skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Opposing statement by a Ghanian doctor and director of public health:

"Dr. Badu Sarkodie, the Director of Public Health, Ghana Health Service (GHS), says they have no evidence that Chloroquine Phosphate 250mg is an effective treatment of the flu-like coronavirus (COVID-19).

He was reacting to claims on social media that Chloroquine Phosphate 250mg had been found by French and Chinese doctors to be effective for treatment of the virus.

Dr. Sarkodie in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) said although the claim sounded promising, the GHS had not had any efficacy clinical trial to confirm that.

They could therefore not make any recommendation for the use of the drug to treat the virus.

"I cannot dispute the claim so the person saying this should provide more information because we have not sighted any publication to this effect," he added."
Probably not that many, because that could result in massive inflation. Sure, QE has shown that we can print some more money and inflation isn't affected that much, but there have to be some limits to that. You can't just give everyone $1,000,000,000 (1B) and not have some huge effect on the economy from that.
It’s very difficult for state governments to do these things although the state governments re trying.

Frankly they need the federal government to step in.
"but I was alluding to how it can be done in a private obfuscated/trustless verifiable manner,"

Requirements nobody asked for. Which is exactly what seems to be annoying about the blockchain "enthusiasts".

A: I'd like a salad for lunch

B: Here's a salad that takes 15 steps to deliver via blockchain

A: I don't need, nor asked for all of this blockchain'ed salad.

B: It's clearly superior, it's distributed and with a ledger, private and trustless. You just don't understand the superiority of it.

Use blockchain to solve problems that have requirements around the value it provides. Not find a way to force every problem to fit into a blockchain.
France hits Apple with record €1.1 billion fine for monopoly practices
But a service like Paypal would likely work just as well but with the added benefit of being much more stable. That, combined with gold is really enough for most middle class people in Asia.

Once you start getting into the tens of thousands of USD, you can afford to obtain bank accounts outside of the country tied to a business. These are widely available and there's an entire cottage industry of lawyers who can provide everything you need.
Hey! Really sorry for the delay here. We've taken a step back and updated our original post with a much more detailed example and explanation given the response here https://bookwithcarry.com/blog/united-cheap-flights-coronavi...
Quantitative easing.
Can both of you share what is now used for guitar sounds?
This conversation got lost somewhere between "IF you're not dying" and "life-threatening medical problems"
The Merriam-Webster[0] dictionary offers the following definitions that might help:

1: extremely intense or severe; "blistering heat"

2: very rapid; "a blistering pace"

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blistering
Externally meaning an authoritative power told the economy to stop. As opposed to 2008 where the market internally collapsed.
He didn't publish a science paper. It's a specific claim and you can easily call Adyen customers and find out if it's true. It's not an outrageous claim and he goes on to acknowledge said competitors strength in another area. FWIW, if you've spent time in payments you will know his claim isn't bogus. It might be pretty close these days, but it's far from a bogus claim.
Looks like a cool idea but it appears to be nothing more than a public posting? When I got to the page the top line said "Chad S. pledged to buy a $100,000.00 gift card at Google in Boston."
> That's not all - some will forego, lose the habit then not re-uptake.

This is why I think the economy on the other side could look so radically different. What if every coffee shop and brewery went out of business... and had no reason to re-open? Could something completely different fill the void?
I often build something that takes time before taking customers. Doing this in an isolated location keeps costs down, assists focus and allows free intellectual exploration without outside influence.
HTTP Desync Attacks with Python and AWS
First, there is always the possibility that I could be wrong. The markets could hover around these levels and fall no further. Second, I may not know when to buy back in. Do I back in after they have fallen 10%? How about 20%? Should I wait till 25%? What if it goes down another 3% and then starts to head backup.. and then back down again above these levels before falling another 30%?

What you are suggesting is market timing. I am not very good at it, and I don't think most people are. You not only have to know when to sell, but you have to know when to buy back in. You have to get it right twice.
What lack of urgency are you talking about?
I'm not trying to contradict you. Just saying that the kind of vaccine that can be perhaps ready relatively quickly is the kind that's not very common yet, and is in the stage of "new and exciting technology", atm. I'll exercise caution.

