skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One could argue that science is about falsifying hypothesis - and terby narrowing in on not just if something works, but how.

Testing the "if" is science - but difficult without a framework helping understand "how". Testing only if, in a vacuum, isn't enough - and it is a tool on the path to understanding "how". This allows such things as using statistical models (if one has an idea of distribution, for example) to help refine the "if" tests, and narrow down exactly what your "if" experiment tested.

I don't think you can have science without both, and I think defining a body of theory is the more important aspect.
And I'd buy things sooner than later.

I doubt stores have appropriate stocks for the change over.
You forget something. Maybe after first curing people get immunity and can get the virus again but it does not get active and test gets positive. People can have viruses and antivirus or a non active virus without consequences and then the test will be positive.
Even they recognized how messy Qmake is/was, and then started working on QBS
I still don't get how people - including apparently some governments - don't get or don't believe it. Getting this graph is as simple as 1) taking the daily measurements, and 2) plotting them on log scale (and technically 3) shifting the lines to overlap, but that's just cosmetics). The trajectory of the entire West being the same as Italy's is immediately apparent.
The Tory party does not require an election to backst— er, replace its leaders.
I have been largely unsuccessful because of the vetting system that filters me out. I was hoping for direct connections to teams that may need extra hands and who read HN, or someone in a staffing/temp agency.
These may be legitimate criticisms of the UK government's epidemiologists - I'm not in a position to judge - but I'm not sure it explains why we should be listening to Tomas Pueyo on the matter.
The full danger was unknown in the initial stages. Provincial officials were downplaying it for various reasons, and until the very end of December it wasn't known to even transmit person-to-person.

Once the threat was clear, the government of China acted much more alacrity and decisiveness than any Western country, which have had months of advance notice.
Italy <may> have a mutated strain . . .
I'm not really qualified to comment on this strategy, but isn't this going to lead to stronger exposure to virus specimens per individual, i.e. more severe infections and thus higher CFR?

The actual goal of the UK might be to sacrifice a few people to boost the economy while the rest of the world wrecks its economy.
> http://www.ox.ac.uk/research/everything-you-need-know-about-...

Thanks for linking to that fascinating article, by far the most enlightening virusy thing I've read.
I think the main appeal of a loud exhaust is that it most pisses off precisely this type of person.
This is a smart observation. The UK is now taking the conservative view because it's the long term view, that this will likely become a recurring seasonal virus (or a one-time virus that keeps knocking on your door until you get it), and therefore there's not much point in a national "lockdown" to "stop" the virus, because as soon as a nation relaxes its lockdown the virus will simply pick up right where it left off.

Herd immunity is the goal for the UK government; they are explicitly saying they want ~60% of the population to get the virus. The only concern for the UK government is to space out the rate of infection so as to avoid overloading hospitals. So they are banning large gatherings, but not doing a lockdown per se, if that makes sense. Slow the pace, but let it continue. (They may do a strategic lockdown later if necessary to flatten the curve, but right now is certainly NOT the time to do a lockdown, according to their strategy, because at this stage it would be motivated by an attempt to "stop" the virus rather than an attempt to flatten the curve.)
No—astrology has no scientific basis and therefore should have no impact.
If you haven't heard of them, The Thick of It is basically a modern version of this show. By Armando Ianucci, the man who went on to make Veep (with Julia Louis Dreyfuss). Both series have been praised by insiders who say "The show is just like what happens in reality!".

He's also made the movies "In The Loop", set in the run up to the Iraq War, and "The Death of Stalin".
One solution if inelegant would be to just move pieces out of the way then move them back in place. It should be possible to find a path using this mechanism though I’m not sure how many pieces you’d have to move in the worst case.
Deaths follow a predictable exponent too.
They're talking about how you, the room host, get an entire "user wants to join" modal that disrupts the whole UI every time someone wants to join the room. You should just add requests to the sidebar or something, not use a modal.
White rice is linked with 10% increased chance of t2 with each serving per day(1).

I don't know if poor Americans are doomed to diabetes, but it is certainly orders of magnitude easier for the poor to eat poorly compared to the rich. Boosting morale in the poor is difficult without cheap fatty/sweet food and drugs, other poor people have nearly nothing else to get by excessive stressors except exercise. Running a perfectly clean life is admirable and very difficult with limited resources, social standing and spare time.

(1)https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20120315/white-rice-link...
No, actually, the comment you responded to specifically said "You don't need it to be a bioweapons lab to have a virus accidentally leak out."

It's just you (and one other poster I think?) that read "it's possible this virus has an [accidental] artificial origin" and jumped straight to "these people are accusing China of making bioweapons".
China's initial response was terrible. When they realized what they had on hand and how fast it was developing they did what they could to turn it around.

