skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The latter already happened[1]. Bayer offloaded most of it's ag business (to BASF) and replaced it with Monsanto. Monsanto has been rebranded "Bayer Crop Science". Although I'm guessing much for the same reason, Monsanto never rebranded any of the dozens of seed companies it acquired over the years (e.g. Dekalb, Seminis, Asgrow, etc.)

The same also goes for Charter → Spectrum.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Sale_to_Bayer
This is pretty interesting, if it is truly tiny and simple enough to reproduce, what impact does it have on quantum computing devices? This example is designed for a single atom, so not applicable for multi-qbit computations, but it seems to break open the floodgates for new research into using electric fields to directly interact with quantum systems cheaply, which sounds potentially huge in my layman opinion.
So they're the extreme, but the general point stands, no?
That wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to leave it up to states if the states weren't also clearly as incapable as the government has shown to be.

Edit: sorry for the confusion, I'm saying letting states decide on appropriate measures somewhat independently is not necessarily a bad idea when competent people are in charge. Each state will have unique circumstances which will require customized interventions. I hear Ohio has been handling this well.
It's complicated. It doesn't stop you from getting the virus if you get droplets on your hands and rub your eyes / nose / mouth, which is one of the more common vectors. So I buy that there's no evidence it stops you from getting the disease. But it does limit the droplets you spray out as you're speaking / coughing, etc. So IMO it would be part of a general solution to limit how much you spread the disease. But self-quarantine is easier to be sure you're doing it right. Wearing N-95 masks effectively is harder than just strapping it on, and the untrained are likely to touch their faces more while they're doing so anyway. I'd be surprised if everyone wearing a fresh mask properly and washing their hands properly before touching the mask or face didn't put a major dent in the pandemic. But that's just not going to happen anyway so we can't tell.

I think the big issue is supply for medical staff. There's a limited supply of legit masks. Medical staff need masks more. We need medical staff more. And the masks are more effective with training / other procedures in place. Other than that - if the masks didn't help you, medical staff wouldn't wear them.
I did something sort of similar for the basic menu controls in a little game I made, visible here [0].

It's a fun puzzle to work out how to draw things like a question mark or on-off power icon in a fragment shader. Definitely not the easiest/quickest way to construct a UI though, especially with weak math-fu like mine.

[0] http://pengaru.com/~vc/tmp/q.png
Suspicious cyberactivity targeting HHS tied to coronavirus response, sources say
It's a good question. I've been thinking of it this way;

If we have an "unlimited" (by which I mean we manufacture them faster than we consume them) number of test kits with a turnaround time of < 24 hrs, then everyone on lock down for 14 days. Medical/Drive through facilities set up to process everyone for a test. Get a test, and then within 24 hours get a text on what their status is (infected, uninfected, immune (post infection)).

People who test positive go into quarantine to be re-tested weekly until they are immune.

People who test immune are allowed to resume work movement while keeping good practice (washing hands, coughing into elbow, Etc.)

People who test as non-infected are required to come back for re-testing every week, can move around with social distancing.

I don't know if it would work (I'm not a public health professional) but from a systems perspective surveillance of the infection seems to be the best strategy for staying on top of outbreaks.

Once a vaccine is available it becomes one of the things you get every year like a flu shot.
This exchange triggered me:

I'm so sick of the "market" paradigm. It's seeped so deeply into every cultural value we have blinded us to many parts of life.

Everything is a market now. Every waking moment your time is on the market. Every thought you have is either contributing to "value" or worthless. Every social interaction is an exchange of value. Every relationship is "optimized." Everyone is an atomized economic actor.

This idea has completely outlived its usefulness and is like a sort of cultural grey goo that corrodes humanity from the inside out.

Sorry, rant over.
> The French have been outdone in so many areas, they're now engaged in a new form of a trade war, which is simply to grab surpluses of foreign companies as they can. And who, even among intelligent, literate people who are responsible enough to grasp material facts is going to care one bit?

When the US fines foreign banks, VW group and others for incredibly higher amounts of money, it's fair-game but when France fines a US company after an 8 years investigation, it's not, and the authorities don't even get the benefit of doubt that maybe they know what they are doing and have a solid case? You don't have any basis to make such a statement that this is only about some revenge.

France was one of the top markets for Apple and had 20 years ago a vibrant network of small retailers dedicated to Apple hardware (without comparison with the distribution situation in the USA). That went downhill once Apple started its online store and then its physical stores. Maybe it's just survival of the fittest, or maybe Apple also tipped the balance in a way that's not ethical or maybe even not legal. That's why we have such government bodies as "Autorité de la Concurrence".

> it seems that Apple was engaged in some otherwise normal business practices.

The "Autorité de la Concurrence" probably has the best grasp compared to anyone on HN regarding what is "normal business practices" and what the law allows in France, which is not the USA.

