skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most people just don't have the discipline to work remotely.

I'd phrase it differently: most people don't start with the discipline. However, it's something you can learn. I don't know if everyone learns. I don't know if everyone learns in the same circumstances. I don't think nearly as many people will learn under exceptional circumstances (virus pandemic) as they would if they were starting to do full time remote permanently. And yes I'm concerned that a lot of people/companies will draw the conclusion that remote can't work because that one time we had to do it, there were problems...
It is a good model not b/c it's politically correct, nor adopted by an authoritarian state, it's good simply because it worked: brought over 3000 new cases everyday in Wuhan down to single digit in recent days.

Any government or organization is problematic if it puts 'principles' over human lives.
The author is THE Doug McIlroy. It's wonderful to learn that he's still around and spreading the good word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy
> On the surface it sounds a lot like it would produce error messages like “expected ‘;’” that most beginner programmers come to hate

Do people really come to hate these? I'd expect the opposite -- that people would start off hating messages like "expected ';'", but fairly quickly become accustomed to what they almost always mean.

As long as you can look at the message and have a good idea of what's wrong, it's not a bad message.
It's surprising that Doug McIlroy still reads and writes about UNIX.

For those who don't know, Dough is the guy that invented pipes.
There's also no guarantee immunity will last long enough to be effective, or that the virus won't be a moving target like flu.

Conversely, buying time with isolation makes the odds of a treatment more likely. There won't be a vaccine until next year, but various other possible medical interventions are already being considered and tested.
From my perspective I'm trying to maintain my health while also working many hours at a computer each day. At 30+ I don't need milk anymore. I'm not a growing child, or calf. ;)

My whole family has developed lactose intolerance, I'm the last one left. I chose to take milk out of my diet pre-emptively and replace it with oat milk for cooking, several years ago.

Partly because it's an unnecessary source of fat. I loved milk, used to drink it like water. Now I drink water like I used to drink milk.

Sometimes I'll mix lactose free milk and oat milk for luxury cooking.
It's special in that the Western world and their economies are much more interconnected and fragile than China or Iran, and South Korea was considered special due to the sect. It's also special in that they didn't have any experience with SARS.

Besides Italy did start to apply lockdown measures to specific towns, and closed schools when they had 20 cases. It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. The US has had clusters out of control in Washington state for almost as long and the federal agencies were actually trying to silence them. And another in NYC, which is basically the economic powerhouse of the United States.
Has anyone found any good spreadsheet models that might show assumptions?

At a local level, I want to be able to help my mother-in-law. If I and my family got it now, I could help them in a month. That is clear and logical at a local level, but may be counterproductive at a global level. Conflict!

At a global level, flattening the curve is about hospitalization. Early infections among those highly unlikely to be hospitalized reduces future risk. But, how does that square with overall growth?

While the local scenario is clear, the global involves more assumptions that can't be modeled in ones head. Dying to play with models.
I present you https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/the-littlest-boy/ which also was to be deployed into prepared shafts to make some area impassable. The keyword here would be
"Wallmeister" for the people tasked with that mission.
Prominent Nigerian Dies of Coronavirus
>If they manage to flatten the curve by timing measures, and if there is a second outbreak this winter, it may well save lives. The Chief Scientific Adviser and other experts are not horrified, they came up with the plan and are defending it, so no, ‘experts’ are not horrified, though some disagree (which is fine).

the question then comes down to if you think this will be better or worse than other methods. I don't understand why you were so hard on the parent comment when you reduced the question and still failed to answer it.

>I’d be more worried living in the US right now given the mixture of denial and bluster which has been the response so far.

yes, it is a dumpster fire. but that doesn't answer the question either.
UAVs don’t have to be battery-powered; don’t mistake them for quadcopters.
I heard about this first from fake news -- promoted from a university of Vienna lookalike, and then rebuked from actual university of vienna. But then it became real news! Very confused.
It’s difficult in practice to distinguish between general and lib-specific flags, becuase one developer thinks is general does not always be considered the same by another, and you either need to magically read developers’ minds, or make a decision somewhere and leave a portion of your users grumpy. This is especially difficult for an ecosystem as established as C++ since there are too many interest groups all want different things.

And more good luck if you don’t control the compiler—whatever you decide may end up wrong tomorrow because the compiler developers change their minds, and of course you take all the blame because everything works except when the user uses your tool.
The important point in the letter seems to be

>we don’t yet know if this novel virus will induce long-term immunity in those affected as other related viruses do not. Therefore, it would be prudent to prevent infection in the first place. More research is urgently needed on this front.
I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the problem? Is it easier to use?
Wasn't this "fake news?
I think the best way to battle Coronavirus is to stay home and order all your stuff online.

Here in Denmark the NGO Red Cross has established a helping-hand network where you can either help or get help - that is an excellent way of helping each other, right?

All the best to you! Get well soon!
There are almost no drawback to the health system by introducing strict measures sooner rather than later. Studies supporting stuff like lockdown or containment fatigue is also sorely lacking. Basing our epidemic response on this is completely bonkers.

The overwhelming consideration is the blow to the economy. The government should at least have the balls to admit it and not hide behind 'science'.

(The only issue with closing schools which might affect the healthcare system is childcare for healthcare workers. This is already in place as a mitigation in other countries.)
> The majority of humans are lactose intolerant and can't drink cow's milk

The majority of adult mammals are lactose intolerant and can't drink any milk; this is true of humans too. Very young mammals generally are not lactose intolerant and generally initially rely on milk, usually from the same species but in most cases it can be substituted from other mammal species (the main problem being that often other-species suppliers are disinclined to cooperate, not any nutritional/digestive barriers.) This is, again, is as true of humans specifically as it is of mammals generally, and domestication addresses the cooperation problem.

> So clearly it's not essential for humans of any age.

Milk is essential for very young humans. Milk from humans (and especially their own mother) is ideal, but there are not-infrequently a variety of problems with that, and the general solutions we've found mostly rely on cow's milk as a key component. For somewhat older human children, it's not essential but still useful, and even for adults it has uses (even for lactose intolerant adults; e.g., in the form of milk/whey protein isolates.)
Sounds like a good idea to me -- just having more languages available for people to write extensions in sounds like a huge win.
Leather and denim are probably your best bet. Higher quality leather jackets can last for 10-20 years if you take care of them.

Personally I recommend Schott in NYC. A bit pricey but my jacket still looks great 5 years later. I imagine it will be wearable for at least another decade.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schott_NYC
Yes - and moreover, the very old and frail living on their own are vulnerable to many things other than Covid. Having a neighbour check in on them every day, for example, might mean that if they have a fall then they are found before they die from injuries or lack of food or water.

There is very real risk in isolating these people for months that this type of protection is lost and costs more lives than it saves so there is a complex tradeoff involved.
Fight to Reunite: How Wuhan Tackled Covid-19
Irish folk music works wonderfully for this purpose too
I don't think that assumption is true because it should be far more easier to brute force the master password of a deterministic password manager. Worse, the OP's solution accepts "password" as a master password, which means that many, many people are going to have the same generated passwords if this gets widely adopted.
What caused this whole mess was the nature, not the Chinese party/people.

In the first few weeks of the virus transmission in China, nobody can anticipate the lethality of the coronavirus. People may think it is just another flu. Who knows? Yes, there were delays in the reporting and yes it could have been handled better. But the following actions of China were swift and determined. The fact is the coronavirus has been contained in China. The cases reported in China are single digit today. Fact shows China's model is effective, no?

You think the governments in EU or US could have done a better job if the coronavirus first appeared there? I'd say no. Why? Because the EU and USA have all the data and information about the coronavirus shared by China for months. You have witnessed all the mess caused by the virus in China for months and so what? Trump was down playing the danger of COVID-19 just a few days ago. The USA cannot even cover a fraction of its citizens for testing the virus.

We know it seemed to be a god sent opportunity to point fingers to the "authoritarian" system of China at this moment. But guess what? The coronavirus does not slow itself down regardless you are a democracy or not. Prove your system/model is better by saving the lives of your own citizens instead of bashing China, will you?

PS. we still don't know from where/what the coronavirus come from. I suggest wait for scientific proof before jumping to the conclusion that it started from China. last time I checked, the Spanish Flu did not originate from Spain.
The most effective strategy would be wave isolation. The virus cannot be contained except by clean-room quarantine for everyone, which is clearly impractical.

So the next best option is to spread the peak by alternate phases of more or less strict social distancing. The virus will still spread, most people will still get it, but the health care system isn't swamped, so resources remain to treat the elderly and vulnerable.

At the end of the season, most people have immunity - assuming it's possible - and you've limited the total number of deaths.

The economic cost is huge, but so is the economic cost of forcing your health care system to collapse.

It's possibly not obvious yet, but the economics of this are going to be ruinous whatever happens. So it would be wise to create some mitigation for that, and suspend the usual market-eats-everything rules.
> But like didn’t you go to high school or college? Did you never have to study at home?

