joshuahughes

So am I reading this right, that the Economist is suggesting “mortgage bad, rental good”??

Seems I’ve seen something similar referenced quite a lot recently... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change...

I preferred it so much that I found myself a new role with a fully remote company. I’ll happily visit the office once lockdown eases, but the ‘forced experiment’ has proved to me that the upsides (live anywhere, zero commute saving time and money, more time with family, etc) vastly outweigh the downsides.

Interesting that you should mention device support as a cause of more complex code, as the best way to support the devices you list is generally to use LESS code.

Bare HTML is supported by pretty much everything...

The Guardian doesn't have a slant? You might want to reconsider that...

“the Guardian is seen as Britain’s most left-wing newspaper”

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/0...

Sorry but you're wrong. Take a look at the UK lockdown rules (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-lockdown-stay-at-home#w...) and you'll find that...

"You cannot leave home for recreational or leisure purposes (such as for a picnic or a social meeting)."

So your statement that the commenter's "entire argument is false" is, well, false.

I really don’t understand how anyone can have such a profound level of trust in organisations that have proved themselves utterly unworthy of that trust. Have the lessons of Snowden really been forgotten this quickly??

There are positives, and there are also negatives. Both have been well-documented.

My point was a more general one, that we are being sucked into a strangely anti-human world where those in power would like nothing more than to reduce us to a mere employee number. Just data in a spreadsheet. It's so much less messy that way, right?

I wish it wasn't true, but the path we're headed down is pretty much set now.

I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated direction.

I dearly wish that the world I was leaving my kids wasn't so dehumanised.

Before today, I’d only ever heard ‘putter’ used to refer to the golf club you use for ‘putting’...

From the UK 2 days ago: “People with a history of significant allergic reactions should not have the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid jab, regulators say.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55244122

Ummm, latest daily UK deaths "with Covid" is 414, not 5000.

Ref: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk

> 1.5 million people have died

But did they die FROM or WITH covid? That's the million dollar question. Here's CDC data that says 94% of Covid-19 deaths involved one or more comorbid conditions... i.e. these are not healthy people struck down in their prime... https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...

Point is, just a raw number doesn't actually make a great argument.

Even worse, it's a number without context. The most recent annual death stat I could find was for 2017 which saw about 54,750,000 deaths. So '1.5m dying from covid' is less than 3% of this year's deaths.

In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, those numbers seem a fair argument for the "overblown" POV.

Worth pointing out that there was an important caveat that the GP included... "Science... BASED ON TRUST AND WITHOUT PERSONAL VERIFICATION is absolutely equivalent to religion."

Yes, clearly “lots of people are arguing against the lockdowns on HN“. My point is that if you do that, you will usually get downvoted to death.

Just like everything else these days, too many people are adopting a black or white stance on a topic when actually there’s tons of murky grey in the middle. I see way too many rational and reasonable comments get totally destroyed because they dared to question the status quo. It’s an unhealthy environment to exist in.

The measures that the UK government put in place are impressive, but they’ve pushed the nation’s debt to more than £2trillion. There’s no escaping the fact that we’ll be paying for these measures for generations.

This is the problem with a socialist solution. We can make things ‘fair’ now, but SOMEONE, at some point in the future, has to pay. Is it really fair that the bill for this falls on future generations? They‘re likely to still be paying off OUR debt in 50 years time. What happens if they have their own ‘Covid‘ before the bill is paid? They’ll already be on the back foot financially.

I don’t resent us helping folks now. But I do resent what it means for my kids, and their kids, and so on.

Why the extreme response? Thousands and thousands of folks here in the UK are losing their jobs and therefore their homes. I assume the same thing is happening elsewhere. We have safety nets, but payouts are often nowhere near enough to match income that’s been lost. It’s a real disappointment to me that HN has decided there’s only one right way to talk about the Covid response, and every other point of view is idiotic or evil. Whatever happened to nuance?

“but both now and yesterday people with a wide view of the issue were basically ostracized and chased away as if they were flat earther or antivaxxer”

Agreed. I’ve been quite taken aback, seeing HN’s response to Covid threads. I’ve always assumed the community was willing to ask tough questions and entertain alternative points of view that are backed by data, but with Covid there’s a complete unwillingness to think about anything other than “deaths bad, lockdown good”. It’s a shame that more nuanced comments get voted down so hard as they’re important to discuss too.

