skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excerpt:

"...Infections and deaths onboard suggest that the disease’s true fatality ratio in China is about 0.5 percent, though that number may vary from place to place, researchers report March 9 in a paper posted at MedRxiv.org. That 0.5 percent is far less than the 3.4 percent of confirmed cases that end in death cited by the World Health Organization, but troubling nonetheless. The WHO’s number has come under fire because the true number of people infected with the virus worldwide is not known."

Link to the actual study:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
The UK government has been explicit that they don't expect to new able to contain the virus in the long term, and are merely trying flatten the curve. They might not be trying to build herd immunity intentionally, but they certainly have given up on being able to contain the virus isn the long run, according to their own statements.
(Not GP)

I think you’re being incredibly cavalier with other people’s personal freedoms if you’re advocating China-style totalitarian lockdown in response.

No, I don’t think having the national guard enforce a national quarantine is a good thing.

Lots of people seem to have this delusion that we will eradicate this virus, or that we cam hold off until the vaccine is ready. That’s a fantasy. The entire world will be exposed, and thus our job is just to slow the rate enough that we do not run out of medical capacity. That’s all.

—-

Seriously tho, it shocks me that people are acting that this is an extinction event. It’s not. My layperson napkin math makes me predict around 1-3 million dead in America by the time this has run its course. That’s a terrible figure but it’s very different from losing 100 million.

Again, I support social distancing and flattening the curve, but I oppose all forms of compulsion in this matter. People seem to really be losing their sanity here...
> (Also, Germany is kinda fudging the numbers. They don't record deaths as Covid-related unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced. That's not how victims are recorded in most other countries.)

That's not just fudging that's outright misleading, any source for this ?
Food, water distribution, internet, building construction are all things people produce and must be paid for to exist and out of fairness. Land ownership is and always has been an arbitrary claim inevitably traceable to a murdered Indian or the equivalent on other continents.
Honestly there is so much that I disagree with in this comment that I can't write a short reply. Sorry.

I get in discussions about philosophy of science all the time because I am passionate about it. But I am very disappointed because it turns out that other people who are passionate about science and the philosophy of science haven't really done the reading. This discussion is a prime example.

It makes me feel like nothing more than a conduit, copying arguments out of old books and pasting them on the internet.
Ask HN: What are some good learning resources for kids online?
With many schools closing ( likely more on the way ) and many other places closing doors - I wanted to share some resources that can help those stuck with things to do with their kids during longer days indoors.

https://github.com/shun1x/happy-life-home

Please feel free to suggest any additional ones (Free and not free) that I can add and share.
Web site has popups for $10 bottles of hand sanitizer (1 oz) :/
No, he still fleeced a great many people already, and we catch a fraction of them. The penalty must be sufficient enough to discourage this or its a lost battle from the beginning.
OSGeoLive Archive Is Online
I usually use f3probe, which IIRC uses some heuristics and trades of accuracy for speed, i.e. it doesn't write to the entire drive.

The docs are lower down the page from the main f3 utils:

https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.htm...
It has some really cool and advanced FP and lambda calculus features.
let’s call that level 2 :)
A week? If you got I’ll this weekend or the last few days you probably won’t feel it for 10 days. We’ll probably see cases drop off in 3-4 weeks. But between them and now the vast majority will be without the need for a hospital visit.

We probably have about 200k sick people today. Few need help.
Laws establish consequences when discovered, but discovery is the challenge. How can you mitigate the risk of someone recording with their phone? how can you tell who recorded it unless e.g. YC watermarks multicasts? What if that recording is never published but is distributed privately to/for someone else's advantage?

Hackers putting together some of the more notable firetalks/skytalks this year had some adjacent conversations about creating possibly virtual-only firetalks, and these concerns were all raised given the traditionally ephemeral nature of in-person conversations at the events.
People are hoarding toilet papers and you expect them to somehow channel knowledge through common sense and magically understand which places/activities to avoid?
That is correct, which is why flattening the curve (as the UK intends to do) is not the optimal response - the optimal response is to contain the virus and prevent it from spreading to most of the population, as South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all done. And as Italy is belatedly in the process of accomplishing.
So I totally agree that a 3-6 months emergency fund saved up as a waiter in case we have a once in a century pandemic is not realistic.

But spending two-thirds of your take-home pay on an apartment is also absolutely crazy.
Whole areas were without necessary products directly because of his actions. No, he didn’t mess up an entire industry, but for the areas he hit, we were without sanitizing products much sooner.
I'm not pro or anti it. I know very little about it. what I have read has always been pro UBI because it is being pushed by people wanting to bring it about. my response to you was just an off the cuff reply. it was not meant to argue your point, but maybe more to formulate my thoughts a little.
All medical procedures come with risk, and all medical devices can fail. It's not obvious that a material increase was introduced.
The vast majority of college kids still have significant ties to their parents. Just go home to the bed they still have for you on weekends. Your parents is an emergency fund of sorts. Of course this assumes your parents have a fund.

