skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough. We're still in the early days of this, so getting down in the weeds on causation is a bit premature. Your first comment made me think you were saying people were glib for downplaying the effect the virus specifically will have on this recession (depression?). I tend to think that's shortsighted, when prior to any knowledge of the pandemic, there were obvious, gaping holes in the reasoning used in shaping our economy in the modern era.

Bottom line is, it seems to me that when the world's richest nation has to outsource the making of anything tangible to the place where the outbreak started, and so much of our economy is based on services of questionable value, we're in for a world of hurt. You can't fight this war with military hardware and social media VC.
This is a fascinating use of the word "easy".
I am only talking about one thing - the market going up or down. That’s the entire reality. Expectations contribute to that, making them part of reality.
> The book "Bowling Alone" documented this collapse and was written between 1995-2000, well before the advent of smartphones and social media.

Smartphones and social media may just be the latest and most extreme manifestation of technological changes that were already underway then. Before you had smartphone screens, you had television screens, etc.
It's probably better to err on the side of caution than the alternative.
> By comparison, the U.S. still has time now before the curve shot straight up to the max

How much time do you think there is? Until recently there have been very little testing, so we don't even know where the US is on the curve.

Even if we assume it's early, that's still just a couple of weeks if time.
> as all our experiences tell that at least globally universe is 100% deterministic.

I'm not sure what you mean by this so I'm also not sure how to address it, but it does seem reasonable to assume free will simply does not exist exactly because phenomena is either deterministic or stochastic, not some third option which would allow free will. This view is informed by physics.

> There is no now and all points across the time dimension have same properties just as points across space.

This is a much more interesting problem and one that has kept me up many times.
They are going for managed infection of those who need medical intervention with the majority not needing such intervention.

Ergo, managing capacity in a way that is mindful that winter 20/21 will come around faster than we realise. After all the West has just entered spring, so 6 months from now we are in Autumn and the seasonal impacts like normal flu etc start to traction up again.

May well be a case sadly to say that every extra death now, will mean two or more less deaths in the comming winter. Sadly it may well get right down to that uncomfortable truth. Hard to say and honestly, not sure how anybody could articulate that without upsetting anybody in some way, shape or form. But that does seem to be the jist of it.
I clicked the link and closed the tab the second I saw it was from Brave. They put out an anti-Google piece pretty much every other week, and they rarely have any substance. This one might (someone who isn't jaded by their track record can probably tell you in the comments here), but I'd be surprised.

They just want you to use their browser instead of Chrome's, and constant attacks on Google/Chrome is their primary marketing strategy (35 mentions of Brave on-page, Brave branding everywhere, giant "Download Brave" button at the end of the page, etc).
NT and OS/2 (2010)
Most hospitalised people will only need non invasive respiratory support and surveillance. I guess these cases could be handled by purposely trained health workers.
Epidemiology of Covid-19 Among Children in China [pdf]
Tf–Idf
I think the focus is the same. Flattening the curve effectively means reducing the R0, and the steps being taken now could theoretically get it below 1.
Good chance that there's more sex, not less, throughout all this. Could be a bunch of babies coming! Fewer hookups, sure... but lots of people have sex with steady partners that they'll be stuck in place with.
“Has the ability to” != “does”. There is faith in the US dollar because the US government doesn’t exercise that right.
> We must have a rent holiday if those businesses and their workers are to survive.

We'll get a lot of rent forgiveness naturally. If a strip mall has some tenants who cannot make rent in this crisis, who are they going to get who can pay? The pragmatic approach is to keep your existing tenants, because their survival is your strip mall's survival.
I've lived without a car for for more than a decade. People who drive have mental maps attached to driving everywhere. They frequently can't see the small shortcuts and the like that already exist.

When I gave up my car, I was in an apartment complex within a twenty minute walk of four shopping centers. There were two other apartment complexes lined up next to mine.

No one walked. They literally got in their car to drive their trash to the dumpster or pick up their mail or go to the pool.

Me and my sons began walking. And when you walked, you didn't have to go all the way down the hill to the street. You could cut through the grass and one of the shopping centers didn't even require you to cross a street.

If you aren't familiar with various options, you don't have the mental maps to do things quickly and easily. You impose mental maps from an unrelated process and draw inaccurate conclusions because your brain superimposes the car path you would need to take when you aren't going to go walk down to the street and walk in the street, etc.

I gave up my car and the internet told me it was not a walkable neighborhood because there was no theater or something. My favorite grocery store was on the corner.y bank branch was across from it. I was near my job and other shopping.

