skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually just completing a high-strength vitamin D tablet course and the advice for taking it in the instructions is to take it with your evening meal, so sounds like a load of hogwash.

Here, for example, are the instructions that came with my tablets:

https://www.sunvitd3.co.uk/site/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/S...

Note the:

"Please Note: SunVit-D3® tablets should be swallowed whole with water and taken in the
evening with a main meal."
"The primary aim is to flatten the curve with specially timed interventions and any herd immunity is a by product of that"

That is my understanding too. I've read through a lot of the official publications[0] and nowhere found reference to "herd immunity". The best reference to "herd immunity" I've been able to find is the quote from the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance that "our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it."[1] but this still seems clear that the main aim is to "broaden the peak" and get the benefits from buying more time that this brings, possibly including the "herd immunity" point (but not limited to it - there will be other benefits, e.g. more time to find a vaccine).

What isn't clear to me is what the exit plan is for the countries that have a full lockdown in place at the moment. Are they going to keep lockdown in place indefinitely and hope a vaccine is found? Or are they going to lift the lockdown and then repeat when the virus begins spreading again?

[0] e.g. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-actio...

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea6...
Every kind of food has a drawback, almond milk for example uses enormous amounts of fresh water. But you can then argue that almonds use less water per calorie than other foods. But then you can argue the water has to be moved large distances to get to the almond tree so a lot is lost in transit. Etc. I drink Lactose free milk (basically regular milk with lactase) after drinking all the various non dairy milks, but only in my breakfast smoothie. Everything is a balance.
> Herd immunity will be a by product

It won't, though: at least, not in the way that 'herd immunity' is commonly understood.

We technically had herd immunity from measles, but it wasn't effective at stopping people from dying until there was a mass vaccination program.
You reminded me of a paper that suggested that there was an error made in developing the RDA of Vitamin D; the 600IU RDA may be wildly wrong.

“ It also estimated that 8895 IU of vitamin D per day may be needed to accomplish that 97.5% of individuals achieve serum 25(OH)D values of 50 nmol/L or more.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210929/
What if more people became vegetarians -- then the fields nowadays being used to grow soy beans for hamburger cows could instead grow biodfuel plants
One of the books that most influenced my coding was Software Tools by Brian W. Kernighan, P.J. Plauger [0]. Even though I never used Ratfor, the clear descriptions were immensely useful.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/515603.Software_Tools
Glad you liked it. Let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions.
There's a very real risk of economic cataclysm, which will roil through the economy and hit many people very hard, causing all sorts of disruptions, negative health outcomes across the board.

Tourism, restaurants, entertainment is 3-7% of the economy (more in Italy) and layoffs are coming very swiftly. Taxes fall, unemployment payments spike, it rolls over into other parts of the economy, bad loans, credit dries up, stock markets dive, investment plummets. The rich will lose some net-worth it will hit the poor physically in many ways, for example, millions more left without health insurance in the middle of a crisis.

Taiwan and S. Korea have been able to keep a lid on the virus without getting draconian, maybe we can follow their example.

But there's quite a lot of risk in these 'lockdown' decisions, it's not just about immediate health outcomes.

So it's not an easy decision.

I should add, the letter is very well written, it's oddly not dramatic, given the gravity of the situation.
Yes, it works on quite a few languages.
Glad you liked it. Let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions.
David Attenborough calls for ban on deep sea mining
Are patients with hypertension and diabetes at increased risk for COVID-19?
The theory is that vitamin D intake helps set the circadian clock because it has been correlated with exposure to sunlight for hundreds of millenia. I think Gwern did a single blind experiment on himself and found some correlation to lower sleep quality if it's taken at night.
Almost all filled up, expected to fill up today or tomorrow.

Dutch:

https://www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/3171310/Code-rood-in-de-...
From the article: "ACE2 can also be increased by thiazolidinediones and ibuprofen. These data suggest that ACE2 expression is increased in diabetes and treatment with ACE inhibitors and ARBs increases ACE2 expression. Consequently, the increased expression of ACE2 would facilitate infection with COVID-19. We therefore hypothesise that diabetes and hypertension treatment with ACE2-stimulating drugs increases the risk of developing severe and fatal COVID-19."
Judas is actually the most important player in the story, and Jesus might have put him up to it (he was his favourite, after all).
Ten Considerations Before You Create Another Chart About Covid-19
> I highly recommend Jeremy Scahill's work.

Seconded, I wasn't referring to Hillary "Jill Stein/Tulsi are Russian assets" Clinton.

I'm not even American, so my interest on American politics is academic at best (eventually the trends trickle down to other countries). The US is ahead of the rest of the Global North in complete institutional breakdown.

I just don't believe we should paint "politicians" with a broad brush. Most of them (like in all professions) are too ignorant to be evil, they just go with the flow. The the zeitgeist changes, they will change with it.

I'm no anarchist, so I believe the zeitgeist can be changed, but that goes against entropy, you need to apply energy to keep it changed. It's not a one-shot revolution that does it. Life is too depressing otherwise...
One of the useful applications of trigram-based analysis I have done is the following: for a large web-based application form where about 200000 online applications were made, we had to filter out the dummy applications - often, people would try out the interface using "aaa" as a name, for example.

Since the names were mostly Indian, we did not even have a standard database of names to test against.

What we did was the following: go through the entire database of all applications, and build a trigram frequency table. Then, using that trigram table, do a second pass over the database of names to find names with anomalous trigrams - if the percentage of trigram frequency anomaly in a name was too high (if the name was long enough), or the absolute number of trigrams in name was too high (if the name was short), we flagged the application and examined it manually. Using this alone, we were able to filter out a large number of dummy application forms.

Of course, it is not a comprehensive tool since what forms a valid name is very vague, but I think this kind of a tool is useful and culture-neutral.
The CP-SAT solver would be used for combinatorial optimization problems. These solvers are very different than the ones you'd use for planning problems a la PDDL.
Do you think we in the UK will be insulated by this global event just because we didn't close our schools? Even if our hotels are open, who will come? This will only delay our recovery once the dust settles.

No-one is asking for a complete shutdown right now. In fact, the whole reason to start implementing more serious measures (like school closures) now is to prevent the type of lockdown we are seeing in Italy and Wuhan as a result of the health system being overrun.
That's what my company is doing. We're small, already a Windows shop, so it just makes sense to centralize on Azure.
It depends on how good your hand-rolled implementation is.

Will it find the shortest path in a graph faster than your Dijkstra implementation? No, leave the simple problems to hand-rolled code. Can it run e.g. TSP faster than a dedicated TSP solver written by an expert? No, but it sure will beat what you or I can code up of TSP over a week. These things have great heuristics and can solve/approximate a very wide of variety of NP-hard problems much better than you could yourself.

I've used the CP solver to plan sports tournament schedules (make sure everybody gets equal time on the streamed field, make sure that special team that arrives with the late train doesn't have the first game, nobody has to play two games in a row, etc.). I made the mistake of using the Python frontend (which is much worse documented than the C++ API), but otherwise, it was a good experience. Constraint programming feels a bit odd at first, though.
Google, with their enormous warchest of money could be providing free test kits for everyone, not developing some chinch web site locator that could be built in an afternoon by a single developer.

They have clearly seized upon the moment for PR.
Would certainly be an interesting lecture, but the quality of picture and sound is terrible. You can hardly read or understand anything.
https://www.gwern.net/zeo/Vitamin-D
> The overwhelming consideration is the blow to the economy.

But this is just as bonkers. It totally ignores the blow to the economy of people dying with no effective treatment because the healthcare system is overwhelmed. If that's really the covert motivation they're being penny-wise but pound foolish to an unprecedented degree, even if we were to ignore the obvious ethical issues with this sort of response.
Having spoken to the local staff at Waitrose, there is no shortage of supply (as of yet). The shortage comes from them not being able to refill stock from their warehouse fast enough due to the unprecedented demand. They are also constrained by their business model. Supermarket shelf spaces are super competitive and expensive, with many products fighting for exposure. So, they maintain a tight refill schedule, which is difficult to alter in a short time. They also have little capacity to fill all shelf spaces with essentials, as they still have to stock and display certain non-essential items (even if these are not in demand) contractually or otherwise. The general gist of it is that they have enough in the warehouses, and even though they can add 2x more, they are not prepared for every single person stocking up 3 months worth of essentials in one go.

In my local Waitrose, they've already limited the purchase of toilet papers to max 2 packs per person and pasta to 3 packs per person. I believe all supermarkets in the UK have already released a statement requesting people to be more considerate when buying essential items, so maybe that will encourage people to not stock up to the extent they are.
I agree that it's worse, but I'm not that surprised about the attention. I've seen people come up with this idea in multiple threads about password managers, so there is clearly something appealing about it. Instead of seeing the traditional "stateful" model of password managers as additional strengthening (like I see it), some people see it as a weakness that we should get rid of. I don't understand why. Under what threat model does it make anything better?

I use a traditional password manager. If an attacker, perhaps with a hidden camera, managed to see me type my master password, then they would still need access to one of my devices before they can use it. And if I had any idea that my master password might be compromised, I would change it just in case. It's quick and easy.

