skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On-campus student housing tends to be high density. Bathrooms and showers and kitchens or kitchenettes are shared among many people. Meals are often in large communal dining rooms.

Given the way this virus spreads and how long you can be spreading it before you realize you are sick, once it gets into an on-campus housing unit it has a very good chance of infecting most of the students.

Sending the students home will send most of them to lower density housing, with bathrooms and showers and dining only shared with a handful of people (e.g., their parents and siblings).

For a given student, this changes things from something like "if any one of these 200 other people get it, I'll probably get it" to something like "if any one of these 4 people get it, I'll probably get it".

That's a vast improvement.
I have nothing against you, but I wish more people would get burn by the sms 2fa without backup/alternatives.

Maybe at some point we will realize that it's a terrible idea.
I guess my feeling comes from spending time with opinionated frameworks like Rails. There are sane defaults and you’re up and running quickly. Any time I look at something like React or similar, the instructions for getting started are written like “If you’re using yarn, do this. If you’re using grunt, do this other thing”. I don’t have either, so now I have to choose one before I can proceed. Instead, I just close the browser tab and go on to something else.
Outsider's uninformed opinion: if you attend AA then regardless of any official narrative or agenda this means you're spending important time with people who (a) used to drink, and (b) don't drink any more. Their example plus hearing what they've got to say seems like an excellent approach.
This definition has too much room for subjectivity. It needs objective criteria. Or maybe WHO might need to have a numerical metric that says high large the impact of a virus or its associated disease is, just like the earthquake magnitude.
Taiwan has not even been permitted membership to the WHO and is excluded from WHO participation. Maybe it was Taiwan that the WHO was praising when they were talking of China.
Oh hi there!
Yeah, I knew about Mr. Pirsig and I've always loved the book.

Depends how impatient you are - or perhaps more accurately, how your financial situation is. Because of my marketing background, I started off with a large company (CSC Computer Sciences as it was then) working with a team that was launching a large collection of 'service offerings' - so the writing, while it had to be accurate and truthful, focused on upbeat, marketing-style messaging. It took me 5 years - including some time as a freelancer - before I began to get regular gigs in my target zone - you know, bringing complex software to life for a readership that was largely composed of developers.
If I was doing it again ... and to get into that zone a bit quicker ... I would definitely look at the open source world and offer to help with some projects that gave me some tingles. There are many, many wonderful open source projects that owe their success to great docs (e.g. DJango) and in the closed source world, orgs like Stripe are very well regarded.

I always took two sayings to heart:

1. You need to write a million words before you can call yourself a writer - both Ray Bradbury and Jerry Pournelle are cited as sources.

2. All writing is rewriting. That is, your first draft will be garbage but it's easier to improve on something that you have, than to start with a blank page.

Both quotes have been more often attributed to writing fiction, but the same goes in the tech writing world.

The other important thing to understand is that tech writing is much less glamorous than development, and so it's often harder to fill those slots, which gives you an edge if you can demonstrate a bit of ability.

One option you might consider is simply to apply for those jobs. If you know programming, that's a huge plus. If you don't have a portfolio - urge the hiring company to set you a tech writing task (that's what I did). You can only learn from the exercise. Sure, you might bomb a couple of times, but there will come a time when you don't.

You don't really get much from books until you're into the groove - tech writing is really just about 'doing it' while keeping an authentic picture of your reader in your mind.

Hit me up (I'll put my email in my profile) if you have any other questions.

[Edit]: for presentation and a typo
The logic behind this is that if the organizer cancels the event unilaterally, it's on the hook for the whole cost and might go bankrupt. If they are ordered to cancel by a local authority, they can invoke the force majeure clause in their business insurance and mitigate the loss.

If they don't keep up a happy face until they are ordered to cancel, they could in turn be sued by contractors who end up holding the economic bag and argue that the event organizers chose to upset the applecart when they didn't have to. .
hcaptcha.com is remote only and hiring
Hahaha. Even before all this nonsense—if I proposed, in earnest, a cruise I think she'd leave me because then I never truly knew her.

Too many pints in Dublin and then wine in her ancestral village in Portugal and then we're talking.
No, you didn't. First you insulted, then you corrected someone, now you're trying to raise a flamewar smokescreen. Please just stop.
Apple has already stated in their disclosures that they expect serve impact on their iPhone sales due to supply constraints.
What did the WHO do to lose credibility? I think I missed that story.
Mexico wages are already lower than wages in China. In fact, chinalawblog.com talks a lot about companies shifting to Mexico due to USMCA and short turnaround for supply chain.

