Hacker News Reader

mcphilipon 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

The rate is hard to determine since it’s per state. There have been many reports of online systems going down and phone queues being insanely long:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/coronavirus-unem...

mcphilipon A history of roguelike games

If you’re in the mood for some more punishing difficulty that’s still fast paced, definitely give Spelunky HD a try! It’s a classic for a reason.

I finally started playing it recently and am hooked. I’m still working on the zero gold run achievement —- it’s so frustrating making it to the caves and stepping on gold buried behind the snow foreground :( I’m determined to finish it before the lockdown is over, though.

mcphilipon Tesla factory is still open for business

Reuters reporting employees showing up at work today:

https://twitter.com/deitaone/status/1240287646825558016?s=21

mcphilipon Dow Falls 2997 points worst drop since 1987 crash

I think there will be some pent up demand, but some parts of the economy don’t benefit from that —e.g. I’m not going to buy more lattes when things return to normal, I will just go back to my daily fix.

mcphilipon Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero

Interesting that S&P futures have fallen 3% as of 5:00pm in Asia. Are markets interpreting this less as the Fed signaling it will do whatever it takes and more as the Fed is panicked and the financial system is under a huge amount of pressure behind the scenes?

Edit: S&P futures limit down at 5:15.

mcphilipon [dead]

Mixed feelings on this one. Suggesting readers could “pay a visit” to the doctor isn’t cool, but is it really doxing if the info is publicly posted?

Regardless, I’ve followed ZH on twitter since the beginning back in the financial crisis when the site would occasionally post legitimate scoops, like early reporting on Lehman Repo 105 before it became a much larger story.

I haven’t visited the site in years except to read the response to being suspended, but I’ll miss the finance related tweets. They were entertaining, at least.

mcphilipon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

-A massive electronic medical records breach due to a security misconfiguration in the cloud gets posted on the dark net and reignites conversations around privacy and flaws in HIPAA regulations.

-The AI job market dramatically shrinks due to automation and tooling built by current AI experts. Advancements in AI puts AI workers out of work, ironically.

mcphilipon WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

Anecdotally, on both mobile and desktop I’m able to hit the X button on Chrome after the content loads but before the paywall shows and read the entire article.

mcphilipon Triggering Video Playback with Bots and Crawlers

> My hunch is that the Facebook crawlers send user-agent strings that Facebook has seen in requests to their own services. This allows them to crawl content in linked posts masquerading as a device that their users would actually use.

Very interesting theory, I’d love a follow up post if this can eventually be confirmed or denied :). That would be very clever of FB but very, very rude to all of the small fish they crawl.

mcphilipon 2017 Was Bad for Facebook. 2018 Will Be Worse

This is just an op-ed

mcphilipon Why Has Bitcoin’s Price Gone Up So Fast?

The volatility aspect attracts more and more quants when compared to the death of volatility in the US equities markets. Or so I’ve been told by friends in a quant lab...

mcphilipon Millennials to Small Cities: Ready or Not, Here We Come

https://www.fundable.com/lucabe-coffee-co

~37k raised from this campaign

mcphilipon Field Notes from my Dementia

>Fucking heartbreaking for me, but whoever he'd turned into seemed at peace and satisfied with life for almost all of that time.

I've witnessed the flip side of this: a grandparent with a hard life plagued by worry amplified by the confusion of Alzheimer's. Slowly wasting away for a few years. She did love her sons and grandkids playing piano up till the end, though.

It is truly a beastly disease.

mcphilipon Field Notes from my Dementia

>I would likely consider suicide, and I don't know whether that makes me weak or silly...

Up till the end of his life after suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, Terry Pratchett argued that such an option is certainly not weak or silly.

Here's a reading of his essay called Shaking Hands with Death [1] by a good friend of Pratchett's. His whit and charm and spirit really shine through this essay dictated to his assistant years after he had lost the ability to type.

Terry Pratchett has long been my favorite author, but his bravery while battling Alzheimer's has made him my hero...

[1] Terry Pratchett: Shaking Hands With Death

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90b1MBwnEHM

mcphilipon Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

Buzzfeed has some surprisingly good long form pieces. A recent one discusses in detail what's going on in Myanmar[1]. I found it interesting, but depressing.

The cesspool of fake news, Trump gossip, etc, turning into hot topics amongst Myanmar's budding online culture is sad, like a virus spreading.

Another worrisome side effect is the quick adoption of the medium by hate groups inciting violence towards religious minorities with outright lies compounded by the fact that most Myanmar users don't yet know fact checking is possible thanks to the walled garden.