That said, I would take any numbers coming out of China with a very large grain of salt; Italy looks way worse than China going by the numbers but I'd trust the Italian numbers more.

Also: it is much better to go by deaths and critical cases than it is to go by the number of cases themselves. The deaths and the critical cases are a lot harder to hide.
> interest rates are a function of expected growth

Again, you're saying that as if it's a matter of fact. When I looked into the relationship between growth and interest rates, I found baffling discussions of demand for money as it relates to a financial system completely unlike the one we use today.

I just find it impossible to separate the nonsense from the useful insight. At some point I just gave up.
> No no, I understand that. But the thinking is, and it seems to be backed by data, that the health system will be able to cope with a full-population maximal pandemic, as long as it is limited to the much less vulnerable segments of the population.

It really doesn't seem that you're getting it, because the whole point of this exercise is that it's quite patently obvious that no health care service in the world is able to keep 10 to 15% of their population in intensive care, which so far is the expected incidence of cases that require medical care.

If that was the case then no one would be bothered with yet another flu-like viral infection.
Yes we should be so flippant about hundreds of thousands of people dead. How dare you ask me to sacrifice going to a restaurant for that?
This doesn't make sense as the next general election here is in 2024 and however coronavirus is handled will be in the distance by then. Consider that the Labour government started a very unpopular war in 2003 and then won a landslide two years later in 2005 - and they were in the middle of fighting it.
Thanks verdverm. I got filtered out for lack of seniority on Toptal. I guess they like to keep there namesake true...
I am going for small roles/jobs here.
Was hoping for banding up with a small team/community that reads HN.
You are wrong.
Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine have already been proven effective.

Do a google search.
You can apply the logic of "having a problem with something" to anything one doesn't like. The current answer is it is allowed as it is legal, and it's sold as it is wanted, and there are penalties for misuse, incase that's not obvious.

FYI, I think this new car is estimated at over 500kph max speed.
Alberta has been testing at 1800 / million (7100 tests). For context when the US was at our point they were at 5 / million.
> China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan...

Uh, China dropped the ball for a full 3 months since the first reports of a novel respiratory disease started back in November. First denying it, then jailing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm. Not to mention not enforcing their own laws regarding food hygiene put in place after SARS which would have prevented the transmission in the first place.

Yeah, they're now showing containment measures that work. But they could have stopped this in its tracks before going global, or prevented it entirely.

Too little, too late.
A bat infecting a pig could easily happen in Italy. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Genuine question, what is the overlap of archeology and biblical studies?
Natural selection, etc.
> Every politician is the same as Trump and Berlusconi, they just hide it better.

Citation effing needed. I would argue those are outliers of sociopaths that reached positions of power, they don't represent every head of state, let alone all elected public officials.
gain of function bioresearch must have international observers, because if there is an industrial accident - it can affect the entire world.
I like the way a teacher explained it in grade school. She said to imagine we had a choice between two deals. One option is that someone would give us $100 each day for a month. The other is to receive 1 cent the first day, 2 cents the second day, 4 cents on the third day, doubling each day until a month has passed.

Of course we all chose $100/day. Then she told us it was too bad we didn't take the other option, because we would have been multi-billionaires.
That assumes you are sampling uniformly, and not in already saturated clusters. The doubling time is also not a known constant, as it depends on actions taken etc, and uncertainty in it will broaden the distribution.

Obviously, all this is basic statistics and should be known to epiodemiologists, who hopefully have some input to policies.

For large N_obs, this will maybe be less important as you're going to find the severe cases anyway, but the uncertainty is significant in the beginning stages, and it is unfortunately these stages where actions will have most impact.
St. Pete Grand Prix ticket-holders won’t get refunds for canceled race
Not sure why this is greyed out. I might not agree with all of it, but you're not out of line.
Well, existing stealth bombers (basically B2 at this point) are sub sonic while many fighters are super sonic.

As for range - that's a good point, if your low fregvency or passive radar gives you a big bounding box, your fighters could run out of fuel before they find the stealth bomber. Or it might drop/launch its payload before you catch it.
I had the same worries for Greece when in just two days recorded cases doubled from 100 to 200, but since the government imposed partial lockdown measures the rate of infections slowed down significantly. My guess is the same will happen everywhere. It's just that it's easier to see the growth slowing when you have an order of magnitude less incidents than Italy. We have to trust the process.
Would love to know more about this and how you've done it
Another directory of receivers, all based on the KiwiSDR Wide-band SDR + GPS cape for the BeagleBone Black, is

http://rx.linkfanel.net/ (map version)

http://kiwisdr.com/public/ (list version)
It's said Germany does not lock down cities and fatality remains to be extremely low, which gives British, even USA the confidence to practice herd immunity.

