skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Modelling disease spread seems like the kind of scientific endeavour that one can dedicate one's whole life to becoming an expert in, and many people presumably do. Considering that, why should anyone give much credence to a random medium article on the topic by a 'silicon valley tech executive'? (lol)

There are 10's of thousands of scientific research papers [1], by scientists, on COVID-19 already, and this guy is just some tech exec who knows how to play with a jupyter notebook. I see no reason to pay much attention to him.

[1] https://twitter.com/freereadorg/status/1236104420217286658
It's too early to say with reliable data. We will definitely know in 2-3 weeks with data from many European countries. In Italy, it looks like the percentage of younger hospitalised people is 12%, but growing.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Or a lot less than that, if the B-2 isn't using gravity munitions.
Nah, that was the thinking before the pandemic, when "action" was either close the borders and crash the economy, or not and hope that nothing happens.

Now, I think the following consequences need to be taken into account:

(1) politicians have very little skin in the game (given they have priority access to hospitals, security, flights, ...)

(2) the only skin in the game is next election, which in the UK won't happen for another 5 years, so literally who cares (a.k.a. this won't affect Johnson's decision-making)

(3) capacity - NHS in the case of the UK - of which we (the public) have very little information, and the government (Johnson) has a lot - he might think that if there's even less capacity than in Italy, it makes no sense to even try their strategy

(4) what other countries do - a disaster isn't really a disaster if it's no worse than other countries... and Italy is pretty bad already, so it makes some sense to do something else (can hardly be worse than Italy)... this is also why I think Trump won't fare that bad, as long as the US outcome is better than EU (which is might still be, it's a bigger country with literally more space for people to self-isolate, and banned flights with China a while ago - not sure if that'll have an effect at all but it might) he should be fine
Fan of DFW, this is fun. Sometimes trash, but mostly fun.

"The shoe is a symbol of control and domination. That's exactly what it is. The sole and the nose are symbols of control and domination."

Why not train on the rest of his work
Third Person at Mar-a-Lago with Trump Tests Positive for Coronavirus
Headphones at Workplace – A Productivity Drive or a Sweet Escape?
OpenArena! <3 It didn't work for me (something about the v6 address not resolving, and then a stream of 'connection reset by peer' msgs in the OA console; too bad it has to be in-browser and I can't just launch my native client) but I love that this is a thing, it's one of my favorite games ever.

Edit: NES games also don't work for me, I keep seeing "Load a ROM file to play a NES game!" but others in the room are playing. Firefox on Linux, this is. Can I register a ticket somewhere or are there debugging tips I could try myself?
This is nothing like the parent implied.
Are you planning any features to help with online teaching (e.g. whiteboard support)?
Just what the doctor ordered, bless you sir.
But ignorant speculation during a crisis can have serious consequences. Look the fools in this thread claiming that the UK government is deliberately culling the sick and elderly. The last thing we need is ideas like that getting widespread acceptance and causing civil unrest and distrust of the authorities who are essential to managing the situation.
UK gov asks manufacturers to help deliver ventilators to hospitals
My intuition on this is that any strategy that relies on rather precise targets to hit in terms of infection rates is doomed to fail. There is simply far too much uncertainty about the exact properties of the virus, the behaviour of the community and the effectiveness of the various measures that are employed to try to contain or mitigate the pandemic.

The incubation period is something like 5-6 days on average, it'll probably take at least another day, likely more to get test results. So you're always at least a week behind when you're trying to examine the results of your actions, and the pandemic spreads at an exponential rate if no containment or mitigation measures are preventing it. If you get this kind of strategy wrong, at the point where you're noticing it you will have doomed your healthcare system and your population.

It is the nature of exponential spread that you will have to act before it is obvious, and that if you don't do that it'll be far too late once you notice that.
Also, the more time you win, the closer we get to a cure, vaccin or way to deal with it better.
So a gigantic engine can make horsepower. Is 600 horsepower a lot?
> Hospitals in the USA marking stuff up 500 or 1000% ARE harming society already.

Agreed, that needs to be fixed.

> If all shoