skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay so here is my dispassionate take on it.

1) everyone (>= 60% of population) will get it

2) the modelling that’s been done by the British government is probably very good and almost certainly includes more variables than the shut it all down countries

3) we don’t know enough about how the virus operates but we might know enough by the time peak cases occurs in the UK

4) It’s very likely to come back in China et al, they think in the Far East it’s under control but it only takes one person arriving in Beijing to reignite the problem and you’re back to square one

5) they are trying to limit peak deaths including a lot of factors I have to assume that is their strategy

6) do you go with the models that give you a way to return to some normality sooner?

7) what is the best case outcome according to the best scientific models we can get? It’s very easy to just do what everyone else is doing without thinking through the best path.

8) I actually trust the people thinking about this issue, I know it’s hard to believe but I do think the UK government is going with a view that there are more factors than are immediately apparent in this equation.

9) will the UK turn out to be right that stopping this permanently will involve herd immunity. Unfortunately the American/Italian/Western society situation means stopping this virus will be impossible so you then start calculating if you want international travel to continue how can we keep our societies interconnected?

My guess is based on a lack of information and a load of assumptions about this, but I think it’ll prove to be the right decision medium term. We are going to be in this thing for some time, some countries much longer than others.
It depends on your field. Engineering is a good counterexample.

I have seen the reverse where so many junior engineers make soooooo many mistakes that are absolutely obvious to experienced engineers. That's why we review things.

I would also argue that programming advances so slowly for exactly this reason--we really don't respect the senior ones who know what they are doing.

In spite of what people think, programming isn't "new" anymore. A "know it all" programmer may be someone who has seen the wheel turn 3 or 4 times at this point. I would argue that programming hasn't really had a significant change since modern (read: assumes infinite memory and CPU) managed runtimes (Java, Python and Javascript).

Part of this is that the fastest way to a VC lottery winner is "social fad"--you want youngsters primarily because they are "plugged into the scene" and the programming is secondary. The number of times I have seen junior programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.
Thanks for the insights! One thing though, protein folding is just one tiny bit of molecular dynamics research (and not really crucial at that often, due to the rise of high res cryo EM and good xray crystallography), so I would hope there are other uses for md.. I studied protein "mechanical" function/dynamics itself, and its manipulation by ligands, for example, and would hope that stuff like that would eventually seem useful to pharma companies.

But yeah, the md crowd should have tighter communication with the therapeutics crowd!

BTW just because you switch around your research-targets when funding changes doesn't imply that the research is useless. For example right now there is a lot of money funnelled into corona-research (for obvious reasons).

I do agree it's difficult to formulate how to ask for donations (money or cpu-time), you need to seem optimistic otherwise nobody would do it but research takes a huge amount of money and cpu-time and calendar time so there surely is a gap here between expectations and reality..
When I saw the headline the first thing I imagined was that the cockpit was completely sealed up and completely flat and the forward and rear view would be on a display so the driver would lay flat to reduce the drag. Sort of like the various SST designs.
I would say the difference lies in the ability to start interactive apps in addition to chatting/communicating
> So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.

By volume most of the "nuts" are roasted unsalted peanuts, which are very cheap, and as you know actually legumes.

I just have a taste for expensive walnuts and cashews, and like organic produce, but I'm not poor.

Everyone can afford peanuts, or peanut butter. I prefer roasted intact peanuts since there's less opportunity for fuckery like replacing peanut oil with palm oil and adding sugar.
The specifics are often not useful but one thing you'll notice is that people who made it work have some kind of a schedule that they stick to. 'Flexible schedule' can be misinterpreted as 'changing all the time'. When I see people trying that, they usually end up moving on.

'Stick to some schedule' is pretty portable advice. It sounds like you and your father both did that.
> 0.1% to 1% of the population unexpectedly dying is huge.

A lot of people seem to be focusing on mortality rate, but data from China and Italy show that people who get severe symptoms, but survive COVID-19 will live with lifelong scares, that make them vulnerable for say the next flu season.

So while 0.1-1% may die, we are talking about upwards of 10% of people being put out of commission. It's also wrong to say that younger people aren't hurt by this, there are plenty of young people with chronic illnesses, and limited immune systems. And even if they do survive, it may not be worth living.
Have you heard about the Windrush scandal?

It's (probably) not about the NHS but more about "we kicked out so many illegal immigrants last year, aren't we great?" (not that these people are illegal immigrants, but hey, let's make burden of proof tests that are hard for them to pass), but, incredible how seemingly easy it is for the Home Office to be heartless to the point of killing people via red tape.
Identity and landing page for a leading distributed ledger services provider
The phenomenal quantity of bugs and inconsistencies that makes Visual Basic so delightful persuaded me to start this project

It seems that Microsoft was aware of the poor quality of its language, as VB .Net is not backward compatible with older versions of Visual Basic.