I realize that there are exceptions. There are many minority scenarios that means many people don't have the above for reasons out of their control. However if the rest use the above it is a lot eaiser to help the rest. When someone with options doesn't use them it hides the existence of those without options and prevents help.
What “seems like” profiteering isn’t necessarily aligned with what the law is. Did you read any of the statues? Here’s an example for California: https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/pricegougingduringdisasters
There’s very little chance a bar in Nashville will be an epicenter. I’d be more concerned with international cities like NYC. Most places can just carry on.
Ah, yes, the "people will magically stop being people" approach.
Not true at all. If 0.2% of Americans between the age of 15 and 55 want to go to hospital before they die of coronavirus, that's 350,000 people. In the entire country there are about 800,000 hospital beds - of which maybe 45,000 are ICU beds. And those hospitals aren't sitting there empty waiting for coronavirus patients to arrive, they average 2/3 beds in use. So, even if we pretend that the hospitalization rate is as low as the fatality rate, and they just need to be inside a hospital and not inside the ICU, we are already short by 100,000 beds. Sounds like overwhelmed to me.
A lot of countries thought they were taking that option like Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US. But eventually, Italy and Spain realized that there was no option 4 and they'd msitaken chosen option 3 so they switched to option 1.
>However, if they dont have a 3 to 6 month emergency fund that's on them

Except if they are homeless and jobless, they are a lot larger burden on society. Now play that out at a grand scale and you see the issue....
Is it hilarious? Is the misfortune of others humorous?

Perhaps it's the people with poor impulse control and lack of education that end up economically poor. Maybe they never learned better.

Taking pleasure from those less fortunate than yourself is a trick of the ego. It makes you feel better about yourself by labeling someone else inferior. It comes from a place of insecurity about one's own worth.

By simplifying the problem to a group of people simply being inferior, you miss all the nuance, the complex system of factors that created the result.

It's much easier to dehumanize. But if we don't counter these primitive tribal urges, we are bound to repeat the tragedies of history.
Here is an interview with WRCB Chattanooga where he is literally asked whether he is sorry, and he waits for about 15 seconds before replying "No". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18wybjhCqg8#t=1m35s

So his faux apology now is a total sham.
There's thinking and then there's thinking. Did these words come out of his mouth when he needed an excuse? Sure. Do any of those hypothesized reasons justify enormous markups and rushing to hoover up giant quantities of product? No. At very best, he let himself be blinded by greed, and so just didn't think too hard. So at best, he was negligent with safety-critical supplies during a crisis.
that may be US centric issue, and if you are doing UBI surely you need to do that alongside socialised healthcare?
Nope, I dislike all unions within the public sector.
Sorry, I want to clarify quickly that appleiigs is right that it isn't cost of insuring cash so much as depository risk. When I say cash, I mean currency as opposed to debt/equity, not physical bills.
The vast majority faces something. Granted the alternator failing on your car is not anywhere near the same disaster, but the effect is the same. You need an emergency fund
> No incumbent President has lost reelection in wartime

This is not a particularly useful thing to say. Incumbents rarely lose anyway - it's only happened 3 times since WW2. Additionally, you have incumbents like Johnson who was so unpopular that he lost his parties' primary contest.
Coronavirus vaccine trial set to start on Monday
Nowhere in Article II of the Constitution does it say that. It’s as false as the notion that a corporation must maximize return to shareholders as a matter of law.

At most, the Article requires the President to take an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, but that’s a far cry from requiring he do everything possible to make the USA the most profitable country in the world.
Personally, I think United is pricing flight changes in every way possible to minimize losses for flights sold when Coronavirus was not taken into account – maybe an incompetent management team.

What additionally suggests this is customers who are offered credit for flight changes due to COVID-19 need to wait an ENTIRE year (12-months!) in order see a refund back to original payment source [1].

[1]: https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/united/unit...
First of all, let's be clear that flattening the curve WILL save lives, even if the same number of people ultimately get exposed to the virus. Not only will we avoid overrunning hospitals, we also buy ourselves valuable time to ramp up production on equipment like ventilators, necessary medicine and protective gear, find better treatments and cures, and perhaps develop a vaccine.

So, is saving lives worth the economic impact? I think the answer is very simple.

