skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being first to report something is ultimately worthless, and absolutely not what we want to encourage (rushing to publish in order to be first).

What matters in actual journalism, and what we should encourage, elevate, and credit, is the BEST reporting. That is, the most accurate, most readable, most informative, most honest.

Factors like misleading clickbait, content-free speculation, inflammatory commentary, and poor fact-checking need to disqualify outlets from consideration when determining which news source to promote on a given story.

I don't mean necessarily junking a publisher categorically for past sins, but rather looking at each story individually and determining whether someone else is reporting it BETTER.
I was watching this clip of Michael Osterholm on Joe Rogen:

https://youtu.be/B6IgMdsZHbM

He said the covid-19 would eventually slow once enough people get it then we’ll have sufficient immunity that it won’t spread.

Of course, he also said a lot of people are going to get it and we’re at the very beginning of a multi-year problem.
This reminds me of John Koza’s Genetic Programming, a technique for evolving small programs. There is an old Common Lisp library to play with it.
Nice snide comment without anything to support your arrogance.

What inputs other than labour and maybe some antibiotics for foulbrood disease?

Back up your attitude next time you think your right.

If you had any concept of the cost of keeping any other livestock just fed you might appreciate how relatively easy bees are to keep and profit from their production.
Show HN: Coronavirus Dashboard Focused on Clarity
Dawkins hasn't been relevant in the field of evolutionary biology for 15+ years and I don't know why people pay attention to whatever he says just because he built a brand about being an an edgy atheist.

There are literally dozens of arguments as to why 'eugenics' (beyond very basic hanging fruit like eliminating monogenic diseases etc.) wouldn't work and doesn't make sense to begin with and many of them have been spelled out in the tweet's replies and blog posts, I'll let you do your homework.
Living up to its name, Empire state
Most of the mid-range UPS systems that are rated at 650KVA or above will use dual 12V batteries for 24V driving an inverter. You can get 1kW inverters for RV's but they need thick (0 gage) wires connected to the battery.

For "universal" battery power (and lots of gear in the market already) consider 48V power. That has been the standard at phone companies for decades so there is a lot of support for it. I once bid on a 10kW 48V inverter on eBay that had been removed from service at a phone company. It made (240V two phase power for telephone racks).
It's not the most economically accessible, but there is a Roche Brothers in Kendall now. It opened a few months ago.
What about browser support? How long will the latest Chrome/Firefox run on Mavericks?

I couldn’t live without the latest Adobe CC as well. I fell like sticking to old OSs is less and less viable these days.
As suicide and depression are on the rise, I think we've removed many fences without even knowing it. Social customs replaced by technology. Lessons not passed on but ill-got through tv. Assuming we know better than all of the customs of human history. Jamming everyone, whether round or square, into the same hexogonal hole.

Proverbs 22:28
"Do not move an ancient boundary stone which your fathers have set."
Have officials in the US ever been prosecuted for telling voters lies that they want to hear in order to validate their own delusions?

We can draw a meandering line from this tweet back through at least 2000, when a US presidential candidate dismissed his opponent's quantitative reasoning about climate change as "fuzzy math".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics)
Thank you. Where did you get the 12V power supply, from a car battery? Or a solar panel?
That should be a given.

Linking to a paywalled source for an audience that you can't guarantee are all subscribers is like telling everyone to just trust you that a story exists.
Sounds like a personal choice. She has the option to adapt to the circumstances, and has failed to do so.

We aren't allowed to wear flip flops to work. I don't see why heels are tolerated, either.

Work isn't a fashion statement.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
Spreading it out in time and space fuels exponential growth, where you might contain it to slow growth through social distancing.

But you've got to get people out of environments where it is going to spread extremely quickly, like communal living in dorms, just the same.
Remember when we thought the Twitter IPO was going to wreck us and it turned out to be a big nothingburger
Link around the paywall:
http://apkmetro.com/what-we-can-learn-from-the-20th-centurys...
> really NOT loving all the over-engineered upstream components like D-Bus and systemd that seem to be there by default.

I'm happy with the usage of systemd if they take advantage of the hardening features in systemd units for core system services. I'm a bit less happy about the continued usage of Docker, but I get why that's happening for this (EKS and ECS both use it, so it helps support that infrastructure).
Oh yes, but that's easily solvable by a $2k investment into coffee machine, dishwasher and a monitor or two. I assumed people had comfortable living/working conditions at home.
Have you tried OpenCourseWare from MIT[1]?
Tends to have more stuff than YouTube :) lecture notes, and typically assignments as well.
Also, some professors from MIT have courses on edx.org.
[1](ocw.mit.edu)
https://hopwag2.podbean.com/
Not to mention that many students will lose study time dealing with the move, and may likely end up performing poorer than they would have otherwise.