From TC article, the accusations are rather quite specific:

=======================

The competition commissioner noted that Apple and its partners violated three specific areas:

— Apple and the two wholesalers agreed not to compete with each other and also to prevent other distributors to compete on price, “thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.”

— Secondly, premium distributors were forced to keep prices high to keep them at the same level as those of integrated distributors.

— Third, Apple has “abused the economic dependence” of these premium distributors, by subjecting them to unfair and unfavorable commercial conditions compared to its network of integrated distributors. (These last two points relate specifically to the accusations eBizcuss had lodged against the company.)

=======================

It was a known fact at the time (10 years back or so) that independent Apple retailers were not getting stock from Apple for certain products and therefore couldn't meet demand from their customers. There were even some "hot" products that could only be bought from apple.com or its own physical stores. I don't know if some of these practices were illegal or not (that's why we have government bodies to act as arbiters and enforcers of the rules), but it certainly didn't help the retailers.

There's some more details in https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/03/16/concurren....
... except Italy
You do realize that there are lots of low cost carriers that were started to compete with the expensive incumbent airlines?
Depending on if those businesses are still around in 6 months.
I’ve been a developer for nearly 25 years. I’m not sure if there is anything MS could ever do to regain my trust. Unfortunately this seems to be the way of large tech companies. At one time I thought Google was the best thing ever (don’t be evil). Now I find that I view Google in much the same way as I do MS. A huge corrupt behemoth that needs to be broken up.
We have testing machines which can pump out 900 results/h (in batches of 900). The issue is that nobody is using them for disease testing, they are instead being used for drug discovery by big pharmaceutical companies.
Well. We Norwegians joke that SAS stands for "svensk alt sammen" (Swedish all together). Some of us consider Norwegian Air Shuttle to be more of a Norwegian airline.

And yes, a bailout is likely. The govt will likely help keep Norwegian Air's planes flying during the Coronavirus period. Additional help is possible.
It's also not like Amazon is being an amazing open source citizen; I don't see them acquiring the tech to be an automatically-better outcome than the current version of Microsoft doing so.

IMO this shows the importance of separating technology from platform. Ideally we would have non-profit groups with good governance & corporate support (rather than control) to grow these technologies. If an open source project can be acquired, it's only so free.
All of plainlanguage.gov is a treasure trove of good advice on writing -- definitely a site worth exploring!
I’d rather not be quarantined with a bunch of sick people for two weeks if I’m not actually sick. The risk of me getting the virus is much higher there than among the general populace. So I disagree that there are no downsides or risks for a false positive here. Especially as the disease has a chance to kill me.
It seems unlikely that a member of the Canadian royal family [0] and Canadian military is going to be blocked from returning to Canada if he isn't showing symptoms.

[0] Technically a distinct entity from the British royal family, it "just happens" to currently contain the same members and have similar (but not the same) succession rules.
I hate to sound anti-science, but with something "spread by droplets" from coughs and sneezes and spit, where we should avoid touching our faces, it sure as hell sounds like even the most basic mask could be hugely helpful.

They're trying to conserve masks for health care professionals, and DEFINITELY don't want people using "I'm wearing a mask" as an excuse to go out when they should just stay home, but I can't imagine they don't help a lot.
> > why would you use fossil fuels to extract CO2 out of the air

>Big plants (can) burn much cleaner than jet engines. (Also, it's an interim step.)

Please show me how you extract more CO2 out of the air by burning fossil fuels than you release.
Exactly, and my point it that this particular clock belongs in the 90%, not the 10%.
That paper is about ACE inhibitors, not NSAIDs, and is specifically about patients with hypertension and diabetes, not the general population. Co-morbidity is apparently a huge driver of deaths, so research on these kinds of interactions is very important. But I think parent comment is a data point of evidence that the general public can't be trusted to interpret research.
Skype returned with a Linux client, and Minecraft never dropped Linux support at all.
> I want Google to use my data in a "free for all." They have done incredible and useful things with it and in my opinion have been extremely responsible about it.

One arm of Google might be doing good things, but another arm might do bad things, like optimize engagement, ad clicking, manipulating buying behavior and stuff like that, or even worse.
Magic Windows – new window manager for macOS
Not even in the top 5

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Typically this is called "ray marching" and it is expensive.

With a more standard forward rendering pipeline, you hand the geometry to the GPU as triangles, then your vertex shader tells the GPU how to move your geometry around, the GPU then handles determining which parts of which triangles are visible, then your fragment shader puts your textures on the triangles and handles lighting them.
I am honestly amazed that there is no official way to install Fedora or Fedora CoreOS on GCP. There are no images even on the GCP marketplace.