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/international-manufactu...
This really highlights the critical design flaw of the World Bank's Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (funded by the pandemic bonds). By the time the conditions are triggered and funds distributed, it's already way too late into the pandemic. These fund should be made much earlier and more should be diverted into proactive measures to maximise effectiveness.
By "fastest growing" they mean by employee headcount:

> Understanding employee growth numbers: Employee growth measures how fast the number of employees has grown. i.e. 100% employee growth in 1-year would mean the company has doubled in size in the last year. 200% employee growth would mean the company has tripled in size.

Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to.
i wonder how people can think that targeted ads are dangerous but also think discussions like this should be public.

kay from the cloak and dagger, memory-erasing men in black knew: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"
==I work in government relations and this is neither news, nor anything new. ==

Lots of people in this article disagree:

> A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.”

> Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said.

> One of the administration officials suggested the security clearances for meetings at HHS were imposed not to protect national security but to keep the information within a tight circle, to prevent leaks. “It seemed to be a tool for the White House - for the NSC - to keep participation in these meetings low,” the official said
At the least, American media has certainly thrown more shade at the American government than Chinese media has thrown at the Chinese government.
Honestly, at a time like this, where California might need federal resources if a bad outbreak occurs in the state - it serves no one to needlessly antagonize the federal government.

It's politics - everyone else should be criticizing the white house in particular, but government officials really need to remain on the administration's good side.
Wouldn't be the first time
More dangerous infection often kill their hosts before they can infect many others, so might result in horrendous dead toll locally but might find it hard to spread very far.
Meet 'Barsi,' the economist directing Israel's virus fight
It turns out that when you elect a celebrity, you get an administration that cares about image and not reality.
In the coronavirus, historians see echoes of past pandemics
That brings up the question, Should we be cleaning products/ food brought home? I mean, normally I will wash produce but what about everything else?
I was telling someone the other day that H1N1 is seen as being not that big of a deal, and if another one or two pan out that way, then the next one after that will kill a lot of people because they start thinking that it was a 'cry wolf' sort of situation.

Look at the situation with vaccines. Your grandparents getting vaccines was a no-brainer. They heard stories of people getting polio or the measles and it was serious shit. Three generations later we have conspiracy theories about vaccines, I think because so few iminently deadly diseases have gotten a vaccine lately. We are down to the tricky ones, and cultural memory of the others is starting to crack.
To be fair, China already delcared state of emergency months ago, but for the WHO to declare pandemic and recognize it as a international problem, it has to be that other countries has also done that. WHO cannot predict things, and they can't declare Pandemic when what they have is mere suspicion, it has to be an actual pandemic to declare. I'm pretty sure numerous experts have warned about the pandemic thing.
Plane tickets, too. Can those be refunded?
It looks like NAB was just cancelled.
yeah, neither is Elastic which is a public $6B company
eBuddy did this back in the early 2000s.
It’s a stupid concern. The reason the government is incompetent is that the government is incompetent. That’s not uniquely American, and there’s no evidence that race has played into any of this. We didn’t exactly change our tune when Italy freaked out. Does that mean we’re racist against Italians?
I'd really like to start seeing less of this sort of comment on Hacker News. It's not even close to literally true.
Possibly a big relief for insurance companies as life insurances typically have exclusions for a pandemic.
Which ones can you recall? If you can "recall" them, why do you still do business with them?

Don't know about the US, but I think most people there shop at Walmart or Costco. Seems to work fine.
@dang looks like a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547607
Added to my reading list, thanks!
That was my interpretation too.
How is this reply from Josh Berkus NOT doing exactly what he accuses ESR of doing?? A directed attack on a person's character riddled with accusations and assumptions about their motive but entirely void of response to any of the points or topics the person brought up, and a dismissive, alienating assertion that the person makes no contribution or adds any value, and their absence will not be felt?

