide, you will always lose. Being a climate change denier when you only have access to facts that don't support climate change is only logical.

To disprove them requires you to have even greater subject matter knowledge than they do, which is unfeasible for most normal people. Even at a top university you would need several years to become a subject matter expert. Clearly not a feasible strategy for every commenter on HN.

So what can we do? Most "Climate Skeptics Science", while not being factually disproven, can lose a great amount of credibility by background checking things like authors, what scientific conferences or journal a paper has been submitted to, if it is peer reviewed, etc. In fact, with enough loss of credibility it becomes the burden of the author to prove that they/their paper is credible (see what I did there?).

If there was a clear bias in the authors' background, this would call into question the credibility of the paper. Humans are well-equipped to understand bias without a university degree, less so with bioengineering.

To summarize: HN commenters are generally ill-equipped to prove/disprove arguments in a scientific paper. Like in most sciences this isn't always necessary since you can put the credibility of the authors up for test. If they fail that test, they must prove their credibility before their scientific argument carries any weight. Most HN-commenters are adept at judging other peoples biases.

The opening paragraph of the article shows to me that the journalist in question has done a poor job researching exactly what happened in Sweden.

> Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment.

Almost every interview available with Anders Tegnell (swedish equivalent of Anthony Fauci) mention that the international community prior to covid had agreed that following a strategy similar to the one sweden are following now is the best choice. Somehow this translates to an "unorthodox" strategy. Never mind that during previous epidemics, like SARS, the current Swedish response was "the normal response".

> It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.

I am really disturbed by this sentence. While it is technically correct that no lockdown has been imposed on the swedish people by the government, saying that life has "carried on largely unhindered" is straight up dishonest.

Ever since February or March there have been regular press conferences with the FHM ("swedish CDC") broadcast over public radio (and obviously you can listen to it on internet and in their app, with push notifications). The hospital system has almost completely shifted to handling covid, nationwide. Most companies have tried to shift their work to peoples homes as much as possible, just like FHM has suggested. Buying groceries online has increased by a large margin. Even the cars at my local supermarket are now practicing social distancing! Swedes, overall, have really taken the gravity of the situation to heart and made changes in their life to protect their community.

> but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.

This misses the most important points about the swedish strategy and shows a lack of knowledge about swedish economy and EU economy. The goal of the swedish strategy has been to preserve peoples health as good as possible. Locking everyone in their homes for several months is not a strategy that is resillient. It increases cases of domestic violence, people losing their jobs cause negative effects as well. The number of deaths related to covid have to be compared to overall deaths, but most importanlty the overall health. The goal was never to gamble peoples life away for the economy!

The article jumps straight into saying that Sweden did not gain anything, economically, from having no lockdown. Well of course not. How could a country with focus on exports and services thrive economically in a pandemic? If the inner market of the EU is as good as closed, who would make the bet that an export focused country would be thriving? Sweden is dependent on other nations, especially in the EU and Scandinavia, so of course the economy wouldn't fare well.

> Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people as it largely avoided imposing government prohibitions.

This is factually wrong. From the 27th of March it became a criminal offence to organize events of 50 or more people, down from the 500 that was decided on the 12th of March https://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2020/03/forbud-mot-allman...

This article is an example of poor journalism. It misrepresents the situation in Sweden, while containing crucial factual mistakes bordering on misinformation while also trying to steer american policy making in a specific direction.

There is actually a bit of a similar thing in Sweden where the government steps in and pays a large portion (roughly 90% maybe? a bit unsure since none in my immediate circle is affected), but only on the condition that you have taken some specific other measures. For example Volvo had to end the contract for like 5000 contractors to be able to get the benefits. source in swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/5-000-konsulter-och-b...

I also remember that the government made it easier for people to join the A-Kassa, the state unemployment insurance. Normally you have to have been paying the insurance fee for half a year or something before you're eligible for payout but I believe that requirement was scrapped.

I'll add two really simple, but also very effective tools. Search: in the form of things like "the silver searcher" (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher) or "fd" (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd). And, Replace: with tools like sed (https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/).

These are really simple tools but they are also very powerful. I have surprisingly often needed to change from version X.Y.Z to version A.B.C in some set of files (be it package.json or requirements.txt or *.csproj) and tools like these make it happen in an instant.

Most recently they have helped me with some spaghetti code where the software is used in several places and I need to ensure exactly which places use the KerfuffleManager. Can I trust my IDE to find all places where it is used? Maybe, but with proper search tools it stops being a trust thing.

I agree with this.

It scares me that there are people (even in this thread?!) who say Tegnell is some wicked scientist experimenting on the swedish population.

Feels like some people read a buzzfeed article on viruses and suddenly they are an expert that somehow figured out the things that the government agency for national health did not. "No, my extremely limited knowledge about virology tells me that I am right and the only logical conclusion is that Tegnell is a wicked scientist". For gods sake... Grow a brain, will you?

Stop spreading such stupid fantasies... Tegnell isn't some crazy scientist that experiments on the swedish population. All of the decision made by the government agency (FHM) has been made by the agency, not by the individual Anders Tegnell.

