skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's a slightly worse flu

There are two key differences here:

1. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus currently appears to have a death rate 7 to 20 times higher than typical seasonal flus, and the death rate gets worse without medical care (and later in the illness).

2. Nobody has any existing antibodies against the coronavirus, so it can infect more people than a seasonal flu.

We have seen in China and Italy that this virus can push health care systems to the point of collapse. And Italy can expect to see 3x the current patient load even if their shutdown has mostly stopped the virus.

Estimates from the CDC say that the US risks up to 1.7 million dead if we don't slow the spread of the disease. Other estimates suggest closer to 480,000 dead unless we take measures. That's out of 325 million, so yes, most people would survive.

The good news is that this isn't the zombie apocalypse or (for Steven King fans) Captain Trips. But unless everyone is missing something important in the numbers, this could be closr to 1918.

Exponential growth (or even sigmoid curves) can be nasty.
The were shooting to kill but missed, and then accidentally shot down a 3rd party’s airliner killing 176 people, including 82 of their own citizens. In my opinion, that tragedy was what was responsible for the de-escalation.
Curfew does happen from time to time in pockets across the US. And it does work.
Inequality Is Inefficient
On a Saturday Night in Florida, a Presidential Party Became a Virus Hot Zone
Let me put your mind at ease: we will learn nothing.

I’m sure epidemiologists and other scientists will learn a lot about the spread of pandemics and coronavirus. As a society though...

For an institution to learn there have to be consequences for failure. The US is so hyper-polarized that these won’t materialize for anyone involved. You can already see the circling of wagons and history being re-written in real time (on this site even). Investment in healthcare (including pandemics) will continue to follow party lines.
> Higher prices are also a deterrent against hoarding, particularly in the days leading up to a disaster. To be on the safe side, many consumers are inclined to buy more than enough of whatever they think they'll need. The more expensive the propane is, the more is available for everyone else.

I think this makes sense.

It would definitely stop people like this guy [1] going out and cleaning all the local stores/rural stores and mom and pop outlets of cleaning supplies, then selling the stuff on for a huge profit...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...
I am intimately aware of exactly what constitutes an externality. I fail to see how this situation (two parties agreeing to a high price for a consumption good) has impacts on third parties.

I'm not sure how "pandemic" applies, either.
It's important to note that the vast majority of people who will own and use Dai have never and will never interact with the Maker protocol or CDP holders. You trade ETH to Dai on Uniswap and go about your day. You trade the Dai to ETH on Uniswap later. I'd expect most people just to go from fiat straight to Dai and back as well.

Maker itself is a system for the professionals and most users won't even know it exists and won't have to.
What's your opinion on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_Nombre_orthohantavirus

Discovered in 1993 near the Canyon del Muerte on the Navajo Reservation, it was originally named the Muerto Canyon hantavirus, in keeping with the convention for naming new pathogens.[2] However, the Navajo Nation objected to the name in 1994.[3] It was also near the Four Corners point in the United States, so the virologists then tried naming it the "Four Corners virus". The name was changed after local residents raised objections.[4] In frustration, the virologists changed it to Sin Nombre, meaning "without a name" in Spanish.

Was that the Chinese government also pressuring people into not wanting to use the common name? Or is it that using the location in the name of a disease just kind of a jerk-thing to do?
Yes, absolutely. A return to the gold standard would be disastrous for our modern economies, in particular in times of exogenous shocks like now. The solution to bad central banks is not gold, but good central banks.
What makes you think things will go back to normal in a week or so?
https://github.com/godotengine/godot-git-plugin

https://godotengine.org/article/gsoc-2019-progress-report-1-...

https://godotengine.org/article/gsoc-2019-progress-report-3#...
Bread goes stale faster in the fridge.
They told me at school that viruses are not life forms. But, that is a good point I suppose, and, should want to know how that is determined "is it alive"?
> One reason projects with large binary files don't use Git is because, when a Git repository is cloned, Git will download every version of every file in the repository.

Wrong? There's a --depth option for the git fetch command which allows the user to specify how many commits they want to fetch from the repository
Covid-19 Global Impact Study
Misclassified Information: Many ‘independent’ contractors are anything but
Yes, this technique is not appropriate where wires are added or removed frequently. It's appropriate where you need extreme density, or inside portable equipment where wires not secured to each other may abrade each other.
Yep. A much better way to alleviate shortages would be to suspend sales taxes.
I think governments would rather that people that get it first have access than the peoplwnehat can't afford it. If you're going to have to essentially have some people not get supplies, basing it off of wealth and income is not politically optimal
>Do you actually think our economy needs 200x as much hand sanitizer production?

