Hacker News Reader

RobAtticuson US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

While true, there is another nuance missing here. The deficit was higher in 2020 & 2021 due to the Covid stimulus spending. Looking at 2017-2019 for Trump and 2022-2024 for Biden probably gives a fairer picture of what happened during both presidencies. It's basically been an upward trend since 2015, excluding the Covid outliers.

RobAtticuson Wealthy Americans fuel half of U.S. economy consumer spending

>I think it depends on how you describe "wealthy". The life of someone who makes $200k a year isn't hugely different from someone who makes $50k. You still have to drive yourself to work and sit in rush hour traffic with every other peasant, for example.

One of the biggest differences between those salary levels is the housing they enable. 200k salary will allow for owning a home in most places (in the US, at least), while 50k will not. From there flows a lot of other things, like crime/safety, schools (if you have kids), etc, and even can improve your example: 200k can get you a place closer to work with a shorter commute, even if some of it still is spent in rush hour.

RobAtticuson Uber Joins the S&P 500

After fees is a bit tacky, but, at least in the US, I think it is considered good etiquette to tip on the original amount before discounts. I remember this came up a lot when Groupon was big offering a lot of BOGO deals.

RobAtticuson Elon Musk: "Don't advertise. Go f*** yourself"

Numerous people (Matt Levine, etc) smarter than me have written about how there was no $1B break up fee. That fee only came into play if something prevented the deal, like regulators blocking it. Him having buyer's remorse was not sufficient to trigger that clause.

RobAtticuson We scaled PostgreSQL to 350 TB+ (with 10B new records/day)

Hi! Author here, happy to answer any questions!

RobAtticuson FCC allows blocking traffic from robocall-friendly provider One Owl

>Say what you will, the 27th Amendment passed.

Sure, but the Congress that approved it never felt its consequences because it took another 200 years for it to become ratified. So the first group it affected was definitely not the same group that voted for it.

RobAtticuson NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

For a company that "stopped posting on Twitter" they sure post a lot: https://twitter.com/FoxNews

RobAtticuson Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Electoral_C...

RobAtticuson U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

dragonwriter was talking about the Democratic primary.

RobAtticuson Twitter Blue for $8/Month

It's pretty much on a steady climb upwards though. So a show today probably has more ads per half hour than one 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc.

RobAtticuson Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

Is there a reason May 2021 should be particularly instructive vs year-to-date (YTD) for NYC? [1] has murders down 1.3% (299 vs 303) and burglaries down 24% YTD. Felony assault is up 5%, but overall crime is down 0.9%. It's definitely a stretch to say NYC is "drowning in an epic ongoing crime wave", given those numbers.

[1] https://compstat.nypdonline.org/2e5c3f4b-85c1-4635-83c6-22b2...

RobAtticuson Fitted Filtration Efficiency of Double Masking During the COVID-19 Pandemic

You keep talking about Sturgis, which ended on Aug 16. There is known incubation time between contact and testing positive, and even by 10 days later (Aug 26) the rate was at ~1200. Also July -> Aug was a 55% increase in cases as well, even before that, which coincides more with summer.

I'm not going to say definitively what caused what here, but your anecdotal recollection of what happened in SD is not really supported by the numbers.

RobAtticuson Fitted Filtration Efficiency of Double Masking During the COVID-19 Pandemic

You can change it to 20/100k if you wish, it doesn't really make a difference.

SD case counts per 1M on selected dates:

Jul 15 2020 - 463

Aug 15 2020 - 725

Sep 15 2020 - ~1800

Doubling in a month seems like a spike to me.

RobAtticuson Fitted Filtration Efficiency of Double Masking During the COVID-19 Pandemic

South Dakota is #3 in cases per capita and #10 in deaths per capita in the US. It's August-November stretch was just brutal, peaking with a death rate of 200/1M for the week of Nov 16.

Sure it's raw numbers may not have been as dramatic as NY, a state with over 20x as many people, but it definitely was not example setter.

Edit: My numbers are based on data I collected from NYT, but Worldometers shows SD as #2 in cases per million and #9 in deaths per million: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

RobAtticuson Amazon Keeps Getting Sued for Paying Drivers Less Than Minimum Wage

>I really want to see how the US being the richest is calculated.