Saying that Tegnell "goes at it alone" is completely misinformed and comparing the situation to eugenics research is just going to show everyone how little you know about this situation. Stop wasting everyones time...

I was curious about this so I looked into it. Seems like deno allows for lock files (similar to package-lock.json for NPM) https://deno.land/manual/linking_to_external_code/integrity_...

One thing that will cost you comparatively little and is often overlooked is moving any savings investments into options which have some form of climate/ethics guidelines (for example investing only in wind, water and solar in the energy sector). A lot of people here on HN often talk about index funds and these quite often invest in large oil companies such as exxon, shell or bp. I don't know the rules outside of my own country for selling and buying investment options but generally if you move a large sum of money from one option to another you need to pay taxes (and you seem to be able to put away some money per month for this so thats why I suggest it).

I also think it makes sense if you are the kind of person who wants to help fight climate change that you do not let your savings fight against your personal goals and values.

Luckily we have "update nights" at most once every other month. But the workflow you describe is what I would want in the end. I work in a small startup tough so change is happening rapidly to make these processes better. It's far from institutionalized!

We do however have a staging environment already that is frequently updated and updates available within an hour from starting the update.

Thanks for the concern and tips nonetheless!

I am right now on the train home from work quite late (22:40 local time). The reason I spent so long at work today is because we update after 8 o'clock. However, we found a critical bug in some open software that we use that we do not know why it triggers. We barely even know how it happens! Of course we haven't been able to solve it yet... After personally spending a lot of time with trying to fix the software I can say that I have gotten a much deeper appreciation of tools that are widely used and with an active community, where most bugs have already been solved.

Previously I had believed if you had a tool that solved the exact problems you have, then you should use it. I hope I'll resist such an urge in the future by having a little pragmatic angel on my shoulder reminding me of the danger of underused software. No software is perfect and even tough you might be able to fix software when it is open source, you paint yourself into a corner when you will necessarily have to fix it.

I felt my experience was matching some of the authors woes and I urge anyone that chooses technologies to think one step ahead and learn from our mistakes!

Hi, thanks for asking!

It is a bit similar to z, I actually looked a bit at autojump (https://github.com/wting/autojump) before working on goto, which is quite similar to z. Z keeps track of where you have been and guesses where you want to go (I haven't tried it, but it probably is good). Goto works more like bookmarking where you can bookmark a single location and then later jump to it. I guess I would say goto and z solve the same problem but goto doesn't guess where you want to go, instead you have to enter the folders you want to use manually.

The reason I developed goto was to use profiles. Sometimes I want a certain set of locations to jump (and autocomplete) to. And other times I want a different set of locations to jump to. Profiles in goto solve this by allowing you to switch between them.

?

It's not just about going to your home folder...

I personally enjoy the Fenwick Tree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree

What is it used for? It allows one to both query and update prefix sums in O(log n), for a normal array this would be O(n)/O(1) respectively.

The cool thing is that it can be emulated with an array and as such it takes just the same amount of space as an array.

The best part is that they can be implemented (simple version) in about 10 lines of C++ code.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if you run a lighter blog and specifically want to do it on a machine you control the I can recommend using the nginx:alpine docker image to host your site. All you need to build it is a COPY command:

   COPY ./my_static_files /usr/share/nginx/html

This alone wont get you HTTPS, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can get that working with little effort using docker volumes and certbot

During my university years my boss (current, not at the time) asked if he could pitch an idea for those in class who wanted to listen instead of going on 15 min break, I think at this point he was going to pitch to investors and wanted the practice. Two or so years later I reached out to him, asking if anything had come of it (I mean he did quit a stable job at Uni to do this, might as well check up on him) and if they were looking for a summer intern and/or part-timer. Luckily everything was going well (except that startups are never smooth sailing) and I got offered an internship. A year later and I am set to work there full time at the start of September.

The lesson I took away from it all was to make effort to stay in touch with people.

I have had a lot of experience with competitive programming (competed in NWERC and NCPC multiple times) and this idea that competitive programming makes you worse at software engineering comes up every now and then. From what I've noticed your statement holds a bit of truth, but I just wanted to add from my own experiences. To me it seems like those that have done a little bit of competitive programming are good coders. They can code a FizzBuzz in 2 minutes without blinking, they are people that will reach the magic 10K hours of coding quicker than most. However, those that excel at competitive programming can code FizzBuzz in 30 seconds but you will have a hard time understanding what they have actually written. I think that there is a point in competitive programming you pass where you actively have to sacrifice the understandability of your code (and your algorithm library) for increased implementation speed. I also think that in order to excel at competitive programming you have to devote a lot of time to learning algorithmic theory and training on problems which can be solved in <1K lines of code. (Most solutions I've written are less than 300 lines) The hypothesis I have is that in order to be a great competitive programmer you will have to routinely write bad code and put a lot of effort into solving problems which you will later throw away the solution to and never look at again. Two properties that do not help with software engineering skills. However, if you are only moderately devoted to competitive programming, then you can earn the practical experience (hours of coding) without reducing the quality of your code.