It wasn't perfect, but it met a lot of my needs. I'm not a big movie goer. I did not care that there was no theater.

And I can talk until I'm blue in the face and people who don't walk as a form of transit will shout me down and tell me I'm a whack job.

But if you want to beat this thing, you may find that you have other options to do things you need to do if you will just look for them.

Sir down and list an essential task.

Food.

Work.

Banking.

Write out the sticking points. Why is this a problem currently.

Brainstorm alternatives: ATM, online banking, PayPal, prepaid debit card, e-gift cards, etc.

Search Google maps for all nearby options. Zoom in. Think about what's actually conveniently close.

I'm not saying no one should drive. I'm just saying it's not better for driving to become the new monolith everyone should pursue because of the pandemic.

Shopping when it's less crowded is effective. It's a practice I'm pursuing. It reduces exposure and it has nothing to do with how I go there. It's just a function of timing.
That is not what the math says. Even if people do become immune, it takes much much longer for the disease to spread through the population at a rate that won't overwhelm healthcare capacity. There was some uncertainty about this until now, but a paper just came out from the team at Imperial, whose advice was informing the UK govt.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

You have to keep severe social distancing in place until there's a vaccine, or there are too many people to care for. Better just hope it's a worst-case scenario when they estimate 12-18 months for a vaccine.
Yeah, the mop feature is a joke. I took one look at it and realized that instantly. Everything else about it is pretty sweet though.
This has nothing to do with any of the things I've posted in this thread. I do have a choice. I could buy a car. Many people own cars. My point was that a pandemic (or similar event) is a good argument for owning a car.

I'm a little bewildered at how you've chosen to communicate but, uh, have a nice day.
>My sense is that the UK will probably fold and institute a lockdown once their ICU capacity gets overwhelmed and healthy young people start dying in the streets. Either that or they'll face a revolution and then have a lot more problems. Of course, by the time it gets to either of those points it'll be too late to effectively change course.

Looks like that's already happening: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy...
And I have to suspect that that way is way more pleasant than dying with COVID-19 symptoms.
I agree with you in general.

I'm saying that, epidemiologically speaking, Canada and the US should be treated as one entity. This is probably the case for border regions of Mexico as well, though I see no reason to allow flights to or from D.F. at the moment.

If (it's probably when) we start to see domestic travel restrictions, curbing transport between states, that's a good time to restrict the border as well.
> It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.

There is no reason this should not be possible, I'm hoping that tools like Dat or IPFS will enable stuff like this to be better than the alternatives
> What's stopping authoritarianism from taking hold, left and/or right, if this drags on for 3-6 months?

On a different planet this topic would be discussed, at length, along with measures to contain the virus. Once we're in lockdown mode worldwide with only the shiny screen to tell us what is going on, it is game over, and rather too late to discuss and set the ground rules for "emergency" regimes.
Mostly by fast tracking newly graduated, who normally have to attend a 2 to 6 year long specialty school. This would amount to around 10 000 new hires, according to the Ministry of University.
I thought they are all wearing hard hats except the mayor
This is why I love dog tails. They can't help but show their authentic intentions
Is there any evidence of your first claim? I don't even think brave goes so far as to claim that the data is available to most developers. They claim that the scope of systems that have access is too broad, but that's a very different, and much weaker claim, then that any dev has access to data.
You are right, they were infected a few days before (I think 6.6 on average). But still, the growth was 10x in ten days as you can see on the graphs. It's just that the measurements are always a few days behind the real numbers. In other words, there is a delay in the system, but it does not change the shape of the graph, it simply shifts it right (towards the future) on the time axis.
Drugs (a few of them are in Phase III and trials are already ongoing, with some results expected next month) will likely help first. If you can treat the severely sick patients, and even just cut one week out of the 3-4 they need to spend in the hospital, it would be a huge success. In fact I'd argue that most of the problems we are facing are because there is no appropriate treatment.

Vaccines will likely take more time, due to long-term effects that need to be investigated (as many mentioned in some other HN story today).
That was a really informative comment, thanks for taking out time to explain it.

Do you still make apps for Windows?
Looking at the people happily strolling around and gathering in public cafes as if nothing was going on, I severely doubt it. (large city in Germany btw)
I'm curious what happened / is happening in Japan.

Here in Tokyo it looks almost like business as usual. Some companies are letting people stay at home but most are not. While cities in the USA are banning gatherings of 100 or more, here in Tokyo every train ever 3 minutes during rush hour has 8 to 16 cars stuffed with 100+ people per car.

