There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this)
Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.
Readit Newsnidhalbt commented on First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources public.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/larsiusprime
nidhalbt commented on Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses reuters.com/world/middle-... · Posted by u/croes
We see more and more similar laws being passed in recent years, laws that are blatantly discriminatory. This may raise the indignation of many people, but in my opinion, Israel is shooting itself in the foot by passing these laws, because it reinforces the argument that it is an apartheid regime. Israel is slowly losing its support in the free democratic world where people believe in the inalienable universal rights of individuals and are less and less willing to turn a blind eye to such institutionalized racism.
nidhalbt commented on What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? twitter.com/typesfast/sta... · Posted by u/CalChris
An overall valid argument, but there are also other vantage points to consider.
Take for instance providers' backlogs. Anyone having studied process scheduling knows how the size of your tasks, precedence, interruptibility, number of processors, and scheduling algorithm make a huge difference. The covid disruption affected all those factors.
nidhalbt commented on China Is Totalitarian. Why Is That So Hard to Say? foreignpolicy.com/2021/04... · Posted by u/paulcarroty
Question: Let's say you took a bunch of indicators and said "I can prove China is a totalitarian state because it has a bad score on each of these indicators". Don't you believe that western "democratic" states probably have embarrassing scores on many of them?
My point is:
1 - "Totalitarian" is a tricky concept to deconstruct
2 - The direction western democratic countries are taking is worrying me
nidhalbt commented on A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019) rollingstone.com/music/mu... · Posted by u/elorant
The easiest way to get the answer to a question on the internet is to post the wrong answer. Simply record the song with your band and claim it's yours.
If nobody comes up to claim it, then the original authors died, and couldn't make it to the final recording. You would have to look for bands whose members died together at the same time.
nidhalbt commented on Ask HN: Absolute noob here, what programming language to learn to land job with? · Posted by u/crmax
I'd suggest https://lambdaschool.com/ or https://www.freecodecamp.org/
These platforms not only provide programming training but also culture and broader context.
Knowing language X or framework Y isn't everything, that's why in interviews people ask questions like "what happens when you open a website".
There's value in studying the "stuff that kept you up countless nights at college but you will never use at work" because it changes the way you think and helps you fit better.
I've actually been thinking about the issue of energy storage a lot recently -- I've read a ton about how lithium-ion battery production is exploding (usually not literally), but it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never needs to be replaced.
It's really cool to see a feasible alternative to batteries. I think climate change is the single most important problem anyone can be working on right now -- amazing that you've found such a massive lever to pull on this issue.
I think the point you just made about the rate of replacement of lithium-ion batteries is very pertinent to solar panels(to the point that many consider solar a scam)
nidhalbt commented on Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices? · Posted by u/thrwaway69
Using an old desktop my dad gave me to spin up some websites getting 1,000,000+ unique visitors monthly. It has some basic specs: 12gb RAM and 8 cores from a decade or so ago.
Was using Raspberry Pis before, but given that many Docker containers don't support ARMv7, I'm just utilizing the luxury of AMD64 (and using Docker Compose, Traefik, and Wireguard to do scaling and networking).
Really cool!
But can you tell us what you use Wireguard for?
isn't the game fun! :)
nidhalbt commented on Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI? · Posted by u/ultrasounder
Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying, and you'll end up with a decent education. It's important, because it's often easier to make a thing work okay than to understand why it works, so you'll get false confidence working through a tutorial. But then you want to apply that to something else and it doesn't work quite right, you won't know why it doesn't work and how to fix it.
Get some textbook suggestions and make a minimum of reading 5-10 pages per day. In about a month or two, you're done with a 300 page book. Repeat that for a few years and you're an expert. Once you have the foundations, read papers too, but don't skip straight trying to using AlphaZero to solve a curve fitting problem.
I agree that MOOCs, particularly in areas such as math and physics, are woefully insufficient.
Nevertheless, videos and MOOCs still have their place, because they help you formulate the questions you need to answer. They help you know what unknowns you don't know.