sdrothrock

You didn't have to go to an office to get your COVID benefits. They mailed a brief, mostly prefilled form to your home and you put in your bank details and a copy of your ID to mail back.

You may be thinking of people rushing to get their applications in for their NFC-capable "My Number" cards, which haven't been very popular... that was entirely optional and gave you access to a digital version of the same thing.

I'd argue that "Team Leader" means "boss," though.

I'm not sure, honestly; there used to be a really long forum thread with random hacks that helped some (but not all) people and there were apparently a lot of conflated bugs that confused the whole thing, so I stopped trying to follow it and gave up.

Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) and iMacs (late 2012, mid 2017).

That particular functionality worked fine on Mojave.

It works fine as long as I keep my VDI files on my system drive, but that can be a pain since they're so large.

Sure thing! I had a blast when it hit the HN front page and it still sticks with me.

There are some correlations between BCG vaccines (especially the Japanese strain) and covid-19 doubling times[1][2][3]. But these are just correlations so far.

There is also an ongoing study in Australia to try to find if there's really a relationship[4] and some talk about trying a similar trial in Boston[5].

It will probably be while before we see any specific results.

[1] http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/COVID-19/Death_vs_BCGpolicy.ht...

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/hshimodaira/status/12474763673707...

[3] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/bio...

[4] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04327206

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/health/coronavirus-bcg-va...

> The issue is that there's no spatial component to WeChat. For whatever reason, it feels different when you have an avatar in a world with some freedom to move around.

I completely agree. My experience in Online Town was vastly different from my experience in Zoom.

Great chatting with you, too!

I've spent the last 2-3 hours in here and have talked to maybe half a dozen people about all kinds of things. This is just such a fun way to get together and have a conversation, and there are so many possibilities.

Thanks a TON to Cyrus for being such an engaging host and sharing his thoughts about what's going on and how people are thinking about the service!

> Main thing we wanted was a minimap, or some way for new arrivals to find us.

I was thinking a minimap would be nice, or maybe a dash option so I could get around a little faster.

For helping people find each other faster, it seems like just having maps with more landmarks might help too!

It would be cool if I could upload my own PNG or something to use as a town backdrop.

It would also be neat if I could click people and find where they are on the map, or maybe just jump to them.

I actually prefer this instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/nipponnoiro/

It's the same concept, but one color for every day of the year. It's a lot more browsable/readable, though it's not searchable at all and has no romaji.

Maybe remove the Japan option until you do support Japanese? It just seems to be an invitation to make yourself look bad. :/

I tried it out and it doesn't seem to support unicode well.

I searched for "学校" (Japanese: gakkou, school) in Japan and the results page was headed with "%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1".

Additionally, the actual results weren't great; it found a 2014 movie and a handful of Amazon/Youtube searches that aren't accurate. Some of the Youtube search results weren't even Japanese, but Chinese.

Just in case I'd weirdly picked a bad word (dubious since school closings etc. are all over the news), I also tried パンくん (Japanese: pan-kun, the name of a chimpanzee who was famous for being with Shimura Ken, a recently deceased comedian), which is currently trending on Twitter.

I didn't get any trend information at all.

He's mentioned working on Pokemon Go before, so I'd guess that.

I read this and my first question was "Why?"

He has a previous post titled "Thinking psycopg3" that shed some light on the issue: https://www.varrazzo.com/blog/2020/03/06/thinking-psycopg3/

- Query parameters adaption

- Context managers and transactions

- Optional C module (i.e. reduce requirements)

- Async from the ground up

- Resolve other outstanding issues

Reading that post first went a long way toward giving me some context to understand this one.

> I wish people would stop upvoting me though... Each one makes me cringe: another person who didn't read very carefully.

I don't think upvotes mean something's correct, I think they mean that something (and the ensuing discussion) is worth reading.

Even though you were a little off base, it was a useful chain of discussion because presumably a large nonzero number of people would think the same thing. :)

> We've worked with brilliant scientific and technical people who do not communicate their ideas well

Alan Alda did as well and that was what gave birth to the idea for his book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? (https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-ebook...)