I hope in US we will not see this exponential infected scenario, finger crossed.
Something something 20% hospitalization rate * number of infected people >> healthcare capacity of any country -> a lot more than 0.5% of fatalities, + all the other deaths for all other kinds of medical emergencies, which only happen because doctors have to aggressively triage patients.
Point proven. Your political astuteness is well honed man, well done. But no one who works with you likes you, guaranteed.
Letting people past a certain age just die only works if people at that age co-operate. No matter how much the authorities try to spin it, there are more than a few "runners" who don't want to die (yet). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Article title "Elon Musk underplays coronavirus threat, tells employees that car crashes are more dangerous". I think that can be shortened, e.g. just the part after the comma, but "Ladies and Gentlemen, Elon Musk" is link bait.
I disagree that Taleb is "middle-brow", check out his new technical incerto book, from what I've heard its rather rigorous.
where did you get the 30-60 days from? is that also true if you are asymptomatic?
There are some existing drugs that help with the treatment but they don't really stop the infection spreading. Chloroquine / hydroxychloroquine are maybe the most useful.

Probably if they handed some out and told people to take a few as soon as they got a cough + some temperature it would help things. (http://news.southcn.com/nfplus/gdjktt/content/2020-03/09/con...)
No. There might be even opposite effect - antibodies might make subsequent reinfections easier. That happened with some previous coronavirus. As well as with some vaccinations that didn't generate sufficient amount of antibodies - some kids acquired some illness much faster than non-vaccinated ones because the vaccine wasn't strong enough.

Current coronavirus has already multiple distinct strains. Even if they don't mutate further, we would need multiple vaccines. They might also mutate to something more deadly, given the COVID-19 is a mutation of the original SARS with some characteristics of HIV and Ebola.

We are in uncharted territory.
Drugs are a solution for mitigation. They already have a preliminary trial result in China that says Chloroquine works. South Korea agrees and I believe is combining it with Zinc. South Korea has the lowest fatality rate of any country.
I wouldn't view it as science vs politics. Science advises, correctly, the politicians. But the ultimate decision stays (for the good, or bad) with politics, because they have to balance things.

As I said elsewhere, a vaccine is likely less "important" in the immediate, especially because it can have far deeper side effects, and no test has been done on humans whatsoever, while most of the drugs are on Phase III (earliest data should arrive in April, at least for the studies I looked up).

Lock downs will help. But they will help in the future. They won't help the overloaded ICUs now, because they're getting now people who had been infected up to 14 days before. In case of no drugs, the alternative is getting makeshift hospitals in place to lessen the burden on the health system, and procure more equipment. However, just as the government was extremely fast in getting people locked in their homes, it was not for these things.

> It's about a nation as a whole can do the right thing, not about authoritarian vs. democracy.

It's hard to tell when the same government gives contradictory or confused statements. Some blamed "the ignorant masses" for the panic fleeing last Sunday, but in my view, people weren't just well equipped to understand (plus the early leak of the document) what was going on. The media also cherry picks the bad apples very well.
I appreciate you owning up to your myopic short comings and hopefully you'll correct that course before those that have hitched their carts to your wagon feel the ramifications.
The point is that the mortality rate estimates are going to be totally out of whack without accurate measurements. As well as estimates of the currently infected.

This matters a lot. The first number is obviously important. The second matters so Italy can plan for whether things have peaked yet, or how many weeks out until it does.
I guess it might be flushed by cleaned air or nitrogen ?

But good point about cross contamination, still could be there is a mechanism to counter that, like some vapour pressure tricks or gas streams preventing fumes from one open container reaching another.
It's basically:

Throw 2 or 3 hounded thousand lives away to have less economical impact next year.

I.e. pure evil IMHO.

especially because there is a non small chance that it will be more like 1-1.5 Million more death then necessary.
I've been using https://meet.jit.si/ through OBS with family to share content/games and webcam chat. Works great on mobile with apps, desktop on web.
exactly. I don't understand why people are so eager to assign blame when in reality every one would be better of taking the good parts of what China did.
I fear that the situation is already at that state in the USA.

There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are.
It simply must be much more dangerous than the flu for the simple reason that comparatively few people have it and it is overwhelming hospitals.
Ask HN: Buying an open mobile device for development
Is there a mobile device which is hacker friendly and open like desktops. These are the features I'm interested in:

1. Unlocked bootloader.

2. 4g

3. Works well with android aosp

4. Open source drivers.

5. Bootable from sd card.

6. Works well with fuchsia

7. External keyboard support
> The first case only just made its way to our city a couple of days ago.

The first tested case. Given the delay between onset and diagnosis, + amounts of tests being actually done, + the couple days you mention, you may as well have over a thousand infected people in your city now, and you won't know until a) more tests start being made, or b) some of these people will start getting hospitalized in the next couple of days.
Only 150 cases in AU at the time Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson got it. Only a thousand in the US when two NBA players got it. Only 150 in Canada when the Prime Minister's wife got it. Only 150 cases in Brazil when the press secretary got it.