There were news today that first subjects are getting the experimental vaccines already. I don't know if it's fast enough or not. But I doubt people will not try to speed things up, at all levels.
Ask HN: Where can I find “eco” jobs?
Working for companies like ecosia, greenpeace, something different than simply business for profit.
Are there specific places for finding jobs like those?
It's just the only one that I could get numbers on. So... show me sensitivity/specificity numbers that show a 0% false positive rate. The CDC PCR test [1], for example, has some data and no false positives, but the sample sizes are so small (107 known negatives tested) that the best we can estimate is ~96% specificity.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
Where do you get that the doubling time of deaths is much slower than that of confirmed cases? I looked for data, and this graphic is not reassuring on the question:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_c...
Amazon Pantry UK is four days for me, and still charging for "one day" delivery.
It's not even close to the intense measures in Italy or Spain (for example), however. There's a good bit of discontent about that among people I talk to in Switzerland, but there's no good option so that's expected whatever they decide.
The only depression you named was 1929. 2000 was barely a recession. 2008 was more severe but...still not really. The US unemployment rate hit 10% which is high...but most countries Europe have had rates at this level for decades. For reference, the current rate in France has an 8 handle.

In terms of depression vs recession, to put it simply, the risk is that we move into a situation from which escape is difficult. For example, and this is a hypothetical, everyone in airlines loses their jobs, this causes demand to fall, more people lose their job, supply falls, etc. Depressions destroy resources. Recessions reallocate resources.

So I don't think this looks particularly serious...if policymakers act promptly. This means ensuring that credit is supplied to companies that are solvent and firms that insolvent are shut down. The only thing that looked bad going into this was everything going on in tech, and the level of corporate debt (and its distribution). There is still a huge amount of complacency here (a big part of this cycle has been ETFs...I talked to a quant the other week who is neck deep in corp bond indexes who confidently told me defaults wouldn't rise...the guy has never looked at a balance sheet in his life).

But one very bad sign is gold and govt bonds falling with equities. This is probably being caused by someone running a risk parity strategy trying to get out of their positions but it could also be a sign that liquidity is disappearing (and people are selling whatever they can sell). Equally, last week the momentum tech stocks weren't really selling off, and now they are really starting to tank (although this is probably a good sign long-term, short-term people are clearly panicking).

Also, as a point of history, there was no "mass defaults" in 2008. The default rate definitely rose substantially and there was a liquidity crisis but this ended up working itself out and the vast majority of these assets came good (we know because the govt bought them all).
so ..... any thoughts on cryptos ??
> A tall profile is pretty much inevitable for vehicles that carry cargo.

But a tall profile does not mean that headlights need to be mounted higher above the road surface. This is a simple problem in geometry.
The current situation is a good argument for owning a car.

It's actually not. It's a good argument for actually diversifying our transit options so people have real choice.

A lot of people aren't really pro transit options. They are really for public transit and/or against cars.

If it is easier to do a mix of walking, public transit, etc, then there's no single point of failure.

If the transit system isn't overloaded, you can sometimes find yourself on the bus by yourself for a bit.

If you have flexibility to work from home or go in when you feel like it, that's another way to not be trapped in a crowded bus or whatever.

We need to break some lockstep patterns, not trade one monolith for another, which tends to be the argument.
so ..... any thoughts on cryptocoins ??
Interesting simulation but very slow at showing any effect. After 3500+ iterations (several minutes) there were still only 5 deaths in the first simulator (without distancing), all in the first iterations. I suggest to find a way to make it clear when it's done or speed it up to get to the point in one minute max.
Jeff Bezos working closely with the White House on the Covid-19 pandemic
France Fines Apple $1.2B for Antitrust Issues
Sorry to single you out, but the fact that people still don't understand that a 1 month+ long lockdown is a certainty means we are nowhere near the bottom. By April the US is going to look a lot like where Italy is at now.
If the person you are speaking with don't think about the people in such terms, don't treat them as such and socializes primary with people who don't treat him in such a way, then that person is not closing eyes from anything. His interactions with others are not like you described.

Instead, that person is expressing moral, ethical or emotional base for his own behavior and thinking when he objects with "you shouldn't think of humans in those terms". One does not have to be able to make full fledged philosophical theory about own behavior and behavior of chosen acquaintances in order to know that what you say does not match his experience.

And this is the case where your believes influence your experience and outcomes. And more importantly, the prevalent believe in community you are in heavily influences peoples experience and outcome. Whether you are able to express them neatly or not, whether you are able to perform well in debate or not.
That's not what Sartre intended to mean and Huis Clos doesn't support that interpretation.
The Fed are a force unto themselves and it's not going well

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/03/16/t...
You don't think 3 people could figure out electricity and computers and networks whether local or even satellite links? That would be one hell of an apocalypse.
That metric is hard to calculate because the transmission rate is still not very well understood for Covid-19, i.e. In order to calculate the cost of staying open, you need to accurately estimate the number of infected, number of deaths, and impact on current healthcare capacity.