Seems like an attempt to intimidate an opponent and win an argument by making the opponent afraid (or banned) to participate

>>> ESR's “sharp language” is not an attempt to persuade. It is an attempt to intimidate opponents; to “win” an argument by making others afraid to participate. Indeed, even today OSI mailing list composition is entirely folks with enough privilege to be resistant to personal attacks. That's a sad, terrible thing.
It's not “free speech” when it's an attempt to shout others down so that they have no voice. It's something else entirely.
Further, not one of ESR's points is original or even original to this list. In his absence, not one of the ideas he so “colorfully” expressed will be lost. In the meantime, we're missing the input of so many people who will not participate in OSI because of our tolerance for wholly uncivilized behavior like his posts.
One needs to read this, if one assumed that the above-cited e-mail got him banned:

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....

Seems odd that someone should be banned for life for a fairly tame message that was already automatically filtered (one assumes for the various word choices not the content)...
Those quotes appear to prove OPs point about giving people in the discussions the ability to speak freely without second guessing from people like "a high-level former official".
#DontTestDontTell

https://www.epsilontheory.com/dont-test-dont-tell/
Prolog also has some really impressive debugging tools. It allows you to pause execution, change the code, and then resume execution from an earlier point in time.

Michael Hendrick's "Production Prolog" talk gives a demo of this (at 12:17) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_eYTctGZw8
This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term...

Well, this is the problem, right. Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis, otherwise it's a net cost. So if you're outcompeted by the other non-resilient companies before that crisis happens, it doesn't help.

I feel like societal resiliency needs to be rewarded (in many contexts, utilities are obvious but also food supply, etc) but I don't know what a good way of doing this would be, except making it government run and making resiliency a primary objective. I don't see how a for-profit system that rewards short-term gains could ever be made to value resiliency.
> Because getting on the wrong end of a Twitter dogpile is astonishingly easy to do. If the stakes were higher, and not only future careers but all existing contracts would be ruined, that would just inspire more dogpile.

IANAL, but this is a good time to remind people that, in the U.S., but actively trying to sabotage a contract between two parties may be tortious interference[1], and something one can be sued for.

If social media platforms made reporting of and discovery for these kinds of behaviors easier, I suspect we would see a drop-off in such dogpiling.

[1] https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/liability-and-insurance/to...
On-Board Computers for Satellites
Sounds romantic. I wonder how romantic that ancestral village will feel when local health officials have declared a mandatory quarantine and you can’t leave your hotel room.
China is a major exporter to a lot of countries, so the same sentiment applies to them, too. More like, make the world great again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
US Tofu is by and large for animal feed or oil, not tofu.
So no summer Olympics I guess
WHO had a good section in their situation report a few days ago comparing Covid-19 and the standard flu:
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
To be honest, it is a bad flu, as what we call as flu is also most commonly caused by coronavirus. Though its death rate is 200% worse than a common flu with proper hospitalization.
Call the local jurisdiction where your event is being held and 'ask' them if you should cancel it. 'If' they say yes, then call your insurer.
It looks like the national response to the conronavirus here in the US is going to be, "Let's hope it's not much worse than a seasonal flu."

It's really not looking good.

I'm still hopeful, though that's because it's the only thing I've got.
Be sure to keep on complaining about Apple not allowing interpreters on iOS though
effective propaganda is always invisible to an inside observer.
Think for a second. You can’t close schools in the US. There is no safety net for people to not go to work. No job, no healthcare at all.

Panic only makes it worse. The sad reality is the best option we have at the moment is for people to pretend like nothing is wrong. Everyone gets to keep their job, income and health insurance for as long as possible. If you get sick, stay home. If you get really sick weigh the cost of going to the doctor against death.

In much of the US many people will opt to just die at home instead of seek medical care. As a result, the system actually won’t get overloaded. If people panic and start showing up at the ER it will though.
Among others, the numbers are way under-reported. For example, in Iran there's good reason to believe that 1-5% of the population already have it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/irans-coro...

Even if you look at Italy, though, and if you assumed that their numbers were accurate (highly unlikely), 20/100k is only 5-6 doublings away from 1% of the population, or as little as 3-4 weeks if not properly contained.
It is not the food that is the problem , it is the packaging. A large percentage of packaging products are made in China, so a producer may have the food here , but packaging will have to adapt with low to no supplies from China.
You could say "let's try in August" and if warm weather has positive effects, then I guess it goes ahead, or if not, you just flat out cancel.

It's irresponsible to hold events right now.
> it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.

