Hacker News Reader

zachguoon Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record

Surprisingly people easily accept the media's foreign coverage without doubt even if they are skeptical about their domestic coverage.

zachguoon A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

Try this https://wiby.me/

Clicking 'Surprise me' gave me an interesting article from 1994 http://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html

zachguoon Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?

Well, SpaceX is in the U.S.

zachguoon China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

The policy is targeting ONLINE games. Companies like Tencent will simply double down shipping those shitty games with loot boxes and microtransactions oversea to your kids. Meanwhile in China offline singleplayer games may see a boom.

zachguoon A critique of Safari's influence on the web

100% spot on.

zachguoon Taiwan bans recruitment for jobs in China

This is meaningless. Taiwanese can still access job posting sites or be contacted by recruiters from Mainland China. There's no language barrier and they can simply buy a flight ticket to Shanghai and start working wherever they want with full Chinese citizenship.

The brain drain is serious and I don't see how it can be solved unless Taiwan can offer competitive salaries against first-tier cities in the mainland, 10% of Taiwanese population is now living and working in the mainland.

zachguoon India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

Surprisingly HNers are embracing the concept of cyber sovereignty that China and Russia are pushing.

zachguoon Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019

I have done more research about the 6 hospitals, my initial claim of "6 small hospitals" is wrong, they at least include the biggest two, Wuhan Union and Tongji.

The claim "far away from the wet market" still holds, these hospitals are not in the Jiangan District, and 5 of them are on the other side of the Yangtze River.

zachguoon Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019

I must be a dedicated one since I actually read the paper, jeez.

zachguoon Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019

Hospitals are obligated to report to the CDC once they discover pneumonia caused by an unknown virus that can transmit from human to human. SARS or COVID is just a name scientists gave to the sequenced virus.

zachguoon Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019

Please stop spreading false information.

Baidu search index for SARS: https://imgur.com/a/3Sca2v8 .

The uptick started at mid-Dec. There is a tiny bump in early October, however, if you hover over it, the bump shows posts about comparing economic activity to the 2003 SARS period, not related to the disease.

zachguoon Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019

A few issues with the methodology.

- only 6 small hospitals were included, and far away from the wet market

- Baidu Search Index doesn't match what they claim https://imgur.com/a/UkcUZou

- No test for statistical significance, really?

COVID-like mysterious pneumonia was not that hard to detect, the hospital would be alerted once doctors and nurses got infected.

zachguoon Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

In terms of geopolitics this is a good move, a superpower should have its own tech infrastructure.

zachguoon Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

> It's built for developers who don't like managing servers and working with cron jobs.

I had a hard time understanding the target market. Are they referring to frontend developers who are forced to do backend work?

zachguoon Hong Kong’s security law is going to devastate its economy

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/hon...

Trading volume with US is just a fraction, and US actually has a surplus. It's unlikely for US to change the status quo in HK which would hurt US companies more.

> Most of the imports are purchased by China because it cannot buy them legally and has to use HK's "autonomous" status to import.

This is simply groundless speculation without concrete data.

zachguoon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

If you don't need to render your notes as a graph, try VSNote out, or simply write markdown-based notes in your favorite editor and store them in your dropbox.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=patrickl...

zachguoon The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

> more transparent

TBH no matter how transparent China is you won't trust it until it turns out to be what you believe.

> actively prevented Taiwan from joining the WHO

Every WHO member can formally invite Taiwan and cast a vote, why didn't any five-eyes nation do that?

> does not do anything for free

I agree. It's simply ruthless geopolitics no matter how angelic a country pretends to be.

zachguoon The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/china-s-v...

China promised to give its covid-19 vaccine to WHO for free. If the accusation is true, it's basically Robinhood for poor countries.

zachguoon Typing 共匪 (communist bandit) in YouTube comments will automatically be deleted

This is the correct explanation but got downvoted. Comments containing only one slur would be considered as spams.

zachguoon Why is Japan still a coronavirus outlier?

It's worthwhile to track whether there's suspicious spike in number of Kodokushi.

zachguoon Coronavirus Cases Strain New York City Hospitals

Presumptive patients with mild symptoms have to be separated from the healthy population by moving them into quarantine hotels or yellow-zone makeshift hospitals. Or you will still see family transmissions.

zachguoon Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear Is Dire

Car factories can be converted to produce masks. An electric car manufacturer in China, BYD, became the biggest mask maker in 3 weeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/buffett-b...

zachguoon Is China Ground Zero for a Future Pandemic? (2017)

This is just a side effect of rapid urbanization. Progress in hygiene and education is not up to speed with the concentration of population.

The next one will probably be from SE Asia or Africa.

zachguoon Surge of virus misinformation stumps Facebook and Twitter

Yup, it's not about the effectiveness of the masks, it's simply because the US doesn't have enough stockpile and capacity to produce them. All east Asian countries recommend citizens to wear masks.

zachguoon Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

"The deaths associated with the facility, according to Killian, amount to 26 between Feb. 19 and March 7. That includes 15 patients who have died in local hospitals. Of those 15, 13 have positively tested for coronavirus."

https://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/life-care-center-of-ki...

zachguoon Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

TBH epochtimes.com is not a legit news source. It's run by the cult group who also produces Shen Yun.

zachguoon Launch HN: Datasaur (YC W20) – data labeling interface for NLP

It resembles an open source annotation tool that has existed for years. https://brat.nlplab.org/

It doesn't include a ML assistant though.

We have built a semi-automated annotation tool for our internal use too. ML models help classify documents and extract named entities by making suggestions. Sometimes I'm thinking of spinning it off as a standalone product but not sure how big the market would be.

zachguoon Coronavirus outbreak makes lobsters so cheap that sellers face a fatal blow

China is the first to handle it, had no idea about how deadly this virus is, and might have freaked out due to its SARS experience.

Korea is next door to China, so it's alerted early on.

Tiny countries like Singapore cannot survive a quarantine. So containment is not an option, they have to work out an effective mitigation plan.

Different countries also have different demographics, population density, and confidence about their healthcare system.

zachguoon With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

Since COVID-19 is targeting elders, I can imagine there are evil capitalists or bureaucrats who view this pandemic as a gigantic economic stimulus for the next decade. Sorry for my evil thought.