skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I help my local community during the Coronavirus pandemic?
I'm in the US, only a few cases in my city.

I've seen the efforts to build open-source ventilators, but I'm wondering if there's something I can do now.

I imagine there are systems & processes that will break down, has anyone observed somewhere analytical/technical effort might make an impact in their local community?

Do any of the other standard volunteering channels make sense right now (food bank, etc.)?
I guess you're getting downvoted because of your tone, but I think you're essentially right. selling off a bunch of stock in expectation of a looming crisis is a choice that leaves your buyers holding the bag when it strikes. it's not fundamentally different than using leverage, options, or whatever exotic investment tool you fancy. people ascribe an arbitrary moral difference between selling to prevent losses and more active investing to seek a profit. in both cases people are making a bet on the outcome of an uncertain event. some will win and some will lose.

regardless, moves made by a small private investor don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. just don't panic sell.
GraalVM 20.0: Run Tomcat as Native Image on Windows
Depends a lot on whether or not there's a vaccine/cure.

We might still be dealing with COVID-19. Ideally, we probably still would be at the peak of it, if we managed to flatten the curve.

With all the resources focused on this, it will likely cause an economic shock. Italy's deep in debt, suspending taxes and mortgages. Other countries will soon follow. Our economic systems today are remarkably fragile - we make 50 year investments, take on lots of debt and debtors, whereas in the past, economies are built with the inevitability of war in mind.

We tend to abstract things out like supply chains. Your sandwich and coffee might go through a dozen countries. What happens when it's no longer free flow? Do prices go up or down?

A lot of industries could die. Mainly airlines, who are already dealing with thin margins.

In harsh times, people either become savage survivalists or become a tight-knit tribe-like community. We'll see which way it goes.
The claim is "Billions are saved on cooling costs because the trees keep the environment cooler due to (presumably) shade and evaporative-cooling".

Since the vast majority of buildings in London do not have AC, the savings are more theoretical than real.

There are also the thousands of people employed full time in the autumn to pick up leaves, and the people employed all winter to unblock drains blocked with tree detritus, and the springtime cutting of every tree and the associated road blockages and slowdowns... Those are very real costs.

Add to that the misery that tree pollen causes ~half the population... Having a headache, painful eyes, and blocked nose from april to july has got to hit productivity pretty badly!

I'd say the benefits on purely economic grounds aren't as clearcut as this article suggests.
I hold a small amount of it and BSV as a hedge against the Fed flooding the market with liquidity too. Emphasis on small amount.

Crypto usually rallies when the Fed undergoes extensive QE for a long period of time but the current popular crypto’s have flaws.
I think it is reliable. Many German journalists report about that topic, e.g. Tagesschau: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/corona-impfstoff-deutschlan...
The R0 of measels is 12-18, and CFR of 25%. This is an entirely different set of parameters. If covid-19 looked like this, the response would be completely different.

Herd immunity isn't a binary thing. Outbreaks reduce as herd immunity increases. Nobody is saying covid-19 will go away thanks to these measures. Indeed, the government have been saying it'll probably become a mild seasonal illness much the same way the Spanish flu is now.

Remember our species has only eradicated one single infectious human disease in our history, Smallpox, and it took hundreds of years. Coronaviruses are notoriously hard to vaccinate. Locking down society indefinitely (which itself had a human cost) based on the hope we'll eradicating covid with vaccines seems like wishful thinking.

Scientists are saying a vaccine is at least a year away and this disease is beginning to spread through India and Africa.

What is the alternative plan here?
> This is an underestimate

No it isn't - if you ask the people actually building American wooden houses how long they think they'll last - they'll tell you almost what I did - just 60 years! Check national building standards 7543:1992. They increased it under pressure a few years ago, but that's what they were designing against until recently!

Of course some houses will survive longer (and 170 is a pretty modest age to be boasting about) but even the people building them don't have confidence that they will.
There are two parts in this history. One are the current problem with wood robbers that had increased in the last decade IMHO. Old trees in public parks can be chopped and selled. Most people is not aware on how valuable is a old tree, and how expensive is its wood

... and is a low risk operation. More profitable than robbing a bank, for sure. You chop a tree at 5am, put it in a truck, and ka-ching. You can tell later that the tree fell ill suddenly, was dying, was a danger, or tell similar excuses. Nobody will battle an eye. Cash and profit.

..................

The second part is the good one. Cities need to make gardens for their citizens. If you can afford it there are good reasons to start with the biggest tree available

For seller is good, the more expensive the tree, the more money that you can bill to the city.

For the buyer is good also. When spending public money, having instant results is a must. Valuable brownie points for the politicians in charge.