My theory: There must be something about us tech industry types that makes a ‘germaphobic’ response more likely. For instance, the WHO have said there’s no point wiping down food packaging because it just isn’t a vector for the virus. Yet I’ve seen dozens of HN comments about doing this and/or leaving groceries in quarantine for days. It really isn’t rational or logical and yet it’s this response that gets the support of the community. Very strange.

Honestly curious... what is there to gain from pessimistic fear-mongering if the data is stubbornly telling a different story?

Where I am (Scotland) it WAS pretty much everything. Only shops selling food, medicine, or maintenance products are allowed to open. All others have been shut for ~2 months now. Driving is strictly forbidden unless you’re travelling to one of these stores that have been ‘deemed essential’. We’re not allowed to meet anyone outside of our household, even in a socially-distanced outside context. I have friends unlucky enough to be living alone and single, and the lockdown is destroying them, to the point that they’re secretly meeting other single friends to stay sane. All of this is in spite of the fact that there are thousands of jobs and activities that can be EASILY done whilst also socially distancing. Of course, it requires vastly more thought and effort to come up with rational guidelines that take into consideration all of this nuance, and governments (mostly because of shortsightedness) haven’t had the time to create more humane lockdown solutions, hence the indiscriminate restrictions that have been brought in by countries the world over.

> without any sort of nuance

I think this accusation is equally applicable for politicians though. There has been precious little nuance in blanket lockdowns that don’t acknowledge how vastly different in risk different activities are (e.g. sunbathing in a park vs clubbing). Seems to me like the shouts of “OPEN UP!” are simply a response to the knee-jerk “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!” that everyone has had to live with for the last few months.

Thanks for clarifying. I was only aware of government-level announcements over here in Europe. From what I've seen here any conditions are more along the lines of "x, y, and z must all be improving" and those values have been left deliberately ambiguous.

> Get the active cases down to a manageable number

Isn't this the problem, the world over? That no government has actually baked into their stay-at-home orders what the specific metric is that unlocks the lockdown. People with mouths to feed are justifiably terrified as they see lockdown stretching out in front of them with no clearly defined endpoint, knowing that the keys to that lockdown are held by politicians who are very much detached from the hardship on the ground.

> British citizens are still EU citizens

The UK actually left the EU on January 31st, 2020. We're still 'Europeans' (inhabitants of the continent of Europe) but no longer EU citizens.

Actually, we've never NOT been Europeans, and we've never NOT been in Europe. Europe's just a continent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe).

However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.) Completely different thing, but very commonly confused.

Slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(film)

May I refer you to item 'c' in jonas21's list? ;-)

I’m one of those sad product designers who finds documentation tools fascinating :) Ping me if you need a hand on the design side (mrjoshuahughes at gmail)

I've tried dozens of services through the years and have always come away disappointed. I literally just want to store a URL and the page title — just text will do. I don't want an overwhelming visual list of my bookmarks. I don't want the page content scraped and stored. I don't need to share my bookmarks (other than syncing across devices). I would like some easy way to flag and clean up old 404-ing bookmarks. Simple categorisation or tagging. And a simple one-click add-to-inbox plugin that'd work on all my browsers including on iOS. And I'd like a good-looking UI — not an ugly mess like Pinboard. And of course there should be a solid export interface so that users aren't locked into some proprietary data structure.

As a product designer I'd love to sink my teeth into this problem but unfortunately it's a dev-heavy project and that's outside my comfort-zone.

For now I'm sticking with my fallback solution — dozens of 'link dump' notes in the Mac Notes app. It's searchable, lightweight, and flexible but a nightmare to manage. There must be something better out there.

Thank you for taking the time to give a detailed response here. I’ve always found it astonishing that the side-effects of ‘progress’ like diminishing nutrient content and environmental impact are so willingly ignored. Feeding more people is a positive, but it’s rather a hollow victory if their well-being and health ultimately takes a hit.

Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system" to terminators?

Probably because humans (especially governments) have repeatedly proven their willingness to take innocent tech and use it nefariously. That's how you go from CCTV being installed to "catch a few crooks" to it being used to monitor citizens for social credit systems. Or people's innocent internet use being hoovered up by massive surveillance projects.

It doesn't seem that crazy for people to wonder at how initially innocent tech might be weaponised.