Some users have landed in jail for not realizing posts containing jests about government officials were viewable by said authorities. The country's speech laws are still evolving and users struggle to understand brand new ceoncepts like scoping of comments.

Interesting times...

[1]. https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...

mcphilipon The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)

I found the shaman's perspective fascinating from an evolutionary psychological point of view. Cultures have had to decide how to treat the mentally ill long before science was around to try and explain it.

The shaman's perspective also had some interesting food for thought about the implications of western society's lack of ritual for the right of passage into adulthood.

mcphilipon OpenEMR: Electronic Medical Records and Medical Practice Management Software

I work at a top 10 EMR on the interface engine team. Messages between products require a lot of custom work to align message types and IDs, establishing a compendium of identifiers for external labs and identifiers, but it's not uncommon.

mcphilipon OpenEMR: Electronic Medical Records and Medical Practice Management Software

>Rather than trying to find a system that could be universalized, the (idiotic) plan has been to give millions of dollars to multiple corporations to develop systems, then subsidize the purchase cost to providers to encourage adoption. Then, only once everyone has invested in their own proprietary system will they begin trying to universalize the system by developing cross compatibility.

This is misinformation. Interoperability via HL7 messages has roots in the 80s. The subsidies encouraging provider adoption of EMRs during Obama's administration set constraints on qualifying EMRs including a certain level of support for interoperability. The government sensibly leveraged existing standards produced by those free market forces you decry.

mcphilipon Ask HN: Is S3 down?

I work in the healthcare industry and there's a big push from AWS into offering HIPAA compliant services for things like patient records. It's becoming much more common to tie in third party services into electronic healthcare software. Obviously no mission critical system should have a single point of failure and doctor's offices should have fallback plans for handling service outages, but most care providers don't have staff onsite with the technical expertise to understand the extent of the coupling. I'm just closely watching this space and found that tweet interesting in relation to the parent comment's remark about realizing the scope of this S3 outage. There's no blame unique to AWS here, but it is becoming an increasingly important piece of plumbing in the industry.

mcphilipon Ask HN: Is S3 down?

A doctor's office that's unable to process patients due to the outage:

https://mobile.twitter.com/drjincali/status/8366578638879989...

mcphilipon Cloudflare data still in Bing caches

>Why is Cloudflare underplaying the issue?

I suspect the random nature of the overflow plaintext spewed out into caches will be difficult to leverage into a statistically significant attack against any particular customer. If CF's bottom line is unlikely to be impacted, why not downplay the issue and refer to it in the past tense?

There may be significant long lasting damage to CF's reputation amongst vulnerability researchers, but that's a tiny subset of the population and statistically insignificant to a company that ~10% of internet traffic flows through.

mcphilipon Cloudflare bug data leak exposed

CF should be clear in its response that working with third parties such as google to clear cached responses with overflow data is an ongoing process and that other parties may have cached responses that CF has no control over.

mcphilipon Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

Indeed, this is the point in the comment thread where you get the feeling the internet is broken.

mcphilipon The Applied Machine Learning group at Facebook

The article seems to posit that Facebook is structured in a way to much more quickly implement advances in the field into production than Microsoft. Microsoft attracted a lot of talent in the area but said talent gravitates towards whichever company is best suited to use their skills.

mcphilipon Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but calling out cocaine usage at a private all hands party in Vegas seems tabloidish to me, too, but it's buried far enough below the fold that I don't think it had much to do with clicks.

mcphilipon Zelda: Link's Awakening: Kennel Glitch

Back in 1993 when this was released, in the pre gamefaqs era, I found a glitch where pausing the game while transitioning to then next screen would warp you all the way to the same position on the next screen. E.g. Leave screen on the left side, appear on next screen all the way to the left instead of the right side of the screen. This allowed you to break the game in all sorts of fun ways :)

I assume the internets have known about that glitch for a long time but it was really fun to feel like I had some secret trick as a kid that no one else had found.

mcphilipon Former employees sue Microsoft after developing PTSD

Some outsource the problem:

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

mcphilipon A bigger problem than ISIS: The Mosul Dam is failing

No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1].

The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy.

Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought:

>We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.

HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist.

For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM

[2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385

mcphilipon Postmodernism Generator

Depends on the skill level of the grader, I suppose, but phrases like "postsemantic nationalism" are a red flag to me as an armchair philosopher with some knowledge of the history of postmodernist thought.

mcphilipon [dead]

A long, but good read if you have 30 minutes to spare. There's an interesting bit of context at the end of the post that put the whole thing in a new light, for me[1]. The careless presentation of misinformation has very real impact, regardless of political POV.

1. >Why am I harping on this?

>I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.