Moreover, you can't just put any tree in any location.

Cypress are survivors. Fit in narrow spaces and stand polluted areas and dry spells. Even if non native, are known not to be invasive, soft, non thorns at eye level, toxicity is not a problem, littering is not a big trouble, and are relatively cheap to buy and maintain. I would prefer to see a row of Amanogawa japanese cherries instead, but Cupressus is a reasonable choice for a city.

> Replaced third time by saplings.

No politician would plant a sapling for helping their successor in power ten years later. Not if can try with a big tree instead. But, after two fails, this is also a reasonable change of mind. Saplings stablish better in difficult places, specially when vandalism is not severe.
In the 40s, I don't think computing was a thing like you're implying, kind of like nuclear reactors were a very very tiny area. The explosion of computer usage and programming was more like the late 50s, when Fortran came out. Even then, I don't think people even thought in terms of a "computing workforce". Nobody majored in computers, a programmer might be a math major or might not. Male engineers had female assistants that were more than typists, but not the same as a Google SWE today either. Nor the same personalities.

My source is my own family history and it makes me annoyed at the anachronistic assumptions and framework that people shoehorn historical tidbits into when discussing this topic.

By the way, how can you have 50% in the 60s and then a peak at 37% later?
My advice is to sort the files just-in-time using the shell:

comm <(sort fileA.txt) <(sort fileB.txt)
I don't think dw would publish articles without a reliable source. Also welt.de is the online-presence of "Die Welt" (the world in english), which is a major german newspaper. I would say that it's not known for world-class journalistic results and major breakthrough investigative journalistic pieces, but it's still a reliable, conservative newspaper that does solid journalistic work.
Ask HN: A mass cardio exercise plan to reduce load on ventilators for Covid-19?
Those with poor pulmonary function are at greatest risk for serious covid-19 complications.

For most of us, who are healthy, we should be doing what we can to remove ourselves from the possible pool of people that might need ventilators. It seems likely we're all going get covid-19 at some point.

My question: would a large-scale cardio exercise plan reduce the load on the healthcare system and limited ventilators?

Given those that have serious complications, it seems like improving overall cardio fitness would help. I can't find good evidence on the question of cardio exercise preventing covid-19, or SARS like illnesses.
It's a overnight loan, backed by US Treasuries of some type (ie Bond's guaranteed by US Government). Bank gives Bond, Fed gives $$, swap back a few hours later.

The closest analogy would be a homeowner offering their house as collateral for a ~12 hour loan....
In some other thread here someone cited study on monkeys that seems to indicate immunity is indeed built: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22582455
It's possible, the black death didn't stop politics in the 14th century.
To be precise, hospitals are overwhelmed only in Lombardy right now. You are correct in that only a very small percentage of the population got infected, but it is densely clustered in a small area (https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/).

However, I agree with your greater point. Reaching herd immunity levels will take months unless a country wants to sacrifice 100.000s or even millions of people.
I agree. I wouldn't doubt Prof. Chris Whitty's credentials; a voice of reason.

Here he is at a Select Committee, a couple of weeks ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfJcwDaZrsA&

If you need to know the role of a Select Committee:
https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/committees/select/
Fake Coronavirus/Covid-19 Map Deliver AZORult (Trojan)
In the sea, of course. We all know the solution to pollution is dilution, and that the oceans are infinite so they can take infinite amounts of it before we have a problem.
You may be certain this has been modelled, but that doesn't mean it's been modelled correctly.

I'm having some difficulty believing that a government with a decade-long track record of stupidity, craven dishonesty, and aggressive contempt for the poor, weak, and old, has suddenly decided to be a world-leading paragon of evidence-based health policy - in a way that's making epidemiologists in other countries say "Huh? What?"

And the question remains - if they're thinking next winter, what difference does two weeks make?
I played around with it a bit in college; in my experience, the "help" wasn't very helpful, although it was suggesting keywords and not semi-colons (though I might not have left any out). I don't remember any specific examples, but I think the thing was that it was suggesting syntactically correct things, but they seemed irrelevant compared to the semantics of what I was trying to do.

I think it's interesting that McIlroy was able to learn Pascal from it!
> Because when a seed password is compromised it could mean all future accounts are compromised. So then you have to increment or supplement with some state, and change all past account passwords.

Uhm, no? There seems to be no direct relation between each passwords. So an attacker does not know by default that there is a masterpassword or what it is. For the real word there is no compromising if just login-data are randomly leaked.

