skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a surprising amount of well-intentioned but misinformed speculation in this thread.

"We don't know" is the best answer to a lot of the questions about Spanish flu. What we do know is that it disproportionally killed young, healthy people who could go from no symptoms to dear in 24 hours. There's a lot of speculation as to why. I've seen medical experts theorize this is likely due too a cytokine response, meaning basically that a healthy immune system goes nuts. Apparently there are other diseases that have fit this pattern.

The mortality rate is estimated at about 3%. Influenza is 0.1%. Coronavirus is somewhere between those.

Best guess of why the second wave was so deadly was due to a mutation that likely happened in Europe.

It's true we have things we didn't in 1918 but we still have surprisingly few tools to combat viruses. Fun fact: only one virus has had a cure developed and that was Hepatitis-C in recent years. To be clear, vaccines != cures.

We also have problems we didn't have in 1918, specifically mobility of people. It's that mobility combined with people being highly contagious while being asymptomatic that makes this particular diseases such a challenge.
https://archive.is/BM4Rf
Good article, but this one from Smithsonian is much more detailed. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-1...
Understanding SARS-CoV-2 and the drugs that might lessen its power
There are small factories - everything from workshops to industrial estates - all over the place. If anything it's much better now because CNC machines and lathes are cheap, widely available and very versatile.
I understand what you mean, it is much better to be contaminated before the system is overwhelmed, however if you are in Europe or US, that ship has already sailed.

The time you'll get symptoms in about 5 days, the system might be already overtaxed, and getting voluntarily exposed to the virus will only stress the system more.

And God forbids if everyone got that same idea at once.
Yes. But if instead stretch the epidemic out over two years with very extreme social distancing measures (if that is even possible), what would the human cost be in terms of food shortages, loneliness, fear, suicide, depression, economic depression, people with other health conditions not being able to get treated etc. It's not straightforward.
It landed in the Gentoo tree 12 hours ago :D
http://archive.vn/yfAWD
I would recommend functional programming, it definitely gets the brain working and will broaden your horizons.

If you are interested, we are working on an OSS programming language compiler in Haskell, and we are looking for contributors :) https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp
Your third and fourth points are good ones. I think the first two points are mitigated by using functions and modules correctly.
Not just cities. Countries.

The hard part is the basics - things that get commoditised tend to get manufactured more efficiently, and at massive scale this tends towards centralisation.

As a concrete example, in the entire country of New Zealand, no one manufactures window glass. Every window, everywhere in every building, ultimately gets shipped into that country in a container.

We'd also miss shoes as there are no "real" factories locally anymore. I think we make nails but I can't tell if we can really make bolts. So I'm not talking about cars, computers or aircraft. No way. Windows. Shoes. Bolts.

So OK, we're missing commodities, most industrial chemical processes, feedstocks, experienced manufacturing labour and plant expertise, all of which went south when NZ was one of the first countries to drop its pants and remove import tariffs. OK. I don't have a dog in that fight, there are reasonable arguments to stop subsidising things you'll never be internationally competitive at.

That said if all imports stopped tomorrow for, let's say, 2 years, it's surprising what you can do without or improvise. The main thing I think we'd really miss is life sustaining medicine. A loss of exports would actually be more catastrophic since our farmers would a) have no reason to exist and b) not be able to keep the finance wheels turning.

We're unbelievably wealthy compared to people in 1918 and we have a lot more slack and fat in our systems than we really know.
Because they did such a great job ramping up testing?
gnuplot and graphviz both are a staple but I've never heard of ministat so far - looks really useful though.
Sutherland was something like a cofounder of Sun Labs, so I guess he was likely to develop some interest. I'm afraid I couldn't track down anything more specific, but I'll keep my eyes peeled. An interesting point I did find: the SPARC architecture was later extended so that register windows could be saved and restored other than via SUB calls, allowing instruction reordering and their use for context switching.