I dislike the bad level of common Visual Basic programmers, often due to bad pratices imposed by the bugs and strangeness of this language.

Pity he couldn't resist taknng a swipe at vb and vb programmers in his introduction. Also he's inaccurate wrt to his comments about why Microsoft didn't make a vb7.
Indeed, and how often/under what circumstances.

Gaming can be perfectly a healthy hobby as well, when not done to the exclusion of all else.
Covid-19 and Jrmpc
I don't know how you'd come to that conclusion.
I also wonder about the virus laying dormant in the body and reinfecting like shingles or for example.
Oh dear.... Never heard of this but I'm glad the cold war is over.

"Alright chaps, let's bury some 10 kiloton nuclear mines in Germany in case the Russians come.", From wikipedia: "deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination"

"It was judged that the risks posed by the nuclear fallout and the political aspects of preparing for destruction and contamination of allied territory were too high to justify. "

Ummmmmm yeah WOULD YOU THINK???

"One particularly remarkable proposal suggested that live chickens be included in the mechanism. The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so. Their body heat would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature."

Ok...... Now I'm really wondering if the Soviets were the crazy ones.
So you want to do whatever you want
That's the type of tactic that mostly only works in movies. In the real world interception is very, very hard just due to geometry. Fighters have limited fuel supplies and don't move much faster than bombers. Any no country can afford to keep a lot of them in the air or even on alert status at any given time. So the circumstances have to line up pretty well to get an interceptor in the right place at the right time.

And even then, aircraft like the B-2 are difficult targets to actually hit. At high altitudes they are fairly maneuverable due to low wing loading.
Open source Covid-19 Telegram Bot
So since I have locked myself down in the home literally, I decided to write a Telegram Bot to track COVID-19 situation and I made it open source. It's written in Java Spring Boot.

Feel free to play around with it: https://telegram.me/covid19_update_bot

GitHub source code:
https://github.com/kasramp/COVID-19-Telegram-bot
No, it never closes because is a URL that you can always come back. We stay in there working for hours, sometimes with multiple screen sharing at the same time.
a lot more than 1 in 20, potentially.

With an overwhelmed health system and shortage of ventilators, mortality can exceed 5% in the general population. If that happens, everyone will loose a loved one.

That's why italy and Germany are desperately sourcing more ventilators: https://www.ft.com/content/5a2ffc78-6550-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea6...
I just posted today's update: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/

Denmark and Norway are less than a week behind Italy in terms of confirmed cases per million inhabitants, as is Switzerland. Spain moved closer the last two days as well.
takk!
I had shitty cable disc brakes before. With the same complaints. I Replaced them with TRP Spyke brakes and all of that went away. I'll never lose another perfectly good wheel to rim wear. But I can see how that is a secondary concern.
TFA is loaded with good advice.

However, there's one thing missing: Track your time, say in 10-15 minute blocks, with short notes about what you're doing. That can be integrated with your calendar.

I consulted for many years, simultaneously for multiple clients with multiple projects, so that was essential for billing. But I can imagine that it'd also be useful if you're dealing with managers with little experience of working remotely.

The idea of videoconferencing from home creeps me some. It's a privacy issue. And I do love working in bathrobes. It's comfortable, and makes for less laundry.
What’s in Trump’s National Emergency Announcement on Covid-19?
Sports cars running over pedestrians is not a leading cause of death
1. The play store is a privately run system, they can delete for any reason without explanation.

2. As a consumer, I prefer they clean up the garbage and malicious apps, install more rigorous and strict rules, become closer to how the Mac store operates.

3. You issue could be permission related, they have become much more strict about the permissions am app can request, based on the nature of the app.

4. It's hard to believe you did nothing wrong and that all fault lies with the other party
> And in terms of replicating, these are derived from stem cells.

All of everyone’s cells are derived from stem cells. The issue is still how prone to uncontrolled proliferation they are, not so much having a population of a particular cell type in the wrong place.
Terraform for everything 'outside' your runtime (VM, container), SaltStack for everything 'inside' (VMs and containers) and for appliances (where Terraform has no provider available) as well.
cum qa become remains in common use today.
I'm genuinely not sure where the balance here should be drawn. The UK is making the case that it's the best thing for the community for all the young folks to get the disease to protect the vulnerable so clearly it's not black and white.
You're betting on 1) a therapy being found in that interval, 2) that therapy being highly effective (no significant side effects), 3) easily available 4) affordable 5) you still have medical personnel with which to apply it.

I wouldn't take those odds.
You might find T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other interesting.[1]

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/127602229/Scanlon-1998-What-...
Because the average person is not an exasperated phd student with a strange dislike of speedy cars, I'd guess
Oh I've been working with git for ~9 years now, it's not a lack of familiarity.