A high level attacker who get's to know your used system could use it probably as an attack-vector, but again, that's not what normal people prepare for.
WebAssembly is slower than native too, how does it currently compare to Lua with a comparably safe & high level language?
I’d say that there are only two strategies that make sense: 1) early containment or 2) herd immunity. The west seems to have gone with herd immunity. Flattening the curve is just a no-brainer.
This is the concerning thing for me, as an asthmatic if I stop taking meds I'm already 30% down on lung capacity, adding another 20% on top of that is scary. That 20% can't be mitigated by meds either.
Polishing is something the KDE taskbar desperately needs. Glad to see it happen.
Typo was added in Research Unix V5[0] and also present in V6[1]. It isn't in V7, my guess is that it was replaced by spell. I don't think it would be difficult to get it compile on a modern system.

[0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
"By dropping 1.5T into the market the fed hoped the financial system would increase circulation enough to stimulate transactions"

I believe this is wrong. Nobody's increasing or trying to increase the amount of money by a large amount. They're just trying to provide a lot of money to be borrowed in the short term, which should have absolutely no inflationary effect. And it's vital to be able to borrow money, because everybody needs to deal with a crisis now rather than in a week or month or year.

It's just about taking resources from the future, not taking from the rest of the world.
A Docker image to backup PostgreSQL databases to AWS S3
Tokbox has better pricing. What's so horrible about it? I've found their sdk trivial to implement.
CEO Dan Menichella was already kicked out 4 days ago:

https://www.curevac.com/news/company-founder-ingmar-hoerr-su...
American Airlines cutting international flights by 75% amid demand collapse
Show HN: Intuitive Guide to Maxwell's Equations [pdf]
Are you retiring tomorrow? If not, it doesn't really matter does it.
this kind of fear mongering and panic is absolutely par for the course with any panic. More often then not it leads to racism, hatred and death. Usually it’s the Jews or the Russians, the masons or some powerful sneaky conspiracy that had the cure and won’t allow anyone else to have it.

It sounds like the FDA is trying to fund a vaccine, maybe by a acquisition (but this article isn’t clear) or by a ton of money with a distribution agreement. It sounds like someone is afraid that means the US is going to kill them by denying access and decided to make a scary anonymous claim. (Which is totally unsubstantiated in the document)

Let’s wait for the Facts before going to pitchforks, fires and racial minorities being strung up, shall we?

This is the exact same kind of conspiracy theory people were saying about this being a weaponized virus the Chinese leaked or the Iranians claiming that the US army sprayed this virus Qom to kill the faithful.

A good trick to deal with anonymous sources is to see who else is also quoted in the same articles or related article about the topic, and then assume they are the author, who just doesn't want to be seen being partisan or bending the truth.

"Karl Lauterbach, a professor of health economics and epidemiology who is also a senior lawmaker with the Social Democrats, junior partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, tweeted in reaction to the Welt am Sonntag report:

"The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means. Capitalism has limits"

From what I understand Karl is one of the backers of a move to a single payer system, and the elimination of private insurance in Germany - Bürgerversicherung. So I suspect what happened here is that the US is investing a huge amount of money into vaccines (which they should be doing), as well as making sure there is capacity for producing that vaccine (which they should also do), and a socialist in Germany got worried that there will not be any for them, unless their government has ownership and gave the wire a good anonymous sound bite.
Comm is perfect for scripting usage but you might find diff better for human usage. Added bonus diff also does binary.

Plus diff was in part written by the author of the linked content :).
Seems it's prepared for this: "Change generated password without changing your master password. Increment the counter field in your options."
do you mean random stains like coffee/juice or armpit stains? if the latter, you might consider switching to an aluminum-free deodorant. I switched a few years ago and I get much more use out of a tshirt now.

as for jeans, these can also last a long time if cared for properly. in my experience, jeans are pretty resilient to day-to-day life but take a real beating in the washing machine. I wear my regular pants one or two times before washing and jeans two to four times. I still have a pair from ten years ago that's a little too worn for going out, but is perfectly fine for yard work.
Denmark is doing all of those same things as well. School closures, borders closed, all non-essential public staff sent home, everyone who can possibly work from home told to do so, most other people sent home with pay/compensation, officials telling us to practice social distancing and so on.

And yet some people insist on going to bars, shisha joints, private parties. It could easily turn messy.

Regrettably we imported a lot of our verified cases via Danes coming home from ski vacations in Austria and Italy, before we realized it was happening.
Splitters!
Gasoline becomes more affordable, just when Americans don't need it
I commented elsewhere, but yes it can! It took a bit of head scratching but I got there in the end with my own Node.js based static site generator. This code integrates version 3 of MathJax, which was considerably different to version 2.

https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/master/lib/rende...