Would you rather lose your job or your parents?
The US may have already passed 100k cases. Is anyone performing randomized tests and publishing the results? That should give us a real sense for how far it's spread. The trouble is that the growth rate is so great, it's a moving target.
IP rights can be suspended in a crisis, additionally the law of necessity might apply - you can generally break a law - such a breaking and entering, in a matter of life a death, for example saving a child out of a burning house.
From what I've understood the mortality rate in Italy is artificially high because they are not prioritizing testing mild/asymptomatic cases. Until there are serological tests available we can only make guesses about the proportion of mild cases, but looking at the data from South Korea and Diamond Princess it looks like they make up the overwhelming majority of cases.
I agree with you that not getting sick is the topmost priority.

The open source ventilator efforts are well-meaning but have a high chance of being close to useless, especiallly without trained medics to go with them, and I agree with others that they might make things worse. We really do need to focus on preventing and reducing transmission first and foremost.

Unfortunately, there remains the question of what are you going to do if your loved one gets sick despite your best effort to prevent it.

The numbers around at the moment suggest there will still be too many of these happening for the hospitals.

Also, unfortunately, many vulnerable people don't have the realistic option to self-isolate.

For example anyone who lives in a cramped house-share and has an existing respiratory condition (asthma etc) is vulnerable, regardless of age, and cannot rely on self-isolation to stay safe unless everyone in the shared house isolates as well. Which they will not.

There are a lot of people in that kind of situation.

Similarly anyone who has a vulnerable partner, in a place that has no spare room for them to isolate in, and at least one of you still has to go out to work to pay for rent and food.

Not getting sick is by far the best option, and preventing transmission is by far the most important thing to do. But unfortunately, we have to explore all realistic alternatives for when that doesn't work, even if those alternatives are a bit desparate and may not help.

One possibility that may be of intermediate use is efforts at building kit that hospitals might be able to use when the proper kit has run out. In that situation there will be trained medics but insufficient equipment. I'm not sure but I think it plausible that an open source ventilator project, especially a well-run one, might be able to help in that sitution.
Judges and juries decide criminal penalties. Fellow citizens decide social penalties. Nobody should be banging on his door, but I'm fine with both his neighbors and the world at large telling him what they think.
I don't want to sound alarmist, but ER docs tend to be 30-40-something's in fantastic health. I'm curious if there is cytokine storm involvement that further degrades lung capacity. Finally, there's a real risk they may never be well enough to return to duty after 6-8 weeks due to severe (and permanent) lung injury. ER docs, respiratory therapists and perfusionists don't grow on trees... taking just one out is a huge minus for a crashing tsunami of critical cases poised to break simultaneously.
If they have credit to begin with.

Without employment it is difficult.

Do you think credit-card companies are looking forward to this?
I have no idea what condition your friends are in. I'm disturbed by the number of people who failed to recognize that the phrase "your friends" wasn't just a placeholder for random people.
not wsb, please don't bring that.sort of comment here, I may also be guilty of it myself but let's not redditify HN, or at least let's slow it down.
Being price gouged by airlines is nothing new, this is business as usual.
"Basic Mario Brothers Example"

This needs to be a thing for every programming language cheatsheet
It isn't in case of pandemic. It is in case of whatever. Most people face something sometime in their life. Generally a small thing, but an expensive car repair is still reason to have an emergency fund
I bet that this guy is very good at geoguesser
At this point I’d consider it more likely than not.
Looking at German news, most reported deaths are reported as having prior complications or having died of other related illnesses, so the blanked statement about "don't record deaths" is clearly not true. If you have sources that it's happening partially, I'd be interested in those though.
https://webpass.rkeene.org/ is also similar, but a single JavaScript file which you can host yourself. It also supports syncing, but for this it needs to reach out to a server. It doesn't store the data on the server, though, just passed it through to another online host.
Most of the United States is single party consent with regards to recording calls. I am not aware about the rest of the world but I doubt the US is the only place where that is true.

I suppose you could make everyone sign a nondisclosure agreement that their candid, off the record conversation couldn’t be recorded, but it does seem to defeat the purpose of the candid, off the record conversation if contract law comes in to play and and would only impose civil (money) penalties.
People speak like this is a vital drug that cures people. What is wrong with hand soap and warm water?
Ah yes, just accept the gouge and gouge everyone instead of just the people who couldn't get in fast enough.

How about we develop a culture where people don't think they are a good person because they are filling a "market demand".
It would be better to have that list segregated by DNSSEC + their own website also being under DNSSEC, then just their nameservers serving DNSSEC, then non-DNSSEC.