My (admittedly limited) experience with education is that no, you don't have to study that much. Pay attention during classes/lectures, do your exercises during the breaks and that covers most of the stuff. Maybe do an hour here or there at home.

Then there's the one off course that has you do more work than you can pull within these limits; dread the deadline and slack on. Pull an all-nighter before the deadline. That's how it goes.

I'm watching a close relative attend university and I feel like they're studying even less than I did.. they attend lectures maybe 1-3 times a week, sometimes watch a video lecture... mostly just stay at home, play games and slack on. Jeez! Seems to translate to something like 10-15 hours of work a week? And not particularly demanding work. In for a shock when they need to be at work 8 hours a day and actually try get some stuff done every day (every hour even).
The environmental arguments are hardly clear to anyone with experience farming since they appear to hinge on equating ranch land with arable land and cattle feed with millable grain. Industrial farming is easy to revile and many people are indeed searching for more sustainable and ethical alternatives. My family raised a small amount of cattle growing up and most of the "clear" arguments against livestock seem incredibly ignorant to me and contrary to the basic facts of my life.

The ethical picture of killing animals is equally murky since obviously to feed the masses industrial farming is necessary and that means pesticides and vermin control. So, no matter what you're going to be killing animals and it becomes a question of utilitarian balance or drawing a line and saying those animals (rats and all insects probably) don't matter. Meanwhile, we still live in an era of slavery, but most people fill up their cars and eat chocolate without any cognitive dissonance. Why would the ethics of meat and dairy be uniquely more clear to people than human slavery and murder?

Finally, people who actually care about their diet probably want a natural source of vitamin B12. South Park actually put the best satirical point on this side of the discussion. People switch over to things like the impossible burger and think they have improved their diet, but they are just switching out one crappy processed diet for another. For many people the clear reality of needing more fortified foods seems to be a degradation, not an improvement.

Do I think these apologetics are going to change anyone's mind? No, just like your apologetics to people around you aren't convincing them in all but a few exceptional cases. Maybe at least people can agree that the discussion is anything but clear and try to be civil but polarisation is more of the zeitgeist than civil disagreement. Logistics and economy are not easy, ethics either, nor nutrition. The only truly clear thing in all of this to me is that the best thing I can do is not have any children, but it is equally clear that other people are not going to stop that.
In my case the first crisis came after three months.

It gets better after that.
Europe right now shows the full spectrum of possible solutions. It is not as if draconian lockdowns are the only alternative. Look at Germany, for example. They've been using testing quite effectively and are also looking at primarily isolating vulnerable people.

It will take some time before we know more about how successful these strategies are. Different countries are at different phases in the infection spread which makes comparisons unfair.

If anything, the politically easy decision would be the lockdowns which shows voters strong leaders capable of "doing something" (even if the value of this "something" is at best unclear).
On the aspect of pain and suffering: many small animals are killed in the act of harvesting a field mechanically. So if we posit that those animals are sentient and feel suffering, and far out number the number of bovine slaughtered, would we not cause more suffering haversting a field? This is serious question.

Also: mono cultures of plants a can destroy landscapes and ruminating animals such as cows can be quite beneficial for the landscape.

Edit: “mono” instead of “no”
That's how fake news sites work. They mix fake to real to confuse people. The purpose of fake news coming from Russia is not to tell alternative truth, the purpose is to make people doubt everything.

You are confused = You are victim of fake news.
It seems to me that almost everyone prefers having the ability to work from home at some times and work remotely at other times. Also, there are clearly preferences around this, such that a given person might prefer one of the other more (or most) of the time.

Taking this into account, along with the undeniable time and energy benefits of remote work, I think companies should start preparing for, allowing and offering remote work. It should become normalized, so that people who want to work from home on some days should be able to.

Importantly though, I don't think it makes sense for most companies to try to completely switch to remote work. Eventually, I think this will lead to a stable equilibrium of some significant percentage of people working from home and a significant percentage coming to work, on a given day. Except for companies which deliberately want to be remote-only, I doubt it would ever result in no one coming to the office.

This seems like a win-win. It reduces the burden of commuting for those that do not want it or cannot manage it on a given day, it gives people more free time, it lessens energy expenditure, but there's still an office to come to and socialize, interact directly and do immediate in-person business, just with a bit less people than usual.
Also interesting:

> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.
On their defense all you wrote about could be seen as antiquated:

- header/footer: good modern UX always has action and effect close together, so Ideally you'd just click that area, not fiddle with nested menues.

