goodside

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181.
by goodside 6y ago
Spending on therapy advertisement would go up during a nation-wide transition to online therapy because far more people are switching therapists — people who previously chose a therapist based on convenience of the office location suddenly
182.
by goodside 6y ago
The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. They obviously kowtowed to the PRC in repeating their
183.
by goodside 6y ago
> A critical shortage of cloth? Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of
184.
by goodside 6y ago
Pigz is backward compatible — it breaks the input into 128K chunks, compresses each in parallel, and concatenates them. Gzip supports naive concatenation of compressed files so the result can be decompressed by standard gzip. Pigz does not
185.
by goodside 6y ago
Zstandard also has experimental support for seekable (and thus parallel) decompression, but it isn't included in distributed binaries. See: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/issues/395
186.
by goodside 6y ago
Note that pbzip2 can only parallel-decompress files that are compressed with pbzip2. lbzip2 ( https://lbzip2.org/ ) is capable of decompressing arbitrary bz2 files in parallel, which is a more common need IMHO. bz2 is very CP
187.
by goodside 6y ago
Everybody's needs are different, but zstd is so fast the lack of multithreaded decompression doesn't matter very often. I've only ever found parallel decompression useful with bz2 files (which are insanely CPU-intensive to de
188.
by goodside 6y ago
This is a low-effort post, showing basic CLI usage and nothing else. Pigz does not actually decompress in parallel, as the author implies, underscoring the importance of benchmarking things — especially when you're only considering the
189.
by goodside 6y ago
“Essential workers” is a nebulous term - formally there are only “essential businesses” that are allowed to operate, and their employees are informally “essential” too. But only a subset of such workers are necessary. E.g., cleaning staff a
190.
by goodside 6y ago
I agree it’s certainly not socially equitable. Laid-off non-essential workers receive an undeserved pay raise for doing no work, and essential workers receive no benefit for continuing to work despite the hazards involved. Mandating hazard
191.
by goodside 6y ago
In more normal times, it makes sense that unemployment should not be lucrative, and workers should be encouraged to take any job at all rather than be unemployed. But the calculus changes in a pandemic, because you want people to stay hom
192.
by goodside 6y ago
Obviously bodies of text bigger than 5GB exist. I was talking about static compressor dictionaries, which are tiny. Hence mentioning Brotli’s 122KB dictionary. Static dictionaries are an optimization to improve the compression of very small
193.
by goodside 6y ago
Counted by whom? What benchmark follows the model you’re describing? Does any real-world compressor use dictionaries anywhere near this big? If you can bring the complete benchmark corpus (or substantial subsets of it) “into the wilderness”
194.
by goodside 6y ago
In theory, yes, but a constant 5 GB penalty is enormous in practice — orders of magnitude bigger than anything used in the real world. Brotli’s static dictionary is only 122 KB, and covers many natural and programming languages beyond just
195.
by goodside 6y ago
That’s why I put “cheating” in quotes — it’s pragmatic, but it complicates the comparison into something that can’t be measured in a single number. I grant you that typical bechmarks ignore the static dictionary in comparing Brotli to other
196.
by goodside 6y ago
Not to diminish what a cool idea this is, but isn’t it cheating to not count the size of the GPT2 parameters as part of the final compression ratio? Assuming the decompressor already has GPT2 weights is analogous to assuming it has a massiv
197.
by goodside 6y ago
For consumers you’re definitely right, but I don’t think this is true when buying by the truckload. Paper manufacturers produce both very high-density products (office paper) and very low-density products (toilet paper). Office paper is so
198.
by goodside 6y ago
Of course they do. People hoard any time they expect the price to go up — even the most unregulated markets have speculators. You also hoard whenever goods have storage costs associated with them and you have excess capacity. Hoarding is ho
199.
by goodside 6y ago
Toilet paper also has relatively high storage costs and low shipping costs compared to other goods, which skews things. It obviously doesn’t spoil, but it’s physically large for how cheap it is and presents a fire hazard in bulk quantities.
200.
by goodside 6y ago
While free-market pricing may create an incentive to hoard for resale, price ceilings also create an incentive to hoard for personal use. If I’m on the fence about whether I might need an N95 mask soon, and I learn they’re being sold at bel
201.
by goodside 6y ago
I imagine the problem isn’t so much volume of crap comments as much as the tailoring of crap comments. Imagine if every tweet-into-the-void from a human with 50 followers reliably got engaging replies. Bots taunting your grammar mistakes,
202.
by goodside 6y ago
If I sign up for a gym membership and then don’t show up for months on end, I don’t feel like I’ve been swindled — I knew that’s how it works when I signed up. I’m not confused about what a gym membership is for or why I’m paying for it. I
203.
by goodside 6y ago
At some point the cost-benefit calculus has to flip. Users on the extreme right-tail of the months-paid-but-unused distribution are a negligible amount of revenue but very likely to complain when they noticed they’ve paid for years of unuse
204.
by goodside 6y ago
Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their accou
205.
by goodside 6y ago
I’ve only ever heard “If you shave it, it grows back thicker” in the context of advising someone who wants the hair to be less visible, not more visible. It’s usually given as an argument for why women should pluck or wax rather than shave.
206.
by goodside 6y ago
It’s less horrifying if you think of it as a treadmill — MySpace is sort of the logical extreme, where the owners realized its days were numbered and made the experience so ad-heavy that everyone left for other platforms. You sow growth for
207.
by goodside 6y ago
The tendency of young people to jump from platform to platform is partially an illusion caused by the fact they don’t remain young. You see this especially in dating sites — people used to think OkCupid could never make money because it was
208.
by goodside 6y ago
HN has a long history of de-sensationalizing link titles, both through automated substitutions and manual changes from moderators. Some aspects of this are in the "News Guidelines" at https://news.ycombinator.com/n
209.
by goodside 6y ago
You’re right that it was only delayed, but it has so far been delayed three times. Retailers filed lawsuits against the ban that the courts have no capacity to deal with, so it’s unlikely to be enforced (or formally reversed) until the outb
210.
by goodside 6y ago
“Eco-friendly” reusable bags are also made from non-woven polypropylene, which is now in short supply as it’s essential for producing N95 filters, surgical masks, and hospital-grade fabrics like gowns and pillow cases.

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