toshk

Was googling to see if I could find a news article to back up my memory.

Instead I found an article on Wikileaks claiming CIA executed false flag hacking operations: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the...

Same here. I remember once I was watching the news and they claimed a hack was done by Russians because they found Russian comments in the code. That didn't sound very convincing :). The ledger evidence sounds better.

At the same time in this case I would be more surprised if the PRC , since their need for control, and since the stakes are extremely high, wasn't doing such things.

Latest study in Spain around 1-1.3. 70,000 participants.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study...

Most studies in Europe show this: 0,5 - 1.

I hear this sentiment often lately. But it always looked like 0.6-1 percent deathrate. Already in february this was suggested by one of the researchers at Hopkins, based on the nrs of South Korea at the time. And it's still around that percentage with the latest studies in Europe. Even though it sounds low, that's still a lot of deaths if left uncontrolled.

There's a lot of great advice to be found on this page. I'll just add one thing: your location matters. If you are in places where there is a high scarcity of engineers and good economic conditions (like western europe), it's more the question of how do I select for something that's in line with my wishes and ambitions. If you are in area where there is less of an fortunate situation for engineers, the question would be more: is it possible to move or find high quality remote clients.

Where do we draw the line between innovation and new features?

Thanks we are running a few node servers, we now deploy command line. Dev we use docker-compose. But we are looking for a way to easily share our servers. We developed it for Amsterdam open source. Around 20-30 cities are in line to start using it. Doesn't have to be scalable, or have high availibility. Ease of deployment, easy way to update and basic security. All sysadmins are pushing for kubernetes, although for the big cities it makes sense, it really starting to feel like an overkill for small cities who will run 1-3 non-critical sites with 0.5-5k users p/m. Heard a lot about ansible, will look into it, thanks!

What would you suggest as an alternative, simpler form for docker deploy, running and managing? Docker-compose?

I'm working on some projects for the city of Amsterdam, by default all we develop is open source.

But whether this is a legal issue is actually an open debate, in some specific cases companies could potentially sue Amsterdam for sharing solutions with other governments and thereby "competing" with the market. How a judge would rule is not clear. But this is something they are aware of and it's a risk. It seems to also be connected to the way the project is shared.

As far as I know they are looking into changing the law on the national level so this stops being a problem. Also strangely enough, I've been told, as soon as the project gets funded by the EU, this law is not applicable anymore.

Open source means published on github, not many projects are actually properly documented.

I always feel a bit awkward reading about distraction when I'm distracting myself :).

On the level of practical risk: on the security level libraries are much more risky imo. A good framework for most project i've seen will lead to a more structured and secure codebase. Probably precisely because there is less room for creativity.

For instance Laravel is very structured: orm, auth routes, controllers system etc., where express.js let's you do whatever.

And almost all Expressjs or other Nodejs projects i've joined were a mess and had security issues, something as simple as CSRF tokens, or not allowing redirects to external domains, are often forgotten or not fully implemented.

Doesn't mean I don't sometimes prefer a library approach, but the developer(s) need to be a lot more qualitative.

I often buy week or two weeks before

Maybe but Im guessing there will be 1 to 3 months flights are open in summer and there will be lots of crazy partying and spending. (in Europe)

I always enjoyed Laravel

Yes sort of. This is the obvious that bothers many.

Of course there is also a deeper culture here. For instance that students in big name universities learn standard macro economics. And then when they come to the institutions this is their default mode of thinking, even though they don't directly benefit from this. But it might be hard to reach to top of many of these institutions as a contrarian, so longterm there is not much incentive to go against established norms.

It's more a way to drive a point home. Taleb has been shouting this point for more then a decade. A portfolio without insurance is no portfolio. His arguing is that institutions that are to big too fail hardly ever insure themselves in this way, using optimistic lineair growth models without hedging themselves against extreme and unpredictable risk. And then when they go bankrupt they present the bill to the tax payer.

It seems necessary to make a point here since these models haven't changed for decades even though they have clearly failed many times.

The RIVM lost the battle in Februari not in March, this is was what my initial comment referred to.

Throughout Februari and March they had the following policy:

- Clearly stating and assuming that asypmtomatic people cannot or are extremely unlikely to transmit (had letters sent to schools and events I particpated in, was also on their website). True or not, there was no data to backup this up and an assumption like this has big consequences when false.

- When from risk area AND with symptoms as a policy they didn't test. In general the whole focus was to test as minimal as possible. Causing us to be completely caught off guard of the true scope untill March.

- Clearly trying to sell the idea that masks don't work for normal people, while at the same time trying to claim them for themselves

- As a policy not testing healthcare people, not even with symptoms. First random test of healthcare people with symptoms in the south was only done on the 8th of march, they were shocked by result (and for a long time untill march allowing people to work with symptoms ). https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/steekproef

- As a policy "non-essentials" healthcare people get no protection unless evidence of covid and hardly get tested. 900 of 2100 healthcare/elderly houses now have the virus with 20 to 30 percent death rate.

