slovenlyrobot

If you click into the per-country view on Worldometers you can see their sources. For example the current numbers for USA came from nyc.gov.

This could have been true except probably half of HN have an Android phone in their pocket. So this, like with Android and Google Play Services, is a case study in perception management. Suddenly the perception of Zoom seems to be forced in a particular direction.

My paranoid 4 glasses of wine self can believe nothing other than money being involved.

Entirely shoot from the hip comment, but at this point I feel it's warranted..

What is with all the Zoom hate? The company have been around for a decade, enjoyed relatively mediocre success until the outbreak of Covid, and suddenly apparently since they're experiencing huge demand and press coverage, every man and his dog is finding reasons to write a blog post complaining about them.

I've read some article splitting hairs over the nuances of "end to end encryption" and how Zoom is so horrible, evil and wrong because they, like almost every telecommunication provider under the sun, can intercept your calls. What makes Zoom so special?

What's driving all this hate? Because it's a far more interesting question than what technical flaws Zoom, or any other product in this category, almost certainly suffer from.

Has someone done any security analysis of Houseparty? It's experienced surge growth in the same period. But in the time I've seen maybe 20 Zoom-hate articles on HN I haven't seen a single mention of Houseparty. What about Google Hangouts: is it "end"-to-"end" "encrypted"? What about its recording feature? Where are the articles? Where is all the hate?

Why?

I mistakenly thought you wanted clarity on my reasoning, instead it seems I've been made a fool of by providing an opportunity for you to argue a position I already understood and couldn't care less about. It's funny, this is also pretty much the reason I stopped relying on Python.

You're welcome to absorb all the externalized costs your heart desires, but in future please consider reviewing HN's rules before bandying attacks like "smug" and "superior".

There's really not much to it, but if it's a foreign concept it may require a kind of conceptual leap. Essentially, this code worked perfectly well, and suddenly it no longer worked. From your perspective, as you quite effortlessly put it, this code is broken. For others elsewhere in more conservative parts of the world, it was not my code that broke, but the surrounding ecosystem.

There is a fabulously unending depth to explore in the chasm lying between these opposing world views. It would be more than possible to write a book on the topic and fail to cover it all, however here are some of the most important aspects, from my perspective at least:

* given a perfectly functional tool relied on heavily by its user to perform their job, and given that tool suddenly decides to change shape such that it no longer fits the user's hand without retraining, nor fits with the remainder of the user's toolset, including custom tools the user has invested in producing, the continued utility of the no-longer-functioning tool is called into question, along with a deserved reappraisal of the tool's applicability in the context of the user's original intended problem domain.

* when the reason for its reshaping is to solve what are highly important problems from the perspective of the tool, but much less so from the perspective of the average user, and that user's application of the tool to real world problems, it can no longer be said that the tool is simply an implement that may be called and relied upon at any point in future -- the tool develops a chaotic life and importance all of its own, and may choose to reshape once again at any future moment (and indeed in this case it has). It is no longer a tool, but some sentient entity demanding unpredictable ongoing costs and attention paid all of its own.

* given a tool that promises to cease functioning 'correctly' at any future moment based on its own whim, preferences, industry fashions and styles, in an ecosystem where many similar such tools exist that explicitly promise not to cease functioning over the same time period, it is a fool's errand to pick the tool that promises to externalize additional costs on the user when alternatives exist that avoid any such cost.

* given tool designers who externalize almost frivolously minor technical costs on to every user, where each 'minor' change is amplified perhaps 10000 times over and directly translates into expensive engineering time, the question is easily raised whether the philosophy of the tool is appropriate for its advertised utility, and whether continued reliance on the tool makes business sense. In economic terms, what was the cost to productivity of the retraining and re-tooling of users compared to any alleged future productivity improvement?

* had I written these scripts in bash, C# or C++, they would not have broken even remotely to the same degree. Of course these are not some completely unevolving entities either, however all take the promise of forwards compatibility deadly seriously, and it is more than possible to find 10-20 year old programs written in C++ or bash that continue functioning to the present day. From my perspective, they are therefore excellent and highly dependable tools.

I recognize it may be difficult to understand, but this is a thread about backwards compatibility. Of course if I had any faith in the contemporary Python community, I would still be treating Python as a serious programming language and not be suggesting this is a difficult concept for someone to grasp.

I'm several years into the "upgrade" and find myself still swearing daily at the idiocy of the whole thing. Hundreds of scripts used maybe once a year, such as 'dups.py' I tried to run today, broken by a missing parenthesis, and a function moved around.

Utterly pointless and reputationally ruinous. I don't do serious work in Python any more

Notably compared to the 2008 program, this time around they allow dealer banks to take out cash loans using... equities.. as collateral.

Dealer goes bust, market takes a huge hit, and the collateral value shrinks in correspondence to that hit. Madness. And still the markets have barely even sniffed at these announcements.

I expect before this is all over, POTUS will be making those daily coronavirus livestreams wearing fancy dress and cracking jokes just to keep people interested, because they've already spent every last drop of substance in the opening weeks of what promises to be a 6+ month journey.

The dates are up to present day. Trump is due to give another press conference during market hours (3:30 today), watch the chaos he's wreaking on your friendly neighbourhood index

Expecting another rally followed by another crash

You can think of them all as JPEG NB.. 'no browser support' ;)

Is it my imagination or was this the second country announcing the same in the past few days?