Yes I do. If everybody is now sanitising their hands thoroughly and regularly throughout the day to prevent infection, this could easily be a 200x increase in hand sanitizer usage compared to what it was previously.
I think the existing kits are performed by hand. This new one can be done using high-throughput machines.
Why not say it instead of keeping it secret?
Oh dear, another ”the swedish government is never wrong! (Even if I have to make up the rationalization myself)”

I’m Swedish/Norwegian, and the governments have responded pretty differently. How do you know that sweden is correct and not norway/denmark?
Sabotage, yes. These will be heavily armed and guarded.

If a small nuclear reactor gets hit by a large nuclear weapon, we don't need to worry about the reactor.
Anesthesiologist here - true, I was a Stanford medical student on an ICU rotation when a Tesla employee crashed his plane into high voltage power lines while attempting to land at San Carlos airport. Electrical power on the peninsula was out for an extended period of time. Battery backups eventually failed, then gas powered generators started failing so everyone with a pair of hands took turns manually ventilating the patients. If push comes to shove, we could get by with a Jackson-Reese circuit and a pair of hands. Obviously we don’t want to find ourselves in this situation.
No, it ensures that companies (and individuals) won't increase the price unnecessarily just to profit additionally from something like a pandemic.
See, for instance, here:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-9.3.0/gcc/Incompatibiliti...

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-9.3.0/gcc/Code-Gen-Option...

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-9.3.0/gcc/Warning-Options...
Yes, but 95% of devs, even fairly talented ones, don't really know how to use Git.
When people charge 10-20X more for something that could have been purchased in a local store before the “arbitrage” businesses purchased all the inventory, that is clearly price gouging.
The President does have the power to direct factories to make masks during a national emergency.
Coronavirus Can Live for a Long Time in Air, on Surfaces
If we look at who it's most dangerous too, elderly people, then basing it off wealth would actually be in their favour compared to basing it off who can get to stores quicker to hoard it.
Free market capitalism has lead to the greatest standard of living ever experienced in the history of the world, especially for citizens on the lowest rungs of society. It may be at odds with your quibbles of modern society, but when viewed holistically I’m so happy that we have clean water, tons of nutritious food, computers, etc. etc. etc.
Covid-19 spread over time – Analysis using TimescaleDB and Grafana
This is great. We use get lfs extensively, and one of the biggest complaints we have is users have to clone 7GB of data just to get the source files. There's a work around in that you don't have to enter your username and password from the lfs repo, and let it timeout, but that's a kluge.
Not by any means an expert here either, but my impression is that, to call something a “ventilator” in a medical context, it has to have a software-controlled rate of flow. “Ventilator” is to “air pump” as “CNC router” is to “regular router.” It needs to be integrated as part of a control system, feeding out forced air-pressure (thrust?) data, and getting fed back a PWM control signal. (Sort of like a CPU fan, but with air pressure in place of on-die temperature.)

Keep in mind, the use of these things is that you hook this up to a patient and then leave them in a room while you go handle other emergencies. It needs to tell you if it’s having a problem (through hookups to monitoring equipment.)

I think it also needs to not try to force air into a blocked airway (i.e. to blow open the patient’s larynx the moment they try to swallow), and/or needs to let up on the air pressure in a sinusoid pattern so the patient can exhale—though I might be wrong about either/both of those, given that they’re not really problems doctors encounter with hand-pumped ventilation. But either of those, in combination with the flywheel-like momentum of a big blower fan, would explain the waste gate.
Most stuff is bought by scalpers and sold on the black market anyway
I'd agree that there's enough coverage already, and that discussing it is hard anyway. Both ends of the spectrum of opinion have faith based outlooks; the ditinction between discussion and argument is hard for them to make.

Why does a hacker forum need more discussion of this? Can't we discusses computer shit here and let the climate change debates happen elsewhere where people are actually more interested in that focus?
> I’m hovering around 30lbs

I think that's about 13 kg. For six days? You must be on very limited water each day. 13 kg is running weight.
Because a lot of the short term price gouging is artificial/predatory:

"Vancouver couple exploits pandemic by hoarding Lysol wipes and charging double to resell them."

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/03/12/were-hustlers...

They are not raising prices to produce more, but just hoarding and then reselling it at higher prices.

"Price Gouger Unable to Sell 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer after Amazon Crackdown"

https://www.nytimes.com./2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-p...
How is that an externality?
From a political standpoint, I see the point. Price gouging makes people extremely mad, and it redirects goods from poor people to wealthy people. When tempers are already fraying and maintaining social order is already difficult because of an emergency, the last thing a government needs is a nucleus for lots of pissed-off people to rally around.

Remember that the first priority of any government is to keep itself in power. Governments that don't accomplish this are no longer governments. Efficiently allocating goods is a secondary consideration that helps them achieve this, but if doing so means they end up with a revolution or rebellion anyway, it wasn't very effective.
The specificity (true positive) and sensitivity (true negative) do not solve the problem I am describing.