See in particular the top of that file, and the renderMaths function. I'm not sure how you'll integrate MathJax into Pelican given the language gap, but in principle it's possible.
Employee scheduling seems to be a problem common to a large number of businesses.

Are the needs of most small/medium businesses currently being met in this area or is there an opportunity for providing tools in this space ?
Yes you don’t test to prove people uninfected but to find those infected without symptoms so they self quarantine. The people crowding bars in NYC right now probably would have stayed home if they knew they were infected. You might also be able to use the stats to identify hotspots where a temporary lockdown or travel restrictions can make sense.
Really cool extension!

A suggestion would be to enable adding pictures in the Answer part of the card
Upcoming Ruby Open Source Libraries Q1 2020 Edition
Ask HN: What books are you reading during self isolation?
It's time to stockpile books for the possibly long Covid-19 slog.

I just finished reading Ron Chernow's US Grant Bio, I can recommend it as long, engaging, and very poignant (esp for Americans). I'm going to read his Washington bio next, should take me a good month :)

What are you reading during this potentially long period of isolation at home?
Yes, though the other issues remain and stainless is very different from "ethernal" (much longer lasting, yes, 2000 years I doubt), besides stainless steel (which is very expensive, 4 to 6 times common reinforcing steel as an order of magnitude) also zinc or resin coated steel is used.

Concrete is only a good material to resist compression forces - generally speaking - it was used by Romans only in structures that were exclusively (or almost exclusively) subject to compression (arches).

The revolution that reinforced concrete made was about combining two materials (steel very apt to resist tensile forces and concrete very apt to resist compression) with very similar other characteristics (thermal expansion) and compatible between them, if you want it is one of the first examples of composite material, to obtain something that could be used in structures subject to tensile and compression (besides shear) forces.

Our recently (last 100 years or so) reinforced concrete structures are very lean and elastic, which implies that they move and crack.

All the research on new concrete is about making mixtures where cracks are reduced to the minimum, as before or later through these (micro) cracks air and water penetrate, oxidizing (or rusting) the steel.

As well in the years the norms about the cover (i.e. the minimal distance from steel to the outside) has been increased (it depends on countries and types of structure but 30 years ago 2 or 2.5 cm were common, nowadays 4 or 5 cm are common).
I had a similar intent for less important accounts (I would keep using a more secure but less convenient solution for more significant credentials). To shortcut guessing the index you could store just the site plus index in a cookie or similar - if that data is lost you can still use the guesswork option. If tracking is a concern so you don't want site names to be stored, has the site name and index and use that to build a bloom filter (not perfect, but it will usually guess right without storing the actual data). Though for my use I wouldn't care that the site names were known.

Another similar idea to stop people using the "just add a character or increment a number" method for dealing with passwords that need to be changed monthly. The password is based upon a hash of master+site+year+month+salt. You are still compromised if the master password is compromised, it is never any worse than what people do already. Again I'd not use this sort of thing for truly important accounts.

> Kinda amazed that two people independently arrived at such a similar idea. :)

I've seen many similar schemes, some identical to those I've considered and either dismissed of not found time to think through, some with minor variations. I think this is a problem a lot of people encounter so it is a common though-game, so I'm not surprised that for every combination of tricks there are a number of people who have thought the same (or even got around to implementing something).
I think all your points are more wrong than right since you pick the weakest possible constructions to attack (reference Lua implementation, invalid bytecode) and seem not to be aware of how good LuaJIT is performance-wise.
Using solvers for Linear Programming (LP) and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems can be ridiculously effective and generalizes very widely.

It can't solve every problem, but it can solve many more than you think, and there's an active research area around using them for solving problems.
does the URL work for you?
To be brutally cold: the goal is almost never to save as many lives as possible. Even hospitals don't use that goal. We estimate the economic value of life and use quality adjusted life years to determine if a potentially life saving treatment is worth paying for.

We make these decisions constantly. You make these decisions every time you leave the house. People die every day from things we could have prevented if we had the inclination.

If the goal is to save as many lives as possible, why are driving and alcohol permitted? Because of personal freedom and the economy.

Treating this pandemic differently would be emotion driven.
I can't. Any businessman/profiteer that thinks IP rights are going to be maintained in this case is a moron. Trying to secure exclusivity in this case is obviously futile.

This is almost certainly about securing a supply of doses, which well duh. Any government voluntarily putting itself at the back of that line will be overthrown immediately.
Seems like a problem Medicare for all would fix.
I'm sure they can analyze a sample of 2000 years old concrete, but it's not going to look the same as when it was built and it'll probably not be a simple mix of basic elements but very complex. The Romans might have used a mixture with actual lava or corals e.g. and it'd be hard to trace it back to such ingredients.