Stuff like this is what irritates me. Even small vps providers have this.
I’ve just pulled the plug on my business, and now I’m moving sideways - back to regular employment but in a role that’s pretty different from what I’ve done for the last 15 years. Hopefully that will recharge my batteries, and then in a couple of years I might be ready to try again.
Can a vaccine be released in such a short timeframe? I don't think anyone is suggesting a vaccine can be released in less than several months. But it is suggested that the pandemic itself could subside within that timeframe.
Care to explain? Safari has one of the highest standards compliance of any modern browser [0], which IE famously did not.

It has been argued with various success [1] that Chrome is the new I.E., due to "Chrome exclusive" web standards.

[0]: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595
Pretty big news, seems like an actual breakthrough with big implications.
> The current tests have a 0% false positive rate.

Need a citation on this. In order to even make a strong statement about the false positive rate you need to have some sort of alternate confirmation mechanism, usually clinical diagnosis or another more comprehensive test. That kind of work takes time and we haven't gotten to the point where we know this.

False positives in the test are one possible reason for the resurgence in Singapore; the initial screenings were overreporting the number of cases leading to a false sense of security, followed by a surge in real cases as the spread continued.

EDIT: A quick look at some of the tests available indicate that currently providers are not publishing specificity/sensitivity numbers in general under the accelerated release guidelines. One I did find was biomedomics test [1], which claims "The overall testing sensitivity was 88.66% and specificity was 90.63%", so ~10% of negative cases will show as positive.

[1] https://www.biomedomics.com/products/infectious-disease/covi...
How many can they make?
Thinking something is over or under valued is very different from general confidence in the economy. In daily life you're not betting on the economy, you're part of it. You work and spend even if you think the nukes are going to kill everyone. Confidence has a vastly weaker connection to demand for goods.
There's a difference between "not going to last long" and "not going to return 10x to their investors". This seems like another example of the faustian bargain of taking VC money.
Ask this to record companies claiming losses for imaginary sales.
How long did the HIV vaccine take?

Use that as a yard stuck.

A lockdown isn't 'successful' it does little, except drag society into the dirt while a little time is bought to work things out.

Time China bought us but we squandered.

If you're lucky it's a winter desease so it'll become summer and it'll die off. But that's coin flipping a little.

Treatments might be found but it's hard to know how fast, especially while everyone is on lockdown.
Rich people are skewing the data favorably. The average does not tell the full story.

https://qz.com/1519229/the-annual-cancer-rate-report-shows-t...
> I'd imagine a lot of key pathways of trade don't really stop at the border. I'm sure that trucking, for example, doesn't hand off goods. They probably drive straight through after a short border check.

It's fairly trivial (conceptually) to close the border to non-commercial traffic while allowing commercial traffic through, given that both are separated physically at the border and you need paperwork to go through the commercial lane anyway.

> Unless they think they have significantly fewer cases than the United States, it doesn't make sense to block travelers.

Absolutely, given that Washington has mismanaged the crisis, and in the US there is often a monetary cost for even seeing a primary care physician, plus no mandated sick or vacation days, and the numbers so far reflect this.

The biggest concern, in my opinion, would be people who try to come to Canada in the hopes that they can get sick here and recover somewhere that isn't going to bankrupt them as a result. Not that I want our southern neighbours to die in the streets while we lounge in relative medical luxury, but risking overloading both systems would be catastrophic for everyone.
True, but you should also make a fuss if it happens to you. If no one complains, then nothing can change.
$500 from you, but another $XXXX from the government subsidising the airports, the fuel (through zero rated tax), the air traffic controllers, the planes (through big military contracts to keep Boeing afloat), and not billing for environmental damage (CO2, noise pollution, etc.)
Between the economy, the oil price war, the politicization of politics, and most pressingly the virus, 2019ncov is proving to be the potential trigger for wide scale geopolitical change and possibly insecurity. States are going to go into quarantine one by one with little to no coordination. Governments and law agencies will be commandeering emergency powers. We are sitting on a major pressure point and it's impossible to predict the outcome, but there is a high likelihood of political instability and/or violence, even within America.

If the economy doesn't recover soon, people are going to grow increasingly hungry and desperate without radical federal measures. It is prudent to be prepared to defend yourself now because this is shaping up to be the kind of scenario where you really cannot rely on first responders to protect you.