I hope MIT really does take this stuff on a case by case basis. The student who can relocate and be back on their feet in a day will be at an advantage compared to the student who takes longer to settle from the shuffle.
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ Is one of the best resources I’ve found and should answer most of your questions.
More so subject to Twitter cropped image previews on mobile (maybe desktop, too?). Want to see the picture? Click the preview, like it’s 1998 or something. And this has a lot of pictures.

But I quibble: yes, it’s a horrible format for such a thing. But I guess the people have spoken:

https://mobile.twitter.com/nerdette/status/11406772597890457...
Usually the point is the account balance and gains at the top above the chart. It's been a few months since I used RH but I believe you have to touch and drag to see the point you're touching be labeled. The real problem with the screenshot is the lack of labels on the X-axis. It might at least be interesting to see what dates the spikes corresponded to.
I’ll have to find something wrong with HOCON and add it to my list :)

https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1237182409239658500
I wonder what will happen after this first wave passes.

Will people then need to get 2 shots each year, once for flu and once for corona and it's descendants? Can the two be handled with a single shot?

I wonder also what will become of small population centers that manage to avoid the first wave. Will they suffer more greatly in the future, when the virus finally finds them?
Does anyone at google actually have food in their fridge?
The UK and the Netherlands are have performed approximately the same number of tests per capita.

The response seems pretty similar in both countries in that until a few weeks ago, you didn't get tested unless you had BOTH symptoms AND relevant history (travel or contact with known cases). In the UK, there is additionally a system of surveillance testing that is being used to ensure our model of infections is in line with reality.

Due to the increasing size of the outbreak, the UK switched a week ago to testing all ICU patients with symptoms irrespective of history. That is again soon to be ramped up to all ICU patients and any hospital patients with symptoms.

To handle the increased testing, some NHS labs are going to be running covid tests, which means the waiting time for other testing is inevitably going to increase. This is why it's important to only test as scientifically appropriate. This optimal response may differ between countries, depending on their particulars.

All that said, the UK response so far seems fairly appropriate. We've tested in line or more than any other country with a similar level of outbreak.

There is, however, a general acceptance here that widespread infection is now inevitable, and the reason you don't want to impose quarantines just yet is you want to do it when they're going to be most effective at smoothing the peak. Imposing quarantine controls now just means that people are going to start breaking quarantine later on when it's more widespread and compliance is most critical.

The reality is, containment is just a delaying strategy now. This is inevitably going to spread widely, and the governments are just trying to time when best to deploy their limited arsenal of weapons.
However, a number of readers were irritated and left unconvinced.

Chesterton's Fence sounds like Pascal's Wager - it's perfectly convincing and rational until you realise it's misleading and oversimplified.

Of course you shouldn't get rid of things just because you want to change them. But unless a fence-builder left an explicit record explaining why the fence is there, your belated estimate of their reasons is at least as likely to be wrong as your desire to remove the fence.

And that doesn't matter, because the original reasons are irrelevant.

The fence may have been built for a good reason, and the reason may no longer apply. It may not have been built for a good reason, but a good reason now exists.

Skip straight to the problem, ask stakeholders (fenceholders?) if you can find them, run predictive modelling, maybe some A/B testing if it's Schrodinger's Fence, make a backup just in case, and then do what you need to do.

The original fence builder is likely long gone and may not want to talk to you anyway.

(Although if it all goes horribly wrong, maybe try looking on LinkedIn?)
If everyone’s going to go to the same place to buy groceries you might as well keep the cafeterias running. Serve meals in shifts if you think that’s necessary.
How does japan pay for so many hospital beds? They have almost 5x what we have
I'm not a stats expert, and this is a genuine question rather than an accusation. I notice on the "graphs" page, the trends look very close to perfect exponential curves when China is excluded, but get a lot further from that when China is included. Does this suggest a lack of accuracy in the numbers they've reported, or is it more likely that the government's strong reaction to the outbreak quelled the exponential growth in a mathematically disruptive way?
Are you an MIT student or employee?
One possibility is that AMD sales were really low until they came out with Threadripper. Security researchers just didn't put the time into a CPU that's not very common.

There are similar AMD vulnerabilities coming out now:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-take-a-way-secur...
Really???

Needing physical access to compromise a system sounds like a much better way to play whack-a-mole.

If the hardware cannot protect itself, moving the defense to the next layer out sounds plausible to me.
A eulogy for Richard Guy, 1916-2020
(a) and (c) sound like problems that are solved with very common household equipment.
The only advantage is not getting sick with a deadly disease. Productivity is not the goal and will probably decrease.
Decreased carbon emissions from commutes disappearing?