The Register window article doesn't talk about Sun's experience or the issue of reordering instructions.
It's not just that. If you have a huge internal register file and register renaming, along with a few other tricks, then it's at least as efficient (and potentially more efficient) to just push and pop the registers that actually get used.
> regex is _extremely_ resource inefficient

No, it's not. Is there something wrong with their implementation?
If I say the specifics it will be obvious who I am because it was front page news, not that I really mind too much I suppose but I'll refrain for now. Suffice to say the question wasn't whether I did the actions but whether it was illegal or not. Turns out it is not illegal in the USA according to their prosecutors and we'll never find out if it was illegal in Canada because it will never go to trial due to withdrawn charges. Some charges were however ruled not a crime during an early hearing by the judge and the remaining were dropped.
Thanks for sharing! Decentralization is good for humans as it brings back to us what belongs us, our rights and freedoms.
I think there's a quantity/quality difference between the cities of 1918 and today. Even if we have more people in cities today cities in 1918 had much, much worse health and cleanliness practices and allowed much more opportunity for disease to spread.
Same thing I do for the courts and military: do my job and pay my taxes.
Snarky comments explicitly discouraged in the official guidelines, which you can find at the bottom of this page.
डी. जे बजाके गरियइब -Rajeev Raj 2020 Me Le Ke Aa Gaya Suparhit Lok Geet
The Worst-Case Estimate for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths
"In short, aerosols (<5 μ m) containing HCoV-19 (105.25 69 TCID50/mL) or SARS-CoV-1 (106.75-7 TCID50/mL) were generated using a 3-jet Collison nebulizer and fed into a Goldberg drum to create an aerosolized environment. Aerosols were maintained in the Goldberg drum and samples were collected at 0, 30, 60, 120 and 180 minutes post-aerosolization on a 47mm gelatin filter (Sartorius). Filters were dissolved in 10 mL of DMEM containing 10% FBS. Three replicate experiments were performed."

I looked up "Goldberg drum" and found this https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Aerosol-apparatus-A-40-L... which looks pretty small. It would dissipate a lot more in a room, and even more outdoors. How can we account for the effects of dissipation?
One tangential snippet that I heard but I don't know if it is true or not is that in Northern Italy, there are whole garment factories that are staffed and possibly owned by Chinese purely so that they can be designated as Italian clothing manufacturers.
When we saw the Chinese building hospitals in a couple of days, maybe we should have started building all around the world, slower. We had the time...
Also build respirators, train ppl.
Even now is better than later...
In addition to the reasons others have given (self-sufficiency, and it being too late this time), closed boarders as a general and ongoing solution is very brittle. All it takes is one infected person to get across the border and you have no defence-in-depth. As a short-term measure in combination with other public health efforts, it might have some merit, but thats all really.
Anything will be better than Java, especially enterprise Java ;)

Please compare it to a modern functional or array/data-parallel PL or combinations of them, i.e ML-family, Julia, Futhark, Clojure, Elixir, etc.
Stocks may be due for a near-term bounce after worst day since 1987, trader says
<pedantry> Regex with backreferences isn't really regex at all, in that it no longer corresponds to the regular languages. </pedantry>
Was there supposed to be an URL?
Why don’t you partner with Wyze, Nest and Ring instead of trying to go direct to consumer with your own camera? Direct customer acquisition and operational complexity of dealing with hardware, inventory, etc. seems outside your core business. Wyze would seem like a great first start since they lost their person detection partner Xnor to an Apple acquisition some months ago and they have millions of cameras in the wild today. Really all of them are trying to build the type of detection you have.
Look really interesting! I think it’s best way for social network future.
Per the other thread on this[1], this is in general a terrible idea, not least because the people intentionally infecting themselves with COVID-19 will be the ones overloading the system by artificially accelerating its spread.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565408