What is known is that it is incredibly contagious, so they're taking precautions for a worse-case scenario with these shut downs.
I am glad to see someone, even if it is a competitor to Google, raising important questions about the data Google captures.

The amount of data Google collects about users is quite simply of unimaginable scale. Who sees this information at Google? Are they able to identify an individual and browse or analyse their online activity (which for millions of people will include some of their most personal and private details)?

Who has access to this data should be stated clearly in Google's Privacy Policy [1]. Instead we have this vague and generic paragraph:

"We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations."

I'll repeat that this is a company that holds the private and personal online behaviour of millions of people, and yet the only detail they reveal about who sees that data internally and which user details are exposed is the purposefully vague and unspecific paragraph above.

The fact that the "tech community" has never chosen to challenge Google on their internal usage of people data shows how little developers care about privacy (as this thread amply demonstrates).

[1] https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
Perhaps. A 30% spy drop is already in predicting recession territory (https://www.investopedia.com/a-history-of-bear-markets-45826...). Even if I was 100% confident there would be a recession, it's still not clear the markets are not undervalued at this point.
Probably a better source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/france-apple-a...

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22598051
Comparing Bitcoin to Gold during the 2008 financial crisis
For sure. But I don't think that's fundamentally different than any other crash in the US. But it may show that there is an economic benefit to having a stronger welfare net.
The textbook definition of a recession may mean that prices will continue to fall until the recession ends -- in fact, as soon as prices rise it ends the recession. But by that definition, the "great recession" ended in the USA in June 2009.

I'm guessing the above poster meant something more like "period of society-wide economic hardship" by recession. By that more colloquial definition, you might say the great recession lasted through 2014. The stock price plummet, however, was largely finished for most of that period of hardship.

I have no crystal ball; I can't tell you where we are going to be. But if the above poster meant "We're past the plummet, all that's left is the slow climb back to normalcy" then their comment makes more sense.
"DJIA is price-weighted index which is completely arbitrary and there is no reason for that."

Well, I believe the reason is that it's much easier to calculate on hand-cranked mechanical adding machines. There is a reason, but it's obsolete.
Looking through Wikipedia, only one congress person was known to die of Spanish flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Edwin_Meeker), so I don’t think the numbers will get up enough in this pandemic to effect someone high profile in government.
FWIW, I was ballsier back in 2008 and bought WAMU on the way down. It's exciting to watch your investment go all the way down to 0 :/
Source?

California has an insanely high state income tax (up to 12.3%), compared to Nevada, which has ZERO state income tax. I find it dubious to put the 'blame' on the federal government for California's finances.
Analyst sees 2000 SP possible with worst-case government policy responses:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coronavirus-stock-market-p...
You are doing it wrong. Read the docs. They are good docs. Sheesh. Going on a public forum and suggesting Stripe is at fault is extremely bad form. You should be ashamed.
Build an Awk program from scratch to edit multiple files
This. The purpose of the money is to address the immediate demand shortfall. We have until December to figure out who might have gotten more than their fair share and claw it back. Hell, even if a fair chunk is wired to Central America it will mean those people won’t starve.

We need to be A-10 Warthogging cash now and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
They will dismantle the blinding headlights just to pass inspection
The problem I have with the passive voice is how certain people use it to affect a kind of officious, administrative power. When I ask someone to clarify whether they're offering their own opinion or that of some other, specific external authority, they tend to get angry.

The passive voice is really the passive-aggressive voice, and I recommend taking every opportunity to antagonize it when someone uses it on you. It's not polite and euphemistic, it's bureaucratic, pseudo-intellectual, and bullying.
I'm hoping for post-pandemic exuberance to lead us out of the economic problems.
hypertension is a western disease
I do understand that. I think workers are needed and should be paid well to reflect that, instead of the constant undermining of the psychology of wage negotiation by the apparent imminent replacement by robots.
TechNet Gallery Retirement
...but you might buy a coffee machine at home to satisfy that fix over the next 3 months.
You can and should use sizeof in your code. The Windows code needs to know the size so it knows what version of the header the code was compiled against. There are probably other ways to do this but sizeof is not bad. That’s how they can get backwards compatibility over decades.
There is https://www.eaze.com/ if you are afraid to make a run.
I have that sorted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22597679
> I recently learned the former (std17) does not have a string.split function in the standard library

It's not C++ and it works in-place, but my manpages say "strtok" has been standardized since C89. strtok_r in POSIX since 2001.
Based on previous events, maybe not much:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/letters/central-p...