I have no idea what the actual infection rate here is or the ICU usage rate. 2 weeks ago Japan was considered the place to avoid. Now it's the USA and Europe. Japan hasn't seemed to have taken any drastic measures so far or maybe I'm just not paying attention.
Disagree, the masses don't use this software, I know nobody who uses this. Plus, the technology behind it is already in WhatsApp.

Although it is a privacy based, (good for _some_ people) I don't see why the masses would use this if WhatsApp is there.
That's SaaS.
Sunlight (UV exposure) helps kill bugs. If you're not worried about porch pirates, I'd leave the packages in the sun. Perhaps turn them over now and then.
> This smells of a panic right now.

It is a panic, but its justifiable to panic over the entire economy being shut down for an undetermined amount of time. No person on earth can say when this will end, given what we currently know about the virus, whether its possible to become reinfected, and how effective our strategies will be.
Ask HN: Hub for COVID-19-related challenges?
Is there a hub listing open problems related to the virus, so that anyone in the world can try to help and progress can hopefully be made quickly?

If not, I'd like to create one, where problems are clearly described, ideas and advances are coniuously discussed openly, and results / solutions are submitted with permissive licenses. Would there be interest in this? Would anyone like to help building it ASAP?
Unfortunately it's not just the UK. Also in the Netherlands we have to live through this social experiment.
They have a proofreading RNA polymerase, IIRC, which means that indeed they have a lower error rate than other viruses.
Intensive care unit: Italy fights coronavirus outbreak [video]
Be weary of catching falling knives.

I've made that mistake before.
Show HN: Animation using SVG on GitHub Readme More details in comments
Reminds me of the Y2K bug
I don't have medical training myself, so my own understanding is only that of an interested layman who's been following this closely. So please take what I say with a grain of salt, but here's my understanding of what Dr Baric said:

In the first paragraph he speaks of evidence that immunity waned over time in the case of a closely related disease called MERS.

In the second paragraph he talks about the mystery of how all human coronaviruses (including some of the viruses that cause the "common cold", the virus that causes MERS, and SARS-Cov-2: the virus that causes COVID-19, aka "The Coronavirus") keep themselves alive in the human population. He didn't say so explicitly, but the implication is that we should expect these coronaviruses to die out as humans get sick, recover, and acquire immunity to them.. but that's not what happens. People get sick with these same viruses again and again and again.

In the case of the flu (which is not a coronavirus), the way it keeps reinfecting people is that it mutates a lot in ways that will evade acquired immunity, so any immunity a person had from having had and recovered from the flu will not keep them from getting sick with another, mutated variation of the flu.

But that doesn't happen with human coronaviruses. People keep getting infected with the same strain. So the educated guess (the hypothesis) is that being infected and recovering from the coronavirus does grant some immunity, but that immunity quickly fades and then people get reinfected with the same strain because they no longer have that immunity (or have too little of it to keep from getting infected).

Then he mentions reports from China of people getting infected with the coronavirus, recovering, and then getting reinfected (which should support the above hypothesis, but we can't be sure because China has not been actually monitoring the levels of antibodies in infected and recovered people in their population).

In the final paragraph, Baric says he expects the US health care system to closely track the level of antibodies in infected and recovered people over time, which should give us some insight in to whether this hypothetical reduction in immune response really does happen.
Is there any information on how many of the ~377 Australian cases originated outside versus inside their borders? I can't find much on that figure.

South Africa only has 62 cases and New Zealand only has 8 cases. Not much there yet.
Node+NPM isn't going anywhere, but Deno sure seems like the server based runtime of the future.
> What can the government do to get aid to these individuals ASAP?

Here is something the government could do: basically suspend for 60 days, everything having to do with owing money to people who don't produce anything.

That means: for 60 days, no interest is charged on any loans, and no rent can be collected, and no taxes of any kind can be collected on anything.
It works by embedding a <style> attribute with CSS animations within the SVG.

The same animation exists on the main site however it’s embedded in the page for wider browser support.

For the GitHub readme I combined the two SVG images and made some adjustments to use [transform-origin] instead of [margin].

It works with most modern browsers but not with IE, while the main site has broader browser support because everything is embedded on the page rather than in the SVG. Additionally the animation works better on a desktop than on my phone (iPhone with latest iOS).
Today and yesterday I have seen countless people who just dont care. Viral pandemic currently causing society to shut down?

Let's go meet in a cafe!