I'd also suspect that if the system becomes overloaded, perhaps because of an artificial increase in the number of cases generated by 'coronavirus parties', people that admit to intentionally infecting themselves in the hope of being at the front of the ICU queue will find themselves at the back.
Building an End to End Machine Learning Pipeline in Bigquery
Android Application with Ada and WebAssembly
Not so fast. The uncertainty principle has narrow conditions outside which it doesn't apply. If you don't satisfy them, you can game the whole system and measure anything you want.
Yes it will absolutely lead to inflation. But for the well connected banks who are first to benefit, and coincidentally, I'm sure, the ones who run the Federal Reserve, the money will get to be spent/loaned before it causes much or any inflation. For the rest of us with value stored as US currency, we get fucked.
No, the story is that he wants yes-men on the panel that assesses their efficacy, not independent scientists.
> The title looks like it's framed to say that you shouldn't watch TV coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak at all.

That is what he is saying more or less: "In any a good, general textual news site, you can read the things you really want to know about Covid-19 in 10 or 20 minutes a day. "
That sounds like you replaced one belief system with another. It is hard for me to see that one is necessarily better or "truer" than the other.
I used to be in exception camp, but I have lately turned to the anti-exception camp. Exceptions have a nasty way of polluting your architecture, they live orthogonal to the rest of the system but still part of the API and have a tendency to mess with every part in every layer & module.

With exceptions is it easy to end up in a situation where your model code changes UI behavior. Let say your model throws ItemNotFoundExcpetion, are you going to catch that in your global handler & return a 404? The proper way is probably to catch it in your controller & rethrow a ResourceNotFoundException to the UI. Thus you need to do that for every exception, catch & rethrow.

And not only you need to translate exceptions between layers & you probably want to translate exceptions between modules. The number of exception classes in your project starts to explode. You have to create hierarchies and groups of exceptions. And many of them are just copies of others.

In a PHP project I experimented with a similar approach as Go, unfortunately PHP does not a have good tuple type support. You can return an array from a function, however the items will be untyped so you have to rely on phpdoc.

What I did instead was to use an out variable for the error.

function parseInt(string $value, ?string &$error): ?int;

$int = parseInt('10', $error);
if ($int === null) {
echo $error;
}

Worked pretty okay. Still undecided if this is a good approach.
Coronavirus: Life inside China's lockdown [video]
> The main thing I think we'd really miss is life sustaining medicine.

Yes, we need flexible chemistry machines on the style of CNC mills. The good news is that they aren't that far away, at the next pandemics we will probably have them.
Google Lens Will Make Sunday's New York Times Magazine Interactive
This is a very poorly written article with no evidence what so ever, except for citing various sources and pictures of “top viral” specialists.
Where do you see MFC? This straight up uses Win32.
This 'illegal ones' canard again.
Unregulated=/=Illegal.
I totally agree with every word. It's so nice to see that the platform has such a solid position and ethics in general. Very good, guys, wish you a great success
The UK are not following quarantine and isolation protocols to mitigate the virus because they are trying to protect the economy post-Brexit.
Related: Samo Burja is a sociologist with a pretty tidy and poignant YouTube channel. He has a lot of stuff on human institutions (from corporations to civilizations), their underlying social mechanics and what makes or breaks them. He emphasizes the importance of patronage and apprenticeship viewed as a "social technology" that allow for the correct passing of knowledge that is essential to maintaining institutional life-cycles.

Short introductory videos:

Why We Still Need Masters & Apprentices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribdRDO75Rk

Dynasties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNIYEhjI2xE

Functional Institutions are the Exception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fanjkT3pi0

Intellectual Dark Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KPAD1UjpsE

Longer and very worthwhile talks:

Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge, and the Future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdYmuFyjWM

Institutions And Intellectual Dark Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA-YeBb5V4
Shouldn't Copy-Paste to Shell
ABRA because it jumps away?
It is sadly amazing that a huge number of people do not have a habit of joining muted as the default state.