I have a smaller list that does that.
https://egbert.net/blog/articles/public-nameservers-with-dns...
One man's gouging is another man's market at work. Would your opinion of this man change if he had stockpiled hand sanitizer a year ago?
You can't stick it in your pocket, purse or car for use in situations where a sink isn't available.
The best solution is to get rid of shopping carts and force customers to use shopping baskets instead. The queues to the checkout will be shorter and so will reduce the exposure to infection.
> Sun, a female member of the powerful Politburo, was being shown around a residential area in Wuhan that had been cleaned up before the visit and made to appear as if plenty of food was being delivered to the residents.

If they lie about that what else could they be lying about?
i know i'll get downvoted for this. but he's absolutely right. Price caps on these high value items will only dissuade more suppliers from entering the market and supplying these extremely valuable items. This is exactly the type of thing that caused venezuela to end up the way it is right now: a country that should be one of the richest in the world and yet is now an impoverished third world country.

Also, there are other benefits to higher prices too. when a bottle of soap costs 5$ instead of 3$, a few less get bought up, allowing others to buy them as well.

the forces of supply and demand are the signaling mechanisms that allow markets to work. Our society, everyone's prosperity and market economy deeply depends on them, far more than most people can imagine. Preventing them from working harms everyone. it's a double loss, not just for the supplier but for all those that want to buy.

>>>
"The higher prices encourage higher levels of production for goods like masks and hand sanitizers, which then increases supply. Even some companies that couldn't afford to produce these goods in the past will be prompted by high prices to now do so. The Japanese electronics giant Sharp started to use its TV factories to make surgical masks when the domestic supply went dry. Manufacturer FoxConn did the same in China to protect its employees who assemble iPhones."
It wasn't until the 1970s (in the USA) that retailers could determine the price of goods in their store. Before then manufacturers could dictate the price of their goods (laws protected that). So retailers competed on other dimensions (service, location) rather than price.

I learned this (and a lot more) from "Goliath": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
> Those retailers aren't going to pull it themselves and shove it backwards up the distribution chain to be redistributed to storm country -- that's just not how distribution works.

Why isn’t that exactly how FEMA or similar agencies work?
No they just think that 1 to 8 million dead is really bad, and are willing to give up some freedom to save a ton of lives.
So did you get that beer?
That's not in the text of the book, only in the metadata added by Project Gutenberg. You can clearly see her signing her name as M. Curie in the image on that website, and (with a brief Google search) I can't find an example of Curie going by her maiden name after getting married, while there are plenty of examples of the opposite: cf. this letter to Alexander Graham Bell: https://www.loc.gov/resource/magbell.12200101/?sp=1
> No reason it will now.

You can't think of anything different now?
Mens rea

They should still throw the book at him for trying to profiteer off the misery of others.
This kind of reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s business principle “commoditize your complement.”

It’s a benefit to a hosting & streaming platform, like YouTube, if the content is amateur, commodity and mass produced, since they dominate the complement (the infrastructure to host, serve and administer traffic to it).

It’s great for automakers if roads are cheap and ubiquitous.
I think the extensive and permissive rebooking offers are COVID related.
Dashboard for checking Covid-19 in Australia
Are loans just going to suspend interest and payment dates extended? I sure hope so because if not, there is going to be a wave of foreclosures and closed small businesses not seen since the 2007 crash.

Personally I am in deep water because Airbnb is allowing 100% refunds without any compensation for hosts!
I believe the (Canadian) govt. wants to minimize the cost and hardship of an emergency evacuation in case things get hairy in any particular part of the world where response to the virus is inadequate:

Case in point: The Israel-Hezbollah conflict of 2006 and subsequent evacuation of Lebanese Canadians. Some hard lessons learnt there.

https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/391/fore/rep/rep1...
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2006/07/19/canadians-begin-evacu...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/lebanon-evacua...
Nestle doesn't believe you have a right to clean water ... that's nutritious.
We already had this discussion with masks.

The owner of a Texas business ramped up mask production for SARS and then almost went bankrupt when demand collapsed afterwards. He simply will not ramp up this time without money up front.

It's not about manufacturing. Capitalism doesn't always work.

This is one of those instances where the government needs to step in and store inventory.
> Put police and soldiers in the street. No one goes out unless it's for food or healthcare, on penalty of heavy fines and imprisonment.

OK, but how will people without savings or adequate credit pay for food and healthcare?

Also, how can people stay at home if they're homeless?

Will governments step in with free food, and rules against eviction?
Where can I find them?
The "pushing on a rope" analogy is usually used to describe how monetary policy stimulates demand but not supply. I do agree with you about asset prices.
What the user was doing was NOT science. It's just random experimentation.

There is nothing you can learn from a one-off experiment like that.

That said, you are correct that they have every right to take whatever drug they want. However, i think it nicely highlights the risk of taking something and having it make things worse.