GP's post is ridiculous but not acknowledging the positives of WFH is … I dunno, bone-headed to put it mildly.
It's a fun essay, but because of the way it's written, a reader could easily confuse "second order thinking" with "understand why a decision was made before planning on changing it." I think the author distinguishes them, but the reader might not notice the distinction because of how it's written.

Here's how I would distinguish these two ideas (hopefully the author would agree, but no guarantees):

* Second-order thinking is the ability to understand the impacts of the impacts of a change. If you're playing a chess game, looking only 1 move ahead (just looking at the impacts) means you'll lose against even a mediocre player. The better you can foresee later impacts, the better the decisions are likely to be. In the real world, there aren't a limited number of moves and no one knows all state, so you can't really look ahead multiple stages for all possibilities. Nevertheless, trying is really important. The close says: "The first step before modifying an aspect of a system is to understand it. Observe it in full. Note how it interconnects with other aspects, including ones that might not be linked to you personally. Learn how it works, and then propose your change."

* "Chesterton's Fence" is a useful rule-of-thumb to get at least a sliver of second-order thinking. Basically, if someone else did something, make sure you understand why they bothered to do it before you undo it. That exercise will help give you a bigger picture & may reveal something important that you hadn't considered.

At least, I think those are some of the points the author is trying to get across. If I've totally misunderstood things, I'm sure someone here will correct me :-).
I have only anecdotes.

I can hold my hand a centimeter away from another person's hand and "channel" Reiki to them and they can feel it clear up to their elbow. But I don't know how to make a scientific instrument to detect that.

(BTW, it is great! I was careless taking a pan out of the oven a few months ago and burned my thumb pretty good. I "beamed" it with Reiki and the pain went away and didn't come back. "So I got that going for me, which is nice."

Quoting myself from back then:

> I burned the tip of my thumb the other day taking a pan out of the oven, 450°F. I was careless and didn't quite hold the potholder correctly, burn reflex overridden so I wouldn't drop the pan, it melted the fingerprint whorls. After I finished hopping up and down, pissed off at my own carelessness, I took a few moments to "beam" Reiki to my thumb, while concentrating on communicating with my healing and immune responses telling them to "get in there and clean things up". The pain went away and didn't come back. A very modest blister formed under the melted skin. The spot was tender, and it stung a bit if I let hot water touch it the first day, but after that there was no tenderness. Two days later the blister was gone. The skin is slightly rough, but it's not peeling, nor is it a scab. Day three I woke up and forgot that I had burned myself. The flesh apparently reconstituted itself. I'm not sure it will even leave a scar. [It didn't.] The skin still hasn't peeled.

> In sum, a minor second-degree burn, apply ten seconds of Reiki, result: no pain and accelerated healing.)
Top private US schools provide very good financial aid packages and are a very good choice for underprivileged students if they can get in. Schools in turn want such students for diversity and metrics.
LibrePlanet 2020: Free the Future, March 14-15, online
>Flu typically doesn't need breathing apparatus.

Neither does this virus, typically. However some people end up having severe complications, as do people with the flu which is why the latter causes a few ten thousand deaths each year in the US, and half a million worldwide.

The issue here really is a matter of quantity. Covid-19 is not a mysterious super disease, but it is dangerous enough to overstress an unprepared healthcare system.
No idea. I don't trust anything on wccftech.
What dorms don't have kitchens? Certainly when I went to MIT, most (if not all) dorms at least had kitchenette's, 20 years back. Shared, of course, which is the main problem.
I went to MIT too and with the exception of about three classes, every single in-person class was a waste. The value the school offers is, in order:

- the people you meet
- the brand name on your resume
- the psets and structured guide to learning hard things

Notice that the last two still work over Zoom. If I were in the hard sciences this might be different but as a professional Software Engineer, the classes were almost entirely irrelevant to me.
The intense focus on robotic assembly seems to make sense in this context. Once streamlined, it makes it relatively cheap for Tesla to open up a new factory if supply chain allows for it.
This is my personal opinion and I could be 100% wrong. But I think this is no worse than crazy cow disease or Zika virus or SARS.

Media, as always, cares about clicks and will publish sensational articles. In China the virus has peaked and the president of China declared victory over the virus today. We are 2-4 weeks behind China.

It is estimated the virus will peak in 2 weeks from now. So next 2 weeks get ready for catastrophic headlines. Then eventually daily new reported cases in Italy etc will start dropping and panic will be over.