But that was only a one day event.
What's the specific outcome you're concerned about?
Something to consider for people thinking of jumping into the market via an index fund; in 2008, corporations were in OK shape to weather a downturn. In 2020, a lot of corps are very highly levreged. I think it's likely we'll see a lot of shareholder wipeouts. This will have an interesting effect if you buy an ETF. If 50% of your stocks get wiped out... that big bounce you might expect won't be in your portfolio. Yes, the index will recover it's value... but the composition of pre-post shareholders will be different.

I don't think the country is in the mood for shareholders to get bailed out unless individuals get bailed out first... and I don't see that happening.
https://www.proshares.com/funds/uvxy.html
I think it's realistic that we could see some sort of easing within a month - like maybe restaurants and bars can reopen if they meet some stringent requirements. But would agree that it will be a long time before things return to "normal".
You don't see the value proposition of peer-to-peer digital cash, cool.
The whole debate is about being too married to stocks and ignoring the wide wide universe of markets and asset classes.

To anyone else, recognize that the citizenry is not limited to being passively investing in stocks, yet many of them are when they shouldn't be.

People in all the other markets say "buy the dip" arbitrarily too, and many of those markets are often inversely correlated to the stock market. So just repeating what your favorite investment guru once said does not give you any more insight than the next person.
Not sure why your score is so slow, you're spot-on. This is literally the global pandemic we've been scared of. It just came out of China instead of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Of course you can be an amateur programmer, amateur means you're practicing something but not in a professional manner (i.e. unpaid).

A huge number of the people who program things like their raspberry pi or open source projects are amateur programmers. Or all the students and dabblers.

Same goes for engineering in general, if you spend any amount of time in a rural area you'll stumble on some amateur engineering genius.
I admit I may have had the tone of "you shouldn't think of humans on those terms," but I emphasize that the point I wanted to make was precisely that the reductionist economic perspective fails to describe how loneliness works. Friendship (and relationships in general) do not align with this sort of model.

To me, attributing these messy interpersonal connections to markets is somewhat handwave-y; it's an unfalsifiable just-so story to explain the behavior, and I think it does more harm than good to think about it on these terms. Again, I would direct you to the Atlantic article I linked above about Tinder. It makes a stronger case than I could that viewing relationships in this way ends up backfiring.
I had this exercise at some point while at high school and in the psychology class. Everyone had to hang a blank paper on their backs. Then the professor asked to start chasing the other peers and write in their papers what you thought about him/her in the most honest way. Since the paper was on the back it was very difficult to see who was writing what. At the end of the exercise I was in shock. I could not believe what the people around was thinking about me. The stuff they wrote was not in line to what I was thinking of myself. It was very hard. After about 25 years I am still recalling that episode. Interesting exercise nonetheless.
N95 respirators have a pore size on the order of 100-300 nm. Viral particles can be a lot smaller than that (5-10nm), but this coronavirus seems to have a 80-90nm diameter. That means a respirator might be able to stop the particles IF worn perfectly (if you have stubble or a beard, you're already screwed). They will however stop droplets from someone sneezing or coughing, again IF worn properly. Medical professionals get fitted regularly to ensure proper fit.

Masks are only effective in a fairly immediate radius: someone coughs, that droplet goes a little ways then falls on a surface. Medical professionals are in that immediate radius all the time, that's why they need the masks. People are usually not sneezing directly on each other, so that's less of an issue. What IS an issue is the viral particle that is now on a surface. You touch that, move your hand to your face (perhaps to adjust your mask) and bingo you're infected. Washing your hands obsessively is WAY more useful than any mask.

Most of the time in medicine masks are used to stop the medical professional from contaminating the patient, not the other way around (that's what you see in surgery). If you're with someone sick, it would be good to give them a mask, they'll spread fewer particles that way.

TLDR: Masks are minimally useful for the broader public, very useful for those directly in harm's way. Don't buy masks unless you're sick, or someone close to you is sick. Let the supply chain work for medical professionals who actually need them.
> As long as you are reasonably sure you can hold your stocks for a few years then just hold on to them.

What's 'a few years' mean to you? The Nikkei hit its high of 40K around 1989-89 and hasn't traded above 80% of that in the 30 years since.
Only police and fire departments, hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations, banks and pharmacies and restaurants serving takeout and delivery customers will be allowed to remain open under the shelter-in-place order

Fingers crossed for everyone, but one thing I've been thinking about lately is how this pandemic will impact the homeless.

Homelessness was obviously a huge problem in the US pre-pandemic and we know those often folks lack access to basic healthcare, have underlying health(mental or otherwise) conditions and will have a harder time with social distancing.

They can't as easily shelter-in-place if they're not feeling well which means they'll have to go to a hospital.