These people certainly have more exposure to other humans than most people do. But not so much that they should be making up whole percentages of the infected population. I believe they are just well connected and wealthy and it's easier for them to get tested.

You can't have confirmed cases without testing. I've come to believe these confirmed case numbers may be having a negative effect on our understanding of the situation.
I am willing to bet a decent amount of work from home folks don’t wear pants.
This reminds me of the old windows 98 times, where windows would just draw a blackish rectangle where the video should be and the graphics card would replace the pixels with actual video on-screen. If you hit the print button, you would just copy the windows graphic buffer with no video to be seen.

It got extra weird when you would paste the screenshot into paint with the video still playing. Suddenly you had a video playing inside paint and could even draw on it...

Aah, good old times :)
Off topic: I am looking for SDR project ideas for a signal processing class (something to do during lockdown I suppose). Right now I'm thinking of doing a pretty rudimentary auto-radio-remix project (ie sample multiple radio stations simultaneously, trigger samples to form a song) or some augmented reality plane flight vector visualization project (ie movement tracking using some kind of sensor fusion between smartphone gps + smartphone camera + radio ads-b data). Any more ideas appreciated!
That's very cool. Did you somehow solve autogenerating a training corpus for a new language as long as it's popular? Based on my impressions working with other people in the space, coming up with the training data seems like a big bottleneck - as the available engines are pretty good at learning new languages already.
For you it's not eating out.

For working families it's losing their jobs, their healthcare, and their housing because a bunch of healthy young people, that are facing almost no risk, are afraid to leave their apartments.

In Seattle we're one week into this and 50+ restaurants have closed and hundreds of jobs have been lost. Those people can't pay rent and now have no healthcare.

That's one week. In one month it'll be much worse.

By the way, you can prevent a malaria death for about $50 in Africa. It kills 500,000 people a year. How many dinners have you sacrificed to save those lives, personally?
I'm in the same position. More than a week ago I wrote an all-hands email to ensure that people realize that if they can work from home they should work from home and that we'd never force them to travel or be in the office if they do not want to and do not feel that it is in their best interest to do so. And of course it goes without saying that any indication of cold or flu like symptoms should cause someone to stay home.

As a co-founder/CEO of any company your first responsibility is for the health of your employees and those that depend on them. If you play games with that then you should not be in a leadership position to begin with.

Here is the full text of our email, feel free to C&P:

As you are no doubt aware there is a virus on the loose
and it isn't pretty.

The better ways to acquire it are to spend some time with
a bunch of total strangers in close confinement sharing
each others air. This includes all forms of public
transport.

These are exceptional (hopefully!) circumstances and I want to
make several things perfectly clear:

(1) You do not have to travel if you do not want to,
there is no obligation to participate in any of
the jobs in the next coming weeks/months and
not participating will *never* be held against
you in any form. You may opt to participate
remotely instead of on-site without financial
penalty.

(2) If you do travel, please take all precautions
possible to avoid getting ill, I'd really hate
myself if it turns out that we caused people to
fall ill (or worse) on account of the work we do,
your health comes first, always.

(3) There is a lot of misinformation going around,
some of it - unfortunately - spread by authorities
that really should know better. The current figures
are - to the best of my knowledge - 2-3% mortality
rate and an R0 (the rate at which the disease
spreads) of about 3. This makes this virus between
20 and 90 times more dangerous than the seasonal
flu, which has a .1% mortality rate and an R0 of
about 0.7-1.

(4) If you decide to participate but not in person
then we should enable video conferencing to do some
of the interviews, these should focus on the people
lower in the food chain at the companies we look at.

Please let us know your preference in time, talk to
Marco to ensure he is aware of what will happen so
that we can communicate it to the customers and the
targets alike.

(5) The virus outbreak is still in its early days, the
situation is *extremely* fluid, and you should make
an effort to stay informed and adapt your plans
immediately if you feel the situation warrants it.
Please do communicate any such changes.

Best regards, and please stay safe,

This was sent on Feb. 28th.
0.5% is a textbook number, not the sorry-the-hospital-is-full number, which has in some places been closer to 5%.
In Sweden we've avoided testing people who haven't been in high risk areas, and moved from that to only testing 'risk groups' (elderly and with preexisting conditions), so the numbers shouldn't be seen as reflective of the total number of infected.
they did the same thing with slaughterbots when deep learning was making the news.
This is a learning experience for those neurotic control freaks too.
Tracking hCov-19 epidemiology through genomic data