If something is rare, it has a low base rate. That even means a test with excellent specificity and sensitivity could still be wrong most of the time.

Decisions on test accuracy simply cannot be made coherently when ignoring the base rate. To make an intuitive example, suppose that one in a thousand people have a disease. A test for the disease has 90% specificity and 100% sensitivity. It will always correctly give a positive result if the person has the disease, and has a 99% chance that a given positive test is valid. Pretty good, much better than most tests.

Now suppose that 1/1000 of people have the disease. A person with a positive result has a 1% chance of not having the disease. If everyone is tested, then 1/1000 people will get true positive results. But, (999/1000 * 0.01) ~ 1% of people will get false positives.

Thus, a given person with a positive result has nearly a 10x chance of it being erroneous compared to it being accurate! As I said, the frequentist techniques that you describe and are taught in medical schools do not help with this.

Yet this is endemic in medicine. This sort of thing is why in a recent meta-study of 54 landmark cancer trials, only six could be replicated. That is frankly terrifying.
depth just let you control the amount of history. It will not let you exclude files that are at the highest depth that you don't want. So while that statement was not accurate, it's not what this feature is intended for.
Not from the US, but it seems there's a widely internalized view of the US being so big that it's ungovernable in some ways, so things that are learned in other countries can't be applied. A variant is that the population is not as "homogenous".

I've not yet fully understood why a large population or area or ethnicity would generally impede things so much, but maybe it's just misattributed and there's sometihng about system of governance or the population's general distrust of government makes it hard to get things done there.

Of course there are some genuine things that scane sub or superlinearly with population size. For example network effects are bigger in bigger populations.
As a bus rider in San Francisco for the last 30 years, there a a few things that made the experience way worse.

The design of munis modern fleet has reduced the seat and isle space. Standing is hard because your always in the way, and the redesign to accommodate more handicap seating has really reduced regular seating that could be perpendicular to the length of the bus.

Reliability is the other issue. Main lines are very reliable, but meandering cross town routes make a two bus commute undesirable.
I do agree with the inducing production part. Where this massively fails is the "only those who really want the item will get it". This is really "the wealthy can afford the item without batting an eye and the poor be damned". Not exactly a great idea for essential items.
Besides the "slotted wire duct" described above, which is OK to "tie" cables to a ridgid surface, the other things normally used in the industry (and that work just fine) are spiral cable wraps, example:

https://t3.lappcdn.com/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_TOOL_616000...
Isn't price-gouging usually (and definitely in this context) about someone who bought an item at a standard wholesale price and is reselling it at a markup? That's not about the reward for producing it, that's about the reward for being in the right place at the right time.

You can still try to argue that it's economically reasonable to reward people for being in the right place at the right time (to incentivize people to ship goods around etc.), but that's a very different argument from whether companies are able to fund increases of production.
>A device would have to be really misconfigured by [...] the OEM

You're giving Android OEMs, on the whole, way too much credit.
Companies are _requiring_ people to work from home, childcare options are closing, schools are closing, businesses are cutting staff and hours, and there are public bans on large gatherings and urgings to stay home so that even if you are asymptomatic or healthy, you don’t risk accidentally contributing the spread to immunocompromised or elderly people.

If you think you only need to budget supplies for two weeks, you’re just wrong. You need to budget for _months_, and likely need to budget many supplies you otherwise wouldn’t have needed, like increased food for daily breakfasts and lunches for a whole family who otherwise would have been at school / work drawing those supplies from elsewhere.

While I agree the panic buying is harmful & we could ration and space it out with less shock to supply chains, I also think the behavior of everyday people facing the sudden prospect of a large family consuming toilet paper, 3 full meals, soap, medicine, etc., for an indefinite number of weeks ahead, it’s totally understandable and not even remotely “selfish.”
Covid-19 is no worse than SARS yet the panic is so much greater:

- USA had 61,000 flu deaths in 2017-2018 from SARS but we've had only 1,600 deaths from Covid-19!

- CDC does estimate we'll have 61,000 deaths from Covid-19 but are they simply grabbing the SARS death statistic and repeating it?

In any case Covid-19 shows no evidence of being any worse than SARS.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/panic-pandemic-there-better...
Yes. Textlinks. Or image links where the images are hosted on the publishers website.

Sending 3rd-party content to my visitors is not non-intrusive. Especially if it is active content like javascript.
...because many nothern european countries provide a much higher quality of life than the US without being wealthier.
The reason the water is clean and the food is nutritious is due to regulations, not free market capitalism.
I thought the WHO kits are being used in mass in South Korea and Italy. Is the U.S. really developing something unique?
This isn’t the companies being punished - it’s the opportunists. These vultures are driving to every small pharmacy and clearing out all the masks and sanitizer. Now that Amazon & EBay have cracked down on reseller gouging, some are sitting on stockpiles through the midst of a pandemic.