It has a big focus on improv that can be distracting from the main message of the book, but I found it really insightful and had my assistant read it for discussion about how to improve communication skills and awareness.

Maybe you've already seen this one, but maybe there are some people who haven't... I get a kick out of it every time I reread it, anyway. :)

http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

Different things, definitely.

Better? Depends on what you need!

I use Amazon Japan because I live here, though.

This is an offshoot discussion and I have nothing against DDG or bang commands -- just presenting another side of convenient searches.

> I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.

I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance.

I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox.

AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword.

For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar.

This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.

Ahh... a neat coincidence anyway. :)

Thanks for letting me know!

I wonder if the name "Nestur" is a callback to "Nester" from the "Howard & Nester" comics in Nintendo Power: https://hn.iodized.net/main.htm

> Doesn't pretend to be meat but is delicious.

This is absolutely my favorite kind of vegan food.

> If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost.

The benefit of going to school for kids in the US at least is that you get to move a year closer to getting out.

A cost is that if you don't go, you get held back (and get the according social stigma).

Another poster below asked

> But why did Japan's snap first?

I think one of the reasons here is perhaps that kids automatically advance through the public schools system for the first nine grades regardless of whether they actually attend school or not. So people can stay even with their friend groups.

I've known/worked with a few kids who didn't go to school, and while some of them had personal issues of some kind or another, others simply just didn't see any cost to not going to school and hung out with their friends when their friends were out of school and otherwise enjoyed life.

Another difference, I think, is that with bullying in US schools, you can usually escape it to a certain extent through different classes/activities, but in Japanese schools, you tend to stay with your homeroom class for every subject, so there's no chance to get away/make a different friend group except for club activities and the next academic year.

I can't stand them myself; they're rarely that uncrowded and many streets with cars/cycle traffic here also don't have setbacks while, at the same time, allowing private property to build high walls.

This results in a large number of blind turns where you can't tell if anyone's coming around the corner unless there are mirrors available, which aren't always a guarantee.

I don't have anything to say about whether or not the article is anti-China propaganda, but I just wanted to address this comment because there's some underlying assumptions being made here about names and ethnicity.

In this day and age, I don't think a name is guaranteed to tell you much about a person. It's a bit fallacious to say "she has a Chinese name, so she's probably not against China."

She could be from Taiwan or Hong Kong, both of which have plenty of reasons not to like China. She could also have been born and raised by Chinese, Taiwanese, or Hong Kong parents in any other country.

I have an incredibly "white" name, but I'm ethnically Korean. I know I'm an outlier, but it gives me first-hand knowledge that using names to assume things about people's ethnicity (and from that, their beliefs) is not a good tactic.

This blew my mind, because baths around 45-50 C (113-122 F) aren't uncommon at all in Japan, and bathing for a long time (relaxing, sleeping, reading, watching tv) every day is also not uncommon here... I wonder if that's been a factor leading to reduced birth rates in Japan.

I don't have time to search a lot for this, but I did find one study that pointed at reduced sperm quality in young men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3641477/

> as pronounced in English

I was curious about whether or not there was an IPA version (which would then work for any language) -- one of the first results I found was Eudex, which looks a little different (since it's a hash of the pronunciation) but more versatile.

https://github.com/ticki/eudex

Since you need to log in now, I wonder if they're also keeping track of which users are viewing what content, and what subreddits etc. that content is associated with.

I think that's different because it's a name.

Here, you have two different names that you're trying to use to order a food that doesn't exist, so it's a bit different than something with a shared etymology and history. It would be like walking into a pub (again) and asking for "tako and chips," where "tako" is Japanese for "octopus." There's no guarantee that the dish exists or that the person you're talking to even knows what "tako" is.

Mandarin and Cantonese are essentially completely different languages, so you're just mixing phrases that the other person probably doesn't know.