I don't think it's really a mystery. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the US has the largest GDP (total, not per capita) in the world. Of course there are pros/cons to this measure. That said, while your hypothetical is true, I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.

RobAtticuson GitHub, fuck your name change

>I mean, until Bernie Sanders, no politician openly called themselves a socialist. This is recent.

Eugene Debs?

RobAtticuson Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public

Does this actually disagree with what he said? OP said Trump doesn't put in the effort to persuade (aka, get McConnell to focus on his agenda) and used his bully pulpit ineffectively (aka, putting enough pressure on McConnell to act). That seems to square with your thoughts.

RobAtticuson TimescaleDB 2.0 released, now distributed multi-node

The latest tag is 2.0.0-rc2 since it is technically a release candidate and not the final cut.

RobAtticuson Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?

It's not a repeat of the spring...yet.

The daily number of cases in Spain appears to still be on the rise, and the death curve is usually 3-4 weeks lagging the cases. So deaths is likely still on the rise.

All that said, it may not reach the same proportions as the spring. But it is too early to wave it off either.

RobAtticuson Sugary drink tax models show health gains, cost reductions, but vary by design

>Customers are also hugely price sensitive, an increase of a few pence can have a massive change on purchasing patterns.

Looking at one weekly special[1] I see Pepsi selling four 12-packs for $12. I would be shocked if customers taking advantage of that deal would balk at it being $13, for example. That would still be only $0.27 per can.

[1] https://shop.shoprite.com/store/e65b663/weekly-specials/848

RobAtticuson Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

Yes but the topic is mail-in voting fraud. He was physically at the polling place and stuffing the box. It's fraud and should be punished, but it has nothing to do with mail-in voting fraud.

RobAtticuson Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

To be clear, it was developed in a branch so all the individual commits have been reviewed beforehand when landing on that branch. And the branch was rebased throughout the development cycle. This is just the final PR to merge that branch back into master :)

RobAtticuson Some overwhelmed parents are abandoning at-home schooling

>constant distractions

The problem is that parents who are being thrust into the homeschooling role typically _do_ have constant distractions, including their day job, watching other siblings, worrying about their financial situation, etc.

RobAtticuson Some overwhelmed parents are abandoning at-home schooling

Not sure if this is just snark, or really just that cynical, but it seems clearly false regardless. The senior in high school missing their last 3 months probably isn't going to experience any negative effects, but there are plenty of younger students at various parts of the learning curve that will definitely experience negative effects.

Reading, especially early on it life, has been found to correlate with academic and life achievement. Kindergarteners and 1st graders who have parents or caretakers able to keep them reading and learning at home will be better off than those who don't. Even if the absence just causes some delays in learning, it can easily lead to bullying and self esteem issues.

Is it going to destroy their lives irreparably forever? No, probably not; but suggesting it has no negative effect (the opposite extreme) is also wrong.

RobAtticuson Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

>You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.

I enjoy the irony of criticizing someone for cherry-picking, while using NY as a proxy for how the whole of the US is doing.

Perhaps you could've picked the state that is most directly comparable to Spain in population and land size, California: 1/10th as many people dead per million. (But that too would be cherry-picking)

RobAtticuson Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

>at the time

My point was that tourism to the US is probably not uniform throughout the year, and March is likely on the lower end of tourism. Hence the ratio of traffic being Americans returning home is higher.

RobAtticuson Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with coronavirus: study

Certainly, but I don't think anyone was assuming 5% fatality rate. There were concerns about it being 1-3% fatality, but even those would be worst cases.

Worth noting that .36 is roughly 3x as deadly as the flu.

RobAtticuson Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

Kind of - it closed the borders for Europeans traveling to the US, but did little to manage Americans returning from abroad. Given March is winter in the US (thus less tourism), I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.

RobAtticuson How the CDC’s restrictive testing guidelines hid the coronavirus epidemic

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

Italy new cases did flatten to 3500-4000 per day for a few days this past week, but they have since resumed increasing on a daily basis. So I don't think they are out of the woods yet. It may not be exponential, but it is very much super-linear

RobAtticuson 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

Perhaps its changed since you looked because my fiancee is Latin American and her results tell her the provinces/areas of her home country where her extended family is originally from.