Take AOSP, even Google had to overlay the repo[1] tool to scale past git. It's a hot pile of garbage that won't let you sync all repos to a specific point in time. Not to mention the nature of cross-repo commits are not atomic. Good luck bisecting a breaking change across millions of lines of code and build files.

I've spent over a week chasing down how some homespun tool for storing binary assets side-by-side with git works so I could get a single file into a build.

Last company I was at which was a leader in the Android space just put the whole thing in P4, branch per device and it worked without many major issues. Pulling source took 1/50th the time a repo sync took. Literally an A/B comparison of one tech vs the other. That's before you even start to consider prebuilts.

Like I said, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

[1] https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo/
I saw conflicting news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/anti-inflammat... which I regard as trustworthy says yes.

On the other hand in Germany there were several articles, e.g. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/covid-19-coronavirus-warnunge... warning about fake whatapp messages (seems it was forwarded voice messages) regarding Ibuprofen.

If your research points to University of Vienna, they issued a denial https://twitter.com/MedUni_Wien/status/1238782938344554496
Short answer is, not easily: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14610427

You can get the most recent tree for a repository (no history, just the current state of the repo) with `git clone --depth=1`. That's often good enough for slow connections.
YMMV, but my diurnal cycle is >>24hr when I'm working hard. And I take frequent short naps.
Note that Rust's "Cow" type is NOT an analogue of copy-on-write C++ strings.

The correct analogue in Rust are the Rc and Arc types, and the "make_mut" method that clones the data if and only if there is more than a reference.

Also the claim that "Rust’s COW implements the Send and Sync traits, which due to Rust safety requirements, means the implementation is designed to be used in multi-threaded applications" is technically true, but highly misleading, since Cow of course doesn't have interior mutability, and so can't be modified if shared between multiple threads (unless put in a Mutex or equivalent container) and it's Send and Sync because all "simple" types do, and not because it's "designed" to be so.

Overall, the author doesn't seem very knowledgeable about Rust.
As someone who might be receiving one of those reminders, I hate it. Sorry.
Palm Beach Reality (Poem)
Not sure what constitutes a moderate speed of rocks in the face.
I find I lack the discipline not to -over-work. When you don’t have clear boundaries between the home and workplace life, and you love what you do, it’s far easier to let work consume you, which isn’t generally a good thing.
A FOSS enthusiast older brother, and no consoles!
How does realtime screensharing with something like Netflix work? If it's actual screensharing, wouldn't it be super laggy and low quality? Do you somehow get each user to stream the exact same Netflix URL in the sense that it's not actually screensharing but rather there are just multiple clients (which sounds like it could be a legal problem...)?
It's not "nonsense". It's real. It works for almost every other virus out there (even colds and flu, even though it's imperfect: new seasonal cold and flu strains don't become pandemics, because many people have some immunity from previous infections). If you let a large enough fraction of the UK contract and recover from COVID-19, we have every reason to suspect that the society will develop good enough herd immunity to make further pandemic-scale propagation impossible. This part is good science, and reasonably well understood.

The question is on the impact side. The reason this theory seems to work is that the seeming danger from COVID-19 is all on the elderly and immunocompromised. If you can prevent them from getting the same disease everyone else is, then they'll be protected by the herd -- new clusters won't form and infect them.

So this all comes down to those assumptions:

1. The virus is genuinely of low danger to the young and healthy

2. The vulnerable can be adequately protected during a pandemic of the general population

If either is wrong, we're looking at a staggering disaster. Are they wrong? We have no fucking idea. I'm not even on the continent and I'm terrified.
> And the article (...) is saying that merely reducing the speed by social distancing--which most people (...) think is going to be sufficient to not overwhelm hospitals, and that life will be able to return to normal soon--is not going to be sufficient to get the peak of that curve under that line...

Sorry but you're either oblivious to the concept of are making an effort to not understand it. Flattening the curve is not a panacea. Flattening a curve is a last resort approach to mitigate a logistics problem. It's patently obvious to everyone who is aware of the concept that it's highly unlikely that demand for intensive care due to covid infections will steadily remain under the service saturation levels. That's a laudable goal, but unrealistic.

What you are failing to understand is that the end goal of flattening the curve is that lowering the peak demand by distributing it throughout time will enable better resource utilization with less scarcity. The goal is that instead of experiencing a sharp increase of, say, 15% of the total population requiring intensive care concentrated in a 2 or 3 week timespan, you slow down the spread of the disease so that the nation's healthcare system can serve a larger portion of the population, thus avoiding unnecessary deaths due to lack of medical care.
My understanding of squatters' rights is when you leave others can take it.
Mozilla Hubs – 3D rooms for hanging out for work or play
Let's do math!