With deterministically generated passwords, all of my passwords would be compromised the moment my master password is compromised. I might not even _have_ a complete list of all the passwords that I should now remember to change. And I wouldn't do it lightly, because it's far from quick and easy.

Also, if a single generated password leaks, then an attacker could use that to start brute-forcing my master password. It's nice and all that there is PBKDF2 to slow it down, but the situation is still worse than with a traditional password manager, where one leaked password doesn't reveal any information about the other passwords.
Italy is doing all of those things.
What app someone should build in 2020 to find and show it's true prowess?
I think the core message of Tomas Pueyo's blog post is sound, but he undermines it completely with the number juggling.

He's not a specialist. He's not an expert. This is an entrepreneur who knows how to create viral content. His previous blogpost was "How to deliver a funny speech".

So, I wouldn't accept the details, the number or the graphs he has cobbled together at face value. This is true for pretty much anything that is published on medium.com and doesn't come from a sources verified by experts or officials.

While people are slightly optimistic about China and South-Korea, I think it's far too soon to try and make any detailed forecasts on how the next few weeks will pan out. We simply don't know enough yet. All we know is that this is an infectious disease spreading at a lightning speed. Stay home, and adhere to WHO and health administration protocols. That's all there is to do right now. Anything else is conjecture until this has played out completely in a few weeks time.
People are comfortable about installing third party extensions that have complete access to their emails' DOM.
>Yes there are, as set out in the medical officer and chief scientific offer's press conference.

And these drawbacks specifically to the health system are...?

>So, to be clear do you think the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific advisor were simply lying about the science?

Did I imply that? Just because they chose a path with more emphasis on economic and social considerations (compared to other countries) doesn't mean they are lying and that it isn't science based.
Oh, I used rsync many times but I thought it simply retransmits changed files. (Oh, it needs the --checksum argument to do this, okay.)

So how do these self-synchronizing hashes work? Like a Merkle Tree? (Ah, okay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Determining_which_parts_... )

So rsync uses 8KB for chunk size, so for a file 1GB it has 125 000 chunks. (And if every chunk needs 16 bytes of hash data to send, that's about 2MB, pretty darn efficient, especially if it can spot reorders.) Though according to Wikipedia it only does this if the target file has the same size, so adding new files to ISOs might not work in case of rsync, but still, the possibility is there for diff algos and version control systems.
I get an error. I’m on Safari mobile on iOS 13.4. I use content blockers, BlockBear and Firefox Focus - not sure if that’s relevant or not.

Method Not Allowed

The method is not allowed for the requested URL.
My friend has a business descaling ships with his own device. The device consists of a "pressure washer" "robot" that sticks to the side of the ship with combination of magnets and suction.

The motor+pump for "pressure washer" is about the size of minivan and resides on it own trailer. The "pressure washer" (if you made it a single nozzle) will cut through an inch of steel. The magnets are arranged in a pattern called a Halbach Array that concentrate the magnet force on one side of the array.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array
Here's a quote from the first link you have:

"That means the total number of reported cases is very likely an underestimate—and by not counting many mild or asymptomatic cases, we’re likely overestimating the disease’s overall mortality rate."

It is not possible to know the mortality rate with the information we have. Extrapolating that dubious number into a prediction of deaths is not a meaningful exercise.
>Did you watch the address Wednesday night? And how many critical points had to be corrected afterward?

Yes. Sounds like the system is working as intended.

Do you understand the pace at which things are happening right now (much of it the administration's own fault)? It isn't "just" a virus; they are also concerned about the economy and an election and an opposition (and media) who will blow every mis-step out of proportion. It doesn't matter what Trump does, the media says it's bad. Always. Remember when he was racist for restricting flights from China early on? And right now I'd bet they don't have a plan (again, their own fault).

The press conference was a disaster, I agree. Trump looked legit ill. Based on that you determine he can't process information? Your priors mean nothing?
Falcon 9 Starlink constellation mission
If that's the case, I would also encounter a lot less people than usual in my weekly food shoping. That didn't happen. There's no need to bring all out your extended family out to Waitrose, Tesco or Costco. People are still doing it, nothing's changed.
The other thing that goes on is that some number of people want to live (and get well-compensated for living) in certain expensive coastal cities. And they hate the idea that companies might decide that they're not going to crowd into those places so dogmatically any longer if people can productively mostly work remotely.
Italy had 21 deaths on the 28th feb, so 2 weeks ago.
So ZIPs don't have any "global" directory thing? :o
The current response to the outbreak in the UK/US is supposedly being driven by "behavioral modeling", which basically means glorified techbro-Python code. So your argument is backwards, if anything. The WHO didn't used to think of "lockdowns" as a recommended approach either, but they're now changing their mind, as this has worked in China and elsewhere.
Best of luck man, that's super tough. Here's to hoping that they let you in, and that that chemo does its job well. That procedure is called embolization, if it works you're in and out on the same day. Hang in there.
> I’m not sure a lack of curiosity is so much a generational thing. Some people just don’t really care, they learn what they need to get done what they want and don’t poke it any further.

Basically true, but on the other side there is today so much to poke on, so much you can't understand and control..I would say to some point even the curious ones stop to poke deeper very fast. And over time this creates bad habits.
The reason for that recommendation is that Vitamin D absorbs better in a meal with fat, and dinner is the biggest meal for most people.

See my other comment in reply to parent. There might be lower quality sleep because of the timing.

https://www.gwern.net/zeo/Vitamin-D
Firefox Mobile was functional.
Now they are. The key point being made is that these measures were put in place "before there are any confirmed cases."
Maybe because the scientific advice may be ambiguous and leave room for interpretation which the politicians must exercise under the best of circumstances.

My reading of the letter is that it challenges the scientific advice, as it has been communicated in the media, and seeks to clarify the "wiggle space" politicians have to work with.
Plant Trees.
> Parents come to mind for the latter, but most of the people I've known who have 4+ children work remotely, so this doesn't add up.

It's multifaceted. It might be fine if you own a large enough home that you can have a dedicated working space, with a door.

Even without kids, I find it extremely difficult to work from home without a dedicated space. If I try to work from the living room, I end up doing living room things (like playing video games).

For some people, though, the idea of engineering your environment to change your behavior is either impractical or unheard of, which is what I think gives these people the general impression that "working effectively from home is impossible."
This is what I use:
https://github.com/dtylman/gitmoo-goog
State of the art for employee scheduling seems to be column generation; see benchmarks here: http://www.schedulingbenchmarks.org/nurse.html

Here is an open-source column generation solver that currently achieves the best solutions on that benchmark: https://github.com/PetterS/monolith/tree/master/minimum/line...
Because now a LOT of people are going to die because of it.

And some of us have cared the whole time. Unfortunately it’s only the geographic distribution of who cares that matters. Not just the count or percentage.
How about GNU parallel? https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
I would also add that there are those who suffer from "imposter syndrome" and prefer to be in the office, simply to show face/"butts in chairs", give a song and dance, and speak at audible levels to give coworkers/management the perception that they're busting their ass.

For those types, maintaining their position means endlessly manufacturing superficial validation. It's a game of perception.
Can you share the city name?
It already is here in The Netherlands. Vit-D and Vit-D supplements are pretty much all gone.

Luckily we have a large supply in house thanks to being forgetful and needing it for the baby. My wife has a large supply of girly multivits and I managed to score a months supply of multivits.
Literally everyone you know got tested for vitamin D levels?
No. Look up plate tectonics.
Mapping the Social Network of Coronavirus
They didn't ask two questions if I read the article correctly.

They asked for two specific actions: more social distancing and releasing modelling data behind decisions.
The point of increased testing is to identify cases, know the true denominator, impose isolation and allow for contact tracing, all to reduce R0
> Their reasoning is that if the only things you can do are China style lockdown or nothing, then the disease will just resume exponentially growing the second lockdown ends, so it's pointless to do it at all.

Before quarantine we had many people infected not knowing they are infected, spreading the virus around.

After a few weeks of quarantine the ones infected will be known and separated from the rest, so the virus should be stopped. That is assuming the quarantine is strict.
Thank you. I should have figured this out myself. I've been postponing going down the Unicode rabbit hole.

Here's some relevant entries.

𝐦 217F SMALL ROMAN NUMERAL ONE THOUSAND
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=217F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_operators_and_sym...

Whelp. That's a lot to ingest. I suppose if (when) I have to do Unicode for real, I'll need to find the 'ascii' command line tool equivalents for Unicode.
The article was a translation from English. The English summary was less good, as it repeats same sentence twice. https://www.takimag.com/article/crushing-the-coronavirus-cur...
> Coronavirus may be dominating discussions, but don’t allow it to overshadow the need for smart security practices.

Do we already have a new name for Corona related blog titles that have nothing to do with the disease other than using it to gain clicks or should we stick with distasteful clickbait? While the point raised is certainly true given the amount of companies facing the introduction of remote work, this is random and nothing more than an ad.
> All Gen Z "digital natives" that I met they never seen a real floppy disk, except as en emoji.

The concept is still around, just the technology changed. Today it's thumbdrives or some other external drive. Someone not knowing how to operate them today, would they be considere as a digital illiterated?
That hour long press conference, that I’ve seen live, can be condensed in don’t do anything at all, let’s get 60% of the population infected so we’ll have herd immunity.