Edit: I meant "polarization of politics" but autocorrect may be hinting at something profound...
There's vids all over YouTube from WuHan what to expect. First the jubilant singing and party slogans, then screaming for help all night https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp3jH6iYrnw

Then each block is allowed movement after 2 months with community punishment if they hide cases and monetary incentive to follow rules, such as keeping contaminated clothing outside. Workers in critical industry will live at work and not allowed home to prevent contamination https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yyucJekT87E
Show HN: Hijax: Intercept Ajax Calls
European countries that have closed borders have said "no family visits" unless the relative is critically ill.
Love the idea, I think I will contribute and design those!
Ohio Limits In-Person Voting
Dead & gone.
It would be interesting if they ended up with Brendan Burns (creator of k8s when he was at google) in charge of github at some point and made him like the OSS champion. He's running all the containers and linux stuff on Azure, so it seems like it would be a natural fit.
QE likely had a smaller inflationary impact simply because the printed money went only towards treasuries and financial instruments disproportionately benefiting the rich (top 5%). There's a strong argument that this is why it didn't show up in the consumer price index and we've also significantly increased wealth inequality.

12k / year for every american is likely too high. I think the Fed should still determine the amount of QE based on inflation and economic metrics, however that QE should be distributed via a UBI rather than used to purchase financial instruments.
Ask HN: German Digital Resources for Kids
My 8 years old daughter self-taught German, and she has progressed to the level to enjoy reading German children's books from her Kobo.

We are looking for digital resources to increase her exposure. With COVID-19 outbreak, I see a lot of digital resources made available/free, however with no-one speaking German around, we don't come by any in German.

Do you know any good German digital education/entertainment resources for kids?
> Let me know what you think.

Just tried it - looks nice!

Feature request: add date/time as text string at the top of output table table:

$ curl https://corona-stats.online/
Last updated: Monday (March 16, 2020) 19:00 GMT (UTC+0)
╔═════╤═══════════════════════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤════════╤════════╤═════════════╤═════════════╤══════════╤══════════╗
║ │ Country │ Confirmed │ Recovered │ Deaths │ Active │ Mortality % │ Recovered % │ 1 Day ▲ │ 1 Week ▲ ║
╟─────┼───────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────┼──────────╢
║ │ World │ 167,449 │ 76,034 │ 6,440 │ 84,975 │ 3.85 │ 45.41 │ 11,352 ▲ │ 57,654 ▲ ║
╟─────┼───────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────┼──────────╢
When you're fighting against a marketing giant, don't you think that a little bit of marketing is justified?
I was surprised to learn he was behind the Oculus Quill (VR art and animation software). He started posting very well produced video lessons on SDFs. I enjoyed this recent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMltMdi1Wzg
I think its likely this would turn into $1K per month for a while. And, yes, for some people it would make an enormous difference.
Current me loves this, and I love all the GitHub tools they've added recently.

Future "5-10 years down the road" me knows this will suck, ending up where all concentrated monopolies end up...
U.S. health agency under cyberattack during coronavirus response
I think there are more "primary" characteristics like kindness or say dependability that we often miss in these kinds of conversations (sic.). Yes there's conversation, entertainment and prowess in bed?, but there are also more basic values that a person cannot help bit bring to a relationship.
I'm not using any of those.
There is evidence look at Asia. Everyone is wearing a mask and they control the virus. If you want to search for research based evidence there are plenty but focus on the research pre coronavirus - right now there is too much noise. One research suggested that with good handwashing masks reduce the infection rate by 75%.
You do remember one of the original Windows NT subsystems was OS/2 1.x, right?
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/nt-and-os2/
And look how that turned out :)
If you keep mowing them, they eventually starve and die. They cannot live off of the root ball forever. So far it looks like it takes two years for that to happen. Every time they throw out shoots it consumes the root ball's food. Cutting off the shoots before they can photosynthesize more food will do the trick. It also helps to cut them down after they flower and before their resources get sucked back into the root ball in the fall.

For scotch broom, they'll also grow back if you cut them off at ground level. But I found if you cut them off right after they flower and start going to seed, they don't grow back. Apparently they throw so many resources into the flower they can't recover.

We also have a huge problem with english ivy, which looks nice but kills the trees.
> There's a school district in Washington where the children have to take a bus through Canada to get to school.

In case anyone is curious, they're referring to Point Roberts, a town whose primary economic drivers are, as far as I've been able to tell, Canadians coming down to pick up packages to avoid cross-border shipping, and providing gas and restaurant meals to those same Canadians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
Don't merge, just mirror. Sign everything. If a mirror finds fresh data on another host, with signatures that check out, grab it.
> But winning is not the same as getting better.

A famous video game coach has a concept he calls the percentage play.

Imagine him reviewing video game footage along with the player after the game. The player would make a successful play. The coach pauses the video and marks a mistake.

"But it worked!"

"It worked in this case. However, it only has a 20% chance of working (due to unreliable teammates, or the opponent making a mistake when they shouldn't). Have you considered this alternative line, which has a 60% chance of success? That's the percentage play."

---

It's also a lesson about not applying NBA advice (where you can expect reliable teammates) to your casual basketball games.
How do you both "don't give a fuck" while also "mak[ing] the effort to make them like me"?