- Failed attempt of centralised buying of masks and other protection wear

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/jos-de-blok-buu...

- Till the end of Februari claiming they had it under control

- etc...

There is more things to point out but Ill leave it at this. The above assumptions and actions are a big part of what made the Dutch ministery fail to deal with the crisis properly and on time. Like many of the Western democracies. If they would have acted in Februari a full lockdown probably could have been prevented or shortened, lives would have been saved and many other treatments wouldn't have been cancelled or postponed.

The article i've linked to above talks about the doctor who did the opposite in the North, and was succesful with it, they even tried to force him to follow their policy.

To come back to your article. The short answer we don't have enough data (yet) to make such conclusions.

It seems reasonable that from the 9th of March the infection rate went down. This was the week all of Europe freaked out and many people started working from home, even if it wasnt official policy except for in the South of Holland (this idea was good, but too late). Certains schools already (partially) closed, partly because not enough teachers were showing up.

Whether or not school en restaurant closure lead to a lower infection rate is not clear from the data. The RIVM's analysis indeed suggests that it only had a small impact. The English analysis of the Dutch data in the same article does suggest a bigger impact. It's telling that the RIVM doesn't trust their own analysis enough to turn in into policy, you can watch the briefing of Dissel of last week, they only very slowly open the elementary schools in a few weeks from and don't open restaurants and high schools till the end of may.

We, the Netherlands, got it under control because we went into stricter lockdown against the advice of the RIVM. Above assumptions led to advice against a lockdown.

Only under pressure of the IC doctors on Sunday the 15th of march did the prime minister close all schools and restaurants. (A high school is like a festival every day)

The policy and advice of RIVM has been wrong and misleading from the end of February. For many of us it was already clear they lost control beginning of March.

There was one hero in the North of the Netherlands who went against RIVM and the Minister of health: https://eenvandaag.avrotros.nl/item/het-gelijk-van-microbiol....

This article in the Volkskrant describes how the RIVM was panicking beginning of March, but the prime minister wanted to present "good weather", and they also send their stock of masks to China beginning februari: https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/nederland-stuur...

Even now they are not testing healthcare people with symptoms in elderly homes and also not providing any sort of masks. Claiming the available masks are not of sufficient quality, they prefer to send healthcare people to work without masks then to get high quality masks even if it is without the preferred certificate.

Last point. Under control is relative. The IC capacity reached a higher number then we ever anticipated, still more IC beds are occupied by corona patients then we had in total beginning of 2020. https://stichting-nice.nl/

For most of the hospitals in the Netherlands most operations and treatments are still postponed. For instance for many cancer patients the date of their treatment is still not sure: https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/chemo-uitgestel...

I could have misunderstood! But when you can smell it when you shower and taste it when you drink it, there is a considerable amount of residue of chemicals in the water. Maybe I smell it because I'm used to water without it. I don't know if it's actually harmful, but when there are alternatives widely deployed, for instance in the Netherlands I don't see the reason for taking the risk.

These were exactly the assumptions of the RIVM in the Netherlands end Februari and March causing it to completely spiral out of control.

When I was travelling in Canada I was checking if the water was safe to drink. And the government website argued it was safe to drink tapwater precisely because it was purified with the help of chlorine. In Netherlands many of us have the opposite view that it's not safe to drink tapwater if there is chlorine in it (let alone the taste). Interesting contrasts in cultures :)

I was joking a few years ago now Kubernetes is a great layer to manage docker, and then in a few years we will have another layer to manage Kubernetes... Just in general this ever evolving complexity in software (and many other system, like law) is interesting, but often we solve one problem while at the same time creating 5 new ones. I understand it, and sometimes it is indeed the best path forward, but also feel a need for more simplicity sometimes. We see it in both hosting, but frontend development is also very good in adding layers of complexity.

Agreed. The risk of the decision seems to be very important in this experiment yet not mentioned. With high risk exploration is out of the question, but with low risk exploration is very logical behaviour (with potential high reward)

Isn't that the whole essence's of Nassim's Taleb work? He actually makes the opposite claim, that a model that doesn't takes extreme events into the equation is not worth anything at all.

Fun side note. Since we always think of international supply chains as a modern phenomena. The Dutch have been, among other things, importing their grains since the 17th century from Eastern Europe: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-dutch-economy-in-the-golden-....

A friend of mine who worked for defense creating viruses is convinced it's man made because of the way the virus is structured.

Whether it's true or not. It's an interesting case, and I wonder why no one is writing about this possibilty in the media. Those ideas are quickly dismissed as crazy conspiracy theory. Where every big government is actively working on creating viruses for both defense and offense.

Especially because in Wuhan there is one of these labs.

Around the world outbreaks out of viruses out of these labs happen regularly. Even on purpose sometimes, but most of the time accidently.