And that's not even the, sorry, assholes at the supermarkets. It was insane today.
You've linked a document created during the 2009 pandemic, when CFR rates are likely to be too high.

https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2840

> At first sight, the data seem to imply that this new virus is relatively mild, with case fatality ratios around 0.5%, similar to the upper range of that seen for seasonal influenza2 and relatively low hospitalisation ratios. However, the case fatality ratio seems to vary substantially between countries, and deaths have occurred in much younger people than is the case for seasonal influenza.3 4

> There are many reasons why simple interpretations of these crude figures at the beginning of a pandemic may be misleading both in terms of assessing severity and in making comparisons between countries. Here, we discuss some of the important mechanisms resulting in biases, propose study designs and associated statistical methods to estimate the case fatality ratio given these limitations, and show their strengths using simulated data. The two main sources of bias in estimates of the case fatality ratio we consider stem from shifts in case ascertainment (over time, efforts may become more focused on the most severe cases, leading to an overestimation of the case fatality ratio) and from the inevitable delay between symptom onset and death, which in the early phase of the epidemic can lead to underestimation of the case fatality ratio if it is not adjusted for.

> A natural definition for the case fatality ratio is the ratio of the total number of deaths from a disease divided by the total number of cases. In a fully ascertained (and complete) epidemic, this simple method works perfectly. However, in most infectious diseases there is underascertainment of cases as people who are asymptomatic or have mild infection will be less likely to present to health care, and if they do present they will be less likely to be tested and confirmed. It is therefore likely that there will be a bias towards diagnosis of more severe cases (fig 1⇓), with the result that the case fatality ratio and other measures of severity are overestimated. Furthermore, this underascertainment will change as an epidemic matures. Initially increased awareness by patients and doctors may lead to high ascertainment, but as cases increase and systems are overwhelmed, only a proportion will be tested (potentially those with links to other confirmed cases), making it difficult to understand the scale of under-reporting.
Jagged Little Pill was cut a quarter century ago. "These days" have been going on a while, I guess.
The community spread by this point has hit the entire US surely. They can't track every single confirmed person location-by-location because it's been far too long.
At some point the testing bottlenecks are real. You can't just remove them. South Korea has tested 0.5% of their population.

Masks production can be increased. But you need hundreds of millions a day of production and won't get there in a short period of time.
> well overdue for a crash.

This is not how markets work.
>My sense is that the UK will probably fold and institute a lockdown once their ICU capacity gets overwhelmed and healthy young people start dying in the streets. Either that or they'll face a revolution and then have a lot more problems. Of course, by the time it gets to either of those points it'll be too late to effectively change course.

> Looks like that's already happening

Is UK ICU capacity overwhelmed and are young people dying in the streets?

No.

Don’t spread rumours in this situation.
Makes sense. I'm afraid we're about to be at the point where a large portion of the US will need to shelter in place. I can't imagine us being able to do something like that for 2 months though.
And Amazon makes money by providing people with goods and services that they need in a manner safer than alternatives.

Nothing wrong with that.
> Furthermore, from what I have read, there is no known long-term immunity to CoV, but maybe a 4-month window of some level of immunity.

Going to need a cite on that one ...
That's patently false. Antivirals slow the reproduction rate of the virus giving your immune system the upper hand; monoclonal antibodies do exactly what your immune system would do, they bind to the virus either neutralizing it or allowing macrophages to detect and destroy it.
I think as soon as there is some clarity around fiscal policy, we will see markets stabilize. Fiscal policy is coming, we just don't know the extent. So 2 or 3 months from now the virus will have burned out and we will have massive amounts of fiscal stimulus in the economy and the boom ensues. This is the way our Economy and stock market function. As soon as the stock market begins to see this, it will explode to the upside. That maybe in a week or a month or 2.
That's actually really good news, thank you. You can just leave packages outside for a day or two.
This makes sense. I guess I expected it to have already happened, probably should tap into senior-year med and nursing students as well.
Every single stranger I developed an online based friendship with was a small community. I don't understand how you can do anything meaningful in a conversation with 2000 people - but 20 people in a chatroom/forum/etc mucking about? Sure.
He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary complaints, especially his egregious examples of academic and political writing, were right on the money.
I have a "balanced" index fund with my retirement savings. I'm 33. I'm simply not touching a thing. I hope this is the correct move.

It's amazing. I think I'm a pretty smart guy and I'm finding it very difficult not to second guess these choices. And the worst time to make choices like this is during financial crisis.
But we can just build them. At least we could if we weren't instead shutting down our economies.

Look at the manufacturing ramp up that occurred during WWII for example.
>But if you want to talk to your grandparents, you need to use Facebook.

Or skype, or email, or text or call them or maybe just visit once it a while.

Facebook doesn't have nearly the degree of monopoly on general human communication or mass communication that HN argues it does, neither does Twitter. If Trump weren't addicted to posting there, no one would care about Twitter.