What is worse, too many video conferencing setups do not have the setting to help with that - mute-on-join.
I didn't know he was a sun co-founder. I remember him saying that he had an interest in geometry rather than graphics, which related to chip design - but that link is to me a bit nebulous, and it was a long time ago anyway.

Sun would not advertise an horrifically expensive design mistake, so no surprise you can't find much. I've picked up a fair bit from random reading around over the years so I can't remember where much of it came from.

Perhaps email Mr. Sutherland and just ask? Worst that can happen is he doesn't respond.

(thanks for the bit about using other than SUB calls, I didn't know).
What's the window on that question? I believe that QE has baked hyperinflation into the USD cake by now, that doesn't mean I expect it to hit main street by June.
It's not as clear cut as it seems: I have spent untold millions on "DE Weather App" and this one funded by taxpayers drives out of business. How is that fair?
The problem with doing that as a library writer is that exceptions, used well, generally change the entire interface and to some extent programming model. It starts with simple things like returning values instead of an error code (and setting value by reference) and goes through having to make "factory" functions for classes (if you want to use error codes) and ends with all sorts of considerations like copy constructors in C++.

So in many cases, if you don't want to compromise on design and architecture, you essentially need to write the entire library twice, or at least the entire interface. Not really a great state.

>discussing "Low-cost Deterministic C++ Exceptions for Embedded Systems"

This exact reason is why I think that paper is great and also how exceptions should have been implemented in C++ in the first place.
South Korea reports more recoveries than coronavirus cases for the first time
Impact of Covid-19 on European tech [chart]
Show HN: Abuse GitHub Actions to track upstream file changes
Sorry - I am having trouble following this. You're saying Xi Jinping wanted yes-men in order to push the herbal remedies, and Zhong Nanshan wanted real science?
Dealing with Coronavirus Anxiety
If your original patch contained a mistake, you just send the new version with the v2 prefix to the mailing list. You can do this with git format-patch -v2 and then send-email will pick it up automatically.

You should note the change in the individual commit or the cover letter.
> ... due to a bad English translation?

Not simply bad, but like a 180⁰ of the original meaning.

Well, there is rich context to this. Chinese mainland media has been for weeks escalating the "herbal remedies" craze, and Xi somehow managed to insert himself even there.

Now the media (propaganda ministry) can't back off, because Xi will look like an idiot if they are to back off and acknowledge how foolish it is.

For Zhong, a man with a known anti-quackery sentiment, not speaking in single voice with CPC's herbal remedy peddlers, was enough to be seen as somebody not standing in line.
What would be an acceptable free for you?
Actually I was thinking more about scale than about absolute impossibility: simple things like emergency hospital beds and the like, a modern city could still make them at artisanal scale, but not in volume like they could back then. All those amazing efficiency gains we have from flatpacks, automation and specialisation come at the cost of reduced flexibility.
Lol you're both right
What, a true decentralized sm? Too good to be true, I cannot believe
Hahaha obviously the top comment had to be someone saying "hey, it's really serious and you should panic!"
What if I want to buy a device that is impossible to repair due to e.g. being inside metal/ceramics/glass?
I am not American, and there were infected people in my country. We had a right wing government then also, and since all the media is left wing here, they made an incredibly huge deal out of it. And now nobody remembers a thing.
Afriktrip – Taking the World to Africa through tech and tourism
“Lot of speculation about how Trump Admin will manage a crisis” (2017)
In France, during the yellow vest protest, there was a similar online crowd-founding for a boxer who did fight with a cop and was sentenced to pay a fine.

From what I remember, with some crowd-funding platforms, it is against Terms Of Service to rise money to pay sentence's fine. I do not remember if laws in France forbid it or if it's for other reasons.

Here are some links about it :

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46794480

https://www.scmp.com/sport/other-sport/article/2181379/forme...
Ideally, a government would quarantine all probable cases with the aim of extinguishing the disease.