- files: it's cloud time, look at files on IOs. It either lives an the app or goes through "share". And while I personally hate it it's actually a fair thing to have it that way.

It's just professional tools that have to be complex because they are more general and powerful. Consumer apps don't have to be any more and that makes them diverge from the pro tools further than ever.

We were just early enough to be forced to learn complex and relatively low-level interaction with our computers. That's great for understanding and using professional tools, but I'd argue it's not necessary any more to get by digitally. And even with the professional tools they are often just a bit behind in UX.

I think drawing a parallel to low-level programming languages makes sense. If you grew up with a lower level you'll have learned a ton of advanced stuff, but it doesn't make sense to force CS students to still be fluent in assembly(?) or whatever.
Interesting, I'm not sure if you can control the spread reliably enough by closing schools and big events. Seems like a huge risk to me. It's very easy lose control with exponential growth. Also I have no idea how you could spread the disease only to low risk groups, I don't think you can find enough volunteers either
I had inquired into why people refuse and the radiologist pretty much said that religion seems to be a major factor.

He also asked me about the "gun situation" where I live. We have a lot of guns but they are locked in a safe. They are for turning animals into jerky. We don't sleep with guns under pillows. We don't even lock our doors.

But he was concerned about my access to suicide machines. Five weeks later I would understand his question.
If it is even half-ass maintained a wooden house will survive far longer than that. If your roof isn't leaking and your siding is either painted or not wood, there is very little that will do actual structural damage to the house. Dry wood can last hundreds of years if it has any sort of protection from the sun and rain.

Also, wood houses can be built to much higher quality than what people are building new to sell on the open market. Square footage has a much higher profit margin than thicker and more insulating walls or better wood or more careful and accurate framing. Even putting in something highly visibly like way better windows and doors isn't going to get you jack shit of a return if you are building to sell rather than ever paying for heating and cooling costs or what not.
It remains to be seen whether it will answer these questions, but the government has agreed to publish its own models - https://twitter.com/janemerrick23/status/1238912217921335297
I don't think there's any working strategy for infecting the young and keeping them separate from the old. Many young people have contact with older people (live together, work together, being taught by them etc.), and anybody who claims it might work is IMHO divorced from reality.
Fixing Failure
Germany and US wrestle over coronavirus vaccine: report
>What mostly helped was lack of mainland Chinese people entering the country

If the whole world closed their borders to China back in early Jan (and followed up with tracing and quarantine), we would be seeing this right now. Unfortunately, China was lobbying heavily against it.

Now China, being a massive exporter, has a global demand problem in addition to the local supply problem of shutting down their country for 8 weeks.
> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.

When part of the joy of a place is that gender doesn’t matter, it’s hard to write about that joy, because calling attention to gender is the opposite of that.
You need an already logged-in device or a printout of the secret key to login. The former isn't much of a concern because if an attacker has access to a logged-in device, you're screwed anyways. The latter would require physical access to your home, and the same applies here too.
Those things are in no way comparable.

First of all, this is not a transfer of trust from A to B: in both cases (traditional password manager or this thing) you still need to trust that your own device is not compromised. But with this thing, you _also_ need to trust that the website is not compromised.

Secondly, the website is a much juicier attack target than your personal computer.
Epidemic control and avoidance through instantaneous digital contact tracing
A material science professor at TU Delft [1] and this material is commercially available [2].

From the abstract of `Bacteria-Based Self-Healing Cementitious Composite for Application in Low-Temperature Marine Environments` [3]: "The composite displayed an excellent crack-healing capacity, reducing the permeability of cracks 0.4 mm wide by 95%, and cracks 0.6 mm wide by 93% following 56 days of submersion in artificial seawater at 8 ◦C. Healing of the cracks was attributed to autogenous precipitation, autonomous bead swelling, magnesium-based mineral precipitation, and bacteria-induced calcium-based mineral precipitation in and on the surface of the bacteria-based beads. "

[1] https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/materi...

[2] https://www.basiliskconcrete.com/hoe-werkt-het/?lang=en

[3] doi:10.3390/biomimetics2030013
Have another BF, if you really want.
Daily OPRA traffic has lately exceeded 6 TB, compressed. So, probably 15 TB. Figure 58 bytes of header + ~50 of payload per packet.

Note the "all NY exchanges" includes a whole hell of a lot more than NYSE.
Focus on writing down meeting notes (or watch another person do it and pay attention in case you have something to add or they got something wrong).
This is a more recent meta-analysis, but thanks it's helpful that you're linking to the discussion.