* https://www.nytimes.com./2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-p...
Take face masks, that front line medical workers don't have, that their procurement offices won't let them buy for 10x - we are all screwed if all our nurses are sick.

You are basically saying "I am ok pricing limited necessary resources up to where only I and people as rich as me can afford them".
It’s obvious that China’s criticism are just a continuation of the spat between China and Sweden. It’s also clearly an attempt to continue shifting blame away from China whose government did a terrible job for the first month. The weird idea that China did well due to their draconian measures after doing so poorly is historical whitewashing.

Regardless I do feel like that idiot needs to resign and that Sweden needs to take this more seriously. Though I guess that’ll happen out of necessity in a week anyway.
Assuming the WHO stash has not already been depleted due to the global spike in cases, the number of WHO tests available to the US is probably insufficient to be helpful for its over 300 million people. Incentivizing the private sector to create tests on the other hand does have the potential to get enough tests for the whole population.

This is a global pandemic and there are many other affected countries around the world that do not have the ability to ramp up testing production the way the US does. Poorer countries should be the ones with access to the emergency test kits, not the US.
I spent a month traveling around Iceland. My suburban neighborhood is more populous than 99% of the town/villages on the island. Even the largest “cities” are smaller than any town where I live. It’s really hard to see how anything that works for such a tiny homogenous population could apply to us.
> That's really heavy - any particular reason you need so much stuff?

75 pounds is 34 kg. A normally fit person should be able to carry that for several days without issue.
Robust Physical-World Attacks on Deep Learning Models (2018)
I think there is a difference between a famine and a virus pandemic. We don't have a shortage of food (at least not yet in the UK). It may get there over time if more people get ill and food and basic supplies get affected as a result. Gradually buying food and buying a bit of a buffer is possibly okay. But buying an entire trolly of toilet papers (I saw a woman buying 20 large packets of toilet papers today, enough to last 2 people 2 months I'd say) is possibly putting unnecessary strains on supermarkets and the supply chain in general. I spoke to the managers at my local supermarket today and asked them if they can place a threshold on certain essential items (for example if you buy more than 3 packets of toilet papers in one go, you have to pay a premium for the 4th packet) - that way people will really think about whether they truly need everything they are buying and possibly think twice before unnecessarily panic buying. It is important to think about how our actions will impact others as well I think.
Price gouging laws typically apply at the consumer point of sale, I'm not sure they prevent a higher price from factory to store.
I'll bite,

I'm pretty sure climate change is taking a back seat to the clear and present danger of Wuhan Fever.

I have seen a few new stories regarding climate change on HN but they haven't gotten enough traction.

I wonder if this is a subtle part of the human phyce, what would happen if a person that is terrified of both roller coasters and clowns is forced to be seated on a coaster ride next to a clown?
Anecdote time: I have been told numerous times, by US physicians and nurses, that m4a is impossible. That it literally is not achievable in the US. These weren't even hardcore republicans. Centrists for the most part.
Yep, here's that comment. Business benefit over direct customer benefit seems to be the manta these days.
Toilet paper availability likely comes down to nothing more than distribution lag.

One scenario is that a few people have taken advantage of low prices to hoard unreasonable amounts.

A second scenario is that the number of people buying a reasonable amount exceeded the assumptions built into the distribution network.

In the latter scenario, high prices pretty much go in the pocket of the retailer (and so on), and availability is still low.

My intent isn't to try to characterize the second scenario as good or bad or okay or whatever, it's to point out a possibility that your comment doesn't address.
really ? .. word of mouth was wrong then (how surprising.)

is it bacterial infection post virus harm then ?
This is 2013 with most of those computers likely even older than 2013 and likely single core vs 3,120,000 brand new cores on the supercomputer. So, in terms of “raw” flops it’s just a question of more and newer hardware on the supercomputer not really better architecture.
Price gouging laws are based on the idea of a totally inflexible supply. If it is not possible to alter the number of water bottles showing up in CVS every day, then an increase in prices would essentially be a big capital gains bonus for CVS because they just so happened to have some water sitting around. Now, even in this situation, you can justify why CVS should get to keep their capital gains: it would motivate them to keep more water around so that they could benefit more in the case of an emergency. So to really explain price gouging laws you have to add a second assumption, that the shelf or warehouse space allocated to emergency goods during peacetime can't change for some reason.
The argument that the threat of gouging increases the motivation to hoard is basic economics. For analogous reasons there is FDIC insurance on bank accounts because the alternative is runs on banks that can lead to system collapse.

Not every point on the supply/demand curve is a good place to be.
That's an inefficient proxy - there are plenty of poor elderly people (note that elderly people are often retired) and rich young people. If we're going to say anything other than "The people with the most ability to pay should get the goods because they have the most ability to pay, in and of itself," then the free market is the wrong tool to use.