If the prices weren't really that different then why did those parts of the supply chain go to China in the first place?
Genuine question: What do the alt-right have to gain by dismissing the potency of COVID?

I know the South Korean government took that exact position because of their pro-China stance. They tried really hard to downplay the dangers of the virus simply because of its Wuhan origins. knowing that the Trump administration is on the other side of the fence regarding China, what do they have to gain by dismissing the situation?
Mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 2-3% with medical care, and maybe 10% without. For common flu it's roughly 0.1% depends on when and where of the outbreak.
Show HN: Evolutionary optimization for landing pages
Yes, but the algebra required to check the equations is much less than what's required to solve them.
You could be flippant and say that China IS Taiwan ;)
> That seems more like the best response would be to quarantine dorm residents at the first positive test

This assumes that reliable testing kits are widely available, which in the United States they most certainly are not.

> Kicking the students out just risks making a larger pool of uncontrolled carriers.

We've seen from the experiences of the cruise ships where coronavirus cases have emerged that the virus transmits through densely packed groups of people at disproportionately high rates. Whereas the experiences of China and South Korea indicate that putting distance between people can significantly retard transmission.

In this context, a dorm is effectively a cruise ship made of cinderblocks. The solution isn't to lock the passengers in together, it's to get them off the ship and spread them out as far as possible.
I agree the fact we exist and we can consider our existence is something special but still it won't help me with believing that things will be better tomorrow or that there is an afterlife.

when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith.

At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)
I’d like to congratulate The United States of America’s for allowing their country health response to a pandemic to be about pleasing the great leader for political reasons

Do people realize how fucked that is?
Oracle slogan is "be exactly as evil as you can get away with".
> That's literally their primary function: to sound the alarm.

Yes, but if they sound the alarm too frequently they'll get a reputation as "the boy who cries wolf." When there really is a wolf, their alarm needs to be believed for it to have any value.

What they have here is an unenviable balancing act. Sound the alarm too frequently, and the alarm is worthless. Sound the alarm too infrequently, and the alarm is worthless.

Edit: Blackwater rebrands itself to make itself more obscure, which runs precisely counter to the goal of spreading public awareness / sounding alarms.
There's the other extreme as well - being a cynic in all circumstances will leave you consistently feeling burnt out.
That is a problem you can handle in a couple months.

At worst, it'll give you more hindsight, and at best time will help people see reason.
> One potential wrinkle here would be exactly what legal standard would be required for the coronavirus to qualify as a true force majeure

... for the institution.
Getting kicked out of your house could easily be a force majeure for the tenant

I'm curious how a force majeure clause applied to the current pandemic would help the institution more than its tenants.
This Wiki link is awesome! It is way more useful to get an idea of major news trends over time than OP's blog
I'm a bit surprised this is being downvoted. It's quite clear the federal government has been suppressing testing. (I assume that's what the comment refers to, not that the USA is forcing anyone to work in factories).
Cows, chicken, pork and fish included.
go to /r/covid19 - it's one of the highest SNR about this clusterf* on the wide internet. plenty of CFR (case fatality ratio) estimation papers there.
Its not xenophobia, to resist the subversion of a totalitarian regime who goes back on there word every time and abuses its people as slaves.

China has played the xenophobia card one time to many. Meanwhile - in china, they blame the foreigners for everything. Time to get a new propangda trick- this one is spend. Love the chinese people by the way, when programming there on a machine felt really welcome and met a lot of nice guys.
I'm an electrician. I was very confused for the first few paragraphs.
I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index). Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api!

But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API
myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.
You can't cancel or suspend the elections, there is no provision for it in the Constitution. Also, Trump could never extend he time in office unless he is re-elected since there is literally nothing in the Constitution to extend a Presidential term unless elected.
Take a look at the Biogen conference. 70 of 92 coronavirus cases in MA are linked to the employees of that company, and the conference is thought to have been a major vector [1].

Ask yourself if that's a risk you're welling to take having been associated with that conference.

I think event organizers are in a particularly brutal position. I know that the credibility and finances of a lot of events are on a thread, and that cancellation can crush the event (even in the future). It's a tough decision.

Were it me, I would cancel, because I think it's the responsible thing to do.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/health/coronavirus-massachuse...
Theres a big election coming up and the guy with the most to loose happens to be the one owned by special interests who wants to get the poors back to being uninsured.
From the official guidelines: Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html