I think I have contracted the Coronavirus but since I am a healthy 31 years old person I have fought it off and defeated it.
Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.
Sure. When somebody lists things as having one aspect in common, other aspects may differ.
The "problem" with all of these precautions is that, if it's successful, it will look a lot like an over reaction when all is said and done. Which I suppose is better than the alternative, but I worry that successful prevention in this case will, the next time there's an issue like this, make people a bit less likely to take appropriate preventative measures.
Only US Exchange-Listed Stocks / ETFs are commission free.[1] Honestly though, the commissions are extremely low. Definitely lower than that $7k. Just keep in mind, you get what you pay for.

[1] https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=45500
"However I think the feedback could be improved very much if each of the remote students would also stream their video (all at once, without audio)."

Raw streaming video isn't going to do you much good for even just a class of 20ish. But you do make me think of a crazy idea where each student has their camera on, and the client does facial analysis to do what would basically be sentiment analysis. Then just the sentiments get sent up to the streaming server (saving tons of bandwidth, which the clients may not much care about but the central server still cares about even in 2020), and the server composites the sentiments together and displays 3 or 4 synthesized faces representing the general sentiment. So you look at your 3 or 4 synthesized faces as you teach, and if suddenly 2 of them get a quizzical look on their face, you know that there's a non-trivial amount of the class you just lost. Or, alas, if 3 of the 4 of them are staring off into space, you know you've lost the class.

It would be a bit weird, but might be an interesting way to hack our human systems for facial reading into being able to read a virtual crowd.

Two possibilities come to mind; one is where the system reads sentiments, and then if it decides one of the faces is going to be confused, plays a pre-canned "confused" animation. Functional, easy, unless someone very skilled works at it it's gonna have a very 1990s animation feel to it, I suspect. The other is more complicated, but potentially more rewarding, where the system uses some more advanced AI and things like eigenfaces to synthesize a more continuous representation of what the crowd is expressing, which may do a better job of looking more human and may be a much more information-rich way of expressing the crowd's sentiments. In this case I imagine the system trying to maximize the number of real faces represented by the synthesized faces; I'd want to set it up so that a crowd of 90 neutral people, 10 bored people, and 5 confused people get the bored and confused a bit overrepresented, rather than just having 3 or 4 equally neutral faces.

You'll also see I'm pretty stuck on having more than one face, despite the fact I kinda expect any system that tried to do this would end up with just one, but I suspect that trying to represent an entire diverse crowd with just one face will wipe away too much information, both resulting in less information for the user, and also eventually the brain of the lecturer categorizing this as something other than a crowd of people. I think you need multiple faces for this to work, and you'd need to do something like what language analysts do to seek out the real information in a sentence and not be afraid to amplify some of the signals only a small minority are putting out.

Anyhow, the foundational tech for all this all basically exists now; this is definitely something a startup-class effort could do.
Two thousand dollars for those 3 things? Are you Bill Gates? (See YouTube vid of Bill guessing how much household items cost.)

More like $30 for a coffee machine and $250 for a dishwasher. Then $150+ each for external monitors.
See 'Are paywalls ok?' in the FAQ. Article text: https://outline.com/f9FLAD
What Noma did next: how the ‘New Nordic’ is reshaping the food world
What about context?
Probably because the top comment mentioned "ecosystem"?

You're not a conceptual kind of person, are you?
Fair enough. I suppose the fact that this outbreak happened suddenly contributed to my loss of productivity. If I had time to properly prepare a home office and gradually transition to WFH, I could be more productive than today.
>This is a required response to the crisis, not something noteworthy. They're ordering masks because they didn't have enough and as we see now they're already running low.

The president was under no obligation to order masks. There is no precedent. It was a legitimately good decision that is worth of praise, despite the various errors that the administration has already made.

The executive branch is attempting to use the market to incentivize sick leave and stimulate the economy by making business cheaper. There's a phenomenon known as the laffer curve that I encourage you to look up.

The first point in particular is what I'm talking about. It helps to take off the partisan goggles once in a while. If they'd done nothing they be criticized too.

Also don't forget that the administration very early on shut down travel with China - and some of the press (and political opponents like Schumer) did not hesitate with accusations of xenophobia.

It's possible for dumb and/or shitty people to do good things.
Bottlerocket does not package docker. It packages containerd instead for its container runtime.
The government did not "bail out Tesla". They lent them $465 million, and Tesla paid it all back, plus interest, ten years before it was due. [1]

The government DID paid out GM, Chrysler and Ford. I.e. it lent $80.5 billion dollars and $10 billion will never be repaid. [2] Taxpayers paid for that so those companies can keep making private profits.

I wish this kind of misinformation would die, because it's so easy to google and it's factual.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2013/05/22/autos/tesla-loan-repayment/...

[2] https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...