But if the disease is spread enough (inside or outside your borders) so that is impossible, the next best thing is to reduce social interaction just before your health system collapses, and just enough to avoid a collapse. That minimizes both the cost and time of isolation.
But ratios only express rational numbers, if we had to express location in a 3D continuum it's almost guaranteed that it would be represented by an irrational number.
you didn't have those meds at all in 1918 either (and this was OPs point). and for the NZ case: did NZ ever have a real industry? With a 4.5 Mio. population today I somehow doubt that... As for basic industries (and meds): in western europe at least, we still have those things, small-scale and specialized, but we have it, including all the supporting industries (what we don't have is electronics, which 1918 wasn't a thing yet ;)). We needed to import the raw materials for 200 years. So?
I'd suggest watching the government press conference today where the chief science advisor + medical officer explain it. They explain exactly why you're wrong (and I'm more inclined to believe them after hearing them make the case).
If you're going to recommend your own product you should state your connection.
Oh, wow. I guess satire isn't satire if it isn't a little bit true.
Research team has isolated the Covid-19 virus
Already paying taxes and doing my job, done and dusted, so we are good. Next! Solving world problems are so simple.
This is bound to result in some interesting new paradigms to get around it
I'd expect there are 2 main reasons.

The first is that investors requiring cash to cover margin calls for all the other markets that are tanking. This is likely to be a reason for the big drop in gold prices yesterday.

The second is a general flight to quality as evinced by the drops in Treasury yields in US, UK and Germany.

Or it could be wibble. It's crypto so we'll never actually know.
It's not fair, that is true.

So I guess that the question is: Does society benefit enough from everyone having access to free weather information, outweigh the harm done by businesses risking bancrupcy because their product is now something that should be free? And also that other businesses start to wonder if it's their product that will be "should be free" in the future?
> I'd vote for politicians who support this. I'd happily pay more taxes to support it. I'd support the development of international institutions in this field. Is that good enough for you?

Have at it then, you could even donate to private research if the government won't come take your virus research money from you under threat of force. Enjoy!
Just basic hygiene is much better than in 1918. I think it's instructive to look at the Spanish Flu, but I agree that too many people are using it to draw direct comparisons. With respect to viral spread, many things are greatly improved today as you mention, but some are worse (such as the ease of global travel).
I got my first cell phone in 1996. It worked really well (GSM network) and SMS's were available. So I can easily imagine that if you relied on it, it seemed like a critical system to you personally or as a business.
I did not see the other thread :( What’s the protocol? Should I delete this one? Copy your replies over?
What if I want to buy a car that has no lights,breaks and pollutes 100x more then the norms?

There are many hardened phones that are repairable.

Edit: also a main issue with repairability is DRM and evil companies trying to use the copyright law so you won't publish repair manuals and schematics. Your ceramic phone won't suffer if someone shares a manual about it's internals
.
Evolution of the local patch is predictable from the patch alone. Violation of inequation is when this evolution has correlation with a distant patch. Copenhagen interprets this correlation as causation, hence FTL.
NetHack 3.6.6
Right? I hesitated to post this, but then remembered my own axiom: If you’ve thought of something, someone else has already thought of it.
True but I'd still go back to the UK advice: the virus is going to spread (we aren't going to stop it) so we need to focus on spreading the peak out so we can deal with it. If we force people to make drastic changes too early (well before the peak) then when we actually need them to make those changes (just before the peak) they will be burnt out and won't do it nearly as effectively.
I was not talking about hardened phones, quite the opposite, a pure design item, so small and precise that any breakage of the shell could destroy it - that's the current direction of the market, which I like very much. Who exactly will I hurt with my phone, and when exactly is it going to gain around 1 metric ton and be hurtling down a highway? Since when is it fashionable to justify regulation with completely unrelated health/safety issues?
I hope this doesn't result in a GDPR-like effect, but for phones instead of websites: "We're sorry, but iPhones aren't available in your region" followed by a redirect to google.com