riyadparvez

In preparation of stopping next pandemic, maybe we should have an international agreement like Paris climate change agreement. Like climate change and nuclear weapons this is an existential risk.

Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up. We may have been able to stop outbreak of COVID-19 on the first place if we had learned our lessons from SARS outbreak and stopping eating exotics animals.

EDIT: bat was used as an example. You can replace any exotic animals in place of bats, the point still stands. This video touches on the topic of outbreak of coronavirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54

> never agree to anything that locks you to Google.

How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?

Not all features have to do anything with backward compatibilities. I agree with the fact that features should be added with caution cause new features can interact with existing features in a non-trivial way that will introduce lot of edge cases. But it's hard to see why a feature like text block would introduce more complexities.

> HN: I won't use anything Google makes, they always shut stuff down.

You are talking about an extremely vocal minority, who inevitably ends up creating echo chambers.

Like everything on earth there are both good and bad vocal minorities. I follow this heuristic about vocal minorities: ignore them when it comes to trivial issues. Online vocal minorities like fanboys who harass directors, writer, or actors are good example of this group. Same goes for the people who constantly complain about Google shutting down some free products. OTOH, I keep close eyes on activists, who are vocal minorities and are fighting for important issues. Activists might not be on the right side of history on every issue, but these are the people who fought for civil rights, LGBTQ rights etc., often at their own personal expense.

> higher viral load

What is "higher viral load"? Isn't it binary - you are either infected or not?

As someone who is not from North America, this positive/good vibe culture really baffles me. You are a human being. Negative emotions are part of life. World is full of pain and sufferings. You are supposed to feel empathy for other people and feel bad for their misfortune even if you have the good luck of not going through suffering. I just don't understand this obsession of feeling good all the time. I don't know how people can just brag about themselves with things like "good vibes only". If you have never felt sadness, pain, shame, or embarrassment, is it something to brag about?

> There's a different form of positive selection bias for that: to survive in a country where you're there illegally, cut off from many high-paying jobs because of that, and may be deported at any time, it takes a particular form of resourcefulness and ambition.

We can replace "illegal immigration" in the above statement with any other illegal activities and it will still hold true.

People constantly criticizing companies not taking long-term bets. When some company does take long-term bets, then some internet expert come along and find some arbitrary timeline to succeed without any justification and start criticizing without offering anything any substantial.

I wish we can have more thoughtful discussion, instead of Twitter style self aggrandizing comments.

Probably because of the precautions taken. It's like the old tale of "Why do we need IT support dept. if your system never breaks down?". Precautions probably helped containing the virus, not the other way around that we don't need to take precautions.

Is it just me or the number of unnecessarily snarky comments in HN is increasing rapidly?

> Google cloning a startup's product should be less legal than a startup cloning Google's.

Genuine question. The article is about Apple. Why did you use Google as an example instead of Apple? Is there anything specific to Google that warrants using Google as an example instead of Apple, which is the company in question?

> The problem with "professionals" is that they are not incentivized to help you fix root causes either.

That's a big accusation against a community of people without any corroborating evidence. Do you have anything to support your claim?

As someone who is also suffering from low self-esteem issues for long time please see a therapist (not CBT therapy, I'd argue a lot of self-therapy books philosophically are some variations of CBT techniques).

My self-esteem issues are the products of childhood abuse and trauma. I was in denial about my trauma, but therapy helped me accept the reality and work on treating the root cause, not the the symptomps. Your self-esteem issues might not root from abuse. But it's a good idea to get help from a professional. Otherwise you might be just treating the symptomps, not the disease itself.

More like unintended consequences. Like many real world cases, each of the policies is a reasonable, sound and fair policy by their own right. But when you combine them they might seem designed with exploitive motives.

I think we are in the acitvism bubble. The outrage culture and now this stir the pot activism are fueling certain individuals narcissism to the detriment of the cause and rest of us.

One thing to keep in mind that their work-load is very ready-heavy which eases things a lot when scaling the system. The same is true for Wikipedia. Scaling a write-heavy workload is way more complex than scaling a read-heavy workload.

> I'm guessing it's some sort of a rule here to have at least one anti-google link on the front page at all times

Not only this, any submission that's remotely related to Google HN crowd finds a way to start bashing Google. It has gotten so bad that recently I started hiding any submission related to Google.

I think we need a new word for this kind of posts anti-hype hype. Lot of people try to ride on anti-hype train to fame without bringing anything new to the table.

Anytime there's new progress in AI, you will see many comments or posts some variations of "but humans do it more efficiently" (in arbitrary dimension) or "what about the other problem AI didn't solve". More often than not these are just some lazy layman criticism that makes the posters feel smart without offering anything new or substantial.

Are you referring to Generalized Additive Models (GAM)?

Maybe this is a result of optimizing for most of the population, which probably decreases performance for tiny minority who search for niche things that are hard to optimize for because of lower amount of data.

The first developer (who was fired) of the startup I am working for exactly presented this arguments. Not having any experience in developing and maintaining any real system and reading some consultants' blog he was confident that the microservice architecture will solve all the problems. The product got delayed by months, extremely buggy and (god knows why) it was an asynchronous architecture (the front-end would have to poll for basic CRUD operation). This costed us losing a big customer.

If you are starting out, please make sure the complexity and development overhead for a microservice is worth it. Don't listen to hypes.

Exactly! The same thing could be said about touch-screens. We can do all these things with a keyboard, why need a touch screen. As a matter of fact, that was the argument Ballmer made during the launch of iPhone. I am not saying Soli would be the same. But it's hard to tell how things would turn out. Or it might take few iterations (maybe from other companies) to get there.

Is it possible to arrange hackathons outside of USA? That's be helpful to lot of people who don't live in USA or no easy way to get visa from USA.

Yes, exactly! This seems like totally overblown title. It's akin to saying Google open sourced their key search tech Kubernetes, which is an open source rendition of Borg, where all the Google workloads run on top of.

Do you have any reference to backup that claim?

I think it has some privacy implications. Lot of people will feel uncomfortable if they feel their conversations are being saved in someone else's device or cloud.

Being an outsider, the thing that stand out most about North American culture is that it is extremely self-promotional. Granted, self-pormotion exists more or less is all cultures. But what makes it different here is self promotion is actively encouraged as a virtue. I think 'I love my work', along with many other behaviors, can be attribute to this self-promotional culture.

Is there any single day goes by without a negative article against Google on HN?

I think the reason is some political party deliberately erases the line between legal and illegal immigration, then uses skilled immigration as an argument for causes like open border or illegal immigration, while not fixing the broken immigration policy. This harms the legal immigrants, but paves the way for illegal immigration. Some legal immigrants feel duped because they have jumped through all the hoops in this broken system only to find someone else cut in the line illegally.

That's why many legal immigrants do not necessarily trust the motivation of articles like this. Is this actually proposing a fix of broken immigration system or a veiled propagnda piece to promote illegal immigration?

FWIW, I am a skilled legal immigrant, currently residing in Canada.

My issue is more with tricky algorithmic questions. I faced these tricky interview questions, where you either have to know the trick beforehand or there is NO way you can come up with a solution in an interview. I never understand the point of these questions. Because these esoteric hypothetical questions will almost never come up in real-life. They don't test someone's skills, because these problems don't follow any standard algorithmic problem solving procedure. They mostly test whether you know the trick or not, which is not a valid metric of skills.

One famous example of this type of questions is to find loop in a singly connected linked list. Now almost everyone knows the trick. And thanks to that, interviewers have stopped asking questions like that.