I'll use US numbers, because I know them.

The current worst case scenarios on the table are between 1% and 5% of the individuals catching the disease dying (there are better numbers, but we're worst casing it). For achieving herd immunity, numbers like 40-70% of the population infected and recovered are bandied about.

So worst case, you're looking at 1.3-11.6 million deaths in the US.

Now, the US government values the lives of its citizens at $7-9 million dollars a piece.

That puts the economic cost of this strategy, in the US, at $9.1-104 trillion dollars.

That dwarfs what is happening in the stock market right now; shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense when faced with that magnitude of potential loss.

I assume the math is similar elsewhere.
I don't personally think politics are playing a major role in these decisions. UK elections are 5 years away, that's a lot of time for them to change the narrative if things don't end well.
Ya got me!
What Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks can teach us about peer review
Hur dur, gas baaaaad. If you don't understand car culture, and why this is cool, why are you commenting on this thread?

There are other forums to jerk off about pathetic road-legal electric go-karts.
> Keep things going until it starts to replicate in the community, then get aggressive before the hospitals are overrun.

How is that not a bad strategy? By this point the disease will have some sort of transmission inertia, so establishing containment just before hospitals are overrun pretty much guarantees they will be overrun.
"although being a pacifist i'd rather see Iran eradicated"

This makes you a monster.
Ask HN: What is the next logical iteration of array languages?
Having now learned kdb+/q, k, and J, I'm wondering what the next logical evolution of these kind of languages is. Static typing, laziness, GPU execution? I believe (or maybe just hope) that all programming is going to move into this direction, just like how we've seen statically typed functional languages become mainstream in the last 20 years. What's next?
Hackers are spreading malware through coronavirus maps
OK, but what's it good for today? Kosovo was 20 years ago. If the B-2's role is to fly conventional missions, the MQ-9 can be armed with the same weapons that the B-2 carries.
Is this serious? The title here has been editorialized
This destroys deep work. If you are paid for deep work you have to balance responsiveness with getting your work done. Don’t be unavailable, use status messages wisely, and set up an SLA that makes sense for deep work. “Seconds” is not reasonable IMO. Depends on your role, I suppose.
I'm the lead author of the paper you cited. Glad you enjoyed our work :)

Sure, you can break systems. That doesn't mean that they aren't useful! In many cases a system will see the same boring input many times over. People are often willing to be a bit flexible and help out when it happens to misread something. The fact that you can intentionally break systems like that, and that you can break them in a particular direction, like making them always think there's no danger in an image, is really worrisome.

Our work shows that your autonomous car won't always work well; that its vision system has some systematic error which we can characterize now. Adversarial attacks show that someone can intentionally make your car see a lane, whenever and wherever they feel like it, and drive you off the road. It's a whole different ballgame, and the language of attack and defense really fits well.
>All so that a bunch of man children can get attention. I can only some that it's a reflection of a general attitude in which they either don't care about the impact of their action on others or are completely oblivious

Again, you don't understand enthusiasts. You have a single stereotype based on the most obnoxious motorcyclists. This is pearl clutching.

Also most people live outside of high-rises.
The room is never destroyed unless you do that manually yourself
Clearly they have. I'm just saying that the word of each individual epidemiologist is not absolute law. They can disagree, because they base models on different assumptions. As a result, many, many predictions shouted far and wide by epidemiologists in the past months have turned out wrong.
When critiquing an interface, its gong to sound a lot like opinion. Its still facts that its not a good UI.

I don't understand how you can say "its rules are great" when I can't have two different message subjects go to the same mailbox.
As a physicist, it still feels odd to me they are talking about statistics with such confidence here.

It seems only SK has earned that right and has tested enough people to get reliable statistics. If you only measure the sick in the hospital...
> Because it isn’t possible to screen every single person entering a country like the UK

Why not? Personally, if I were put before the choice of not having more people enter my country than I can screen or killing off 1M+ of my electorate, I'd at least seriously consider the first option. Meanwhile the UK government clearly thought that even stopping the flow of people from an epi-center, fleeing quarantine (or at least tracking them) would be a grave over-reaction.

> You might track down some of these smouldering brush fires, but not all

I don't see why you can't keep it reasonably contained even with occasional flare ups. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it is certainly not self evident. Since the Chinese were willing to kiss good bye to something in the vicinity of $1T, presumably they think they can. If you keep perfecting testing and procedures and hold out till you've got a vaccine, I don't see that would not be a winning strategy.

> That’s how flu keeps coming back every winter.

Well, this is way worse than the flu and may get worse still, so we should be very motivated to kill it whilst we can. Also, looks like there'll be more where this one came from. Just taking a big hit to global life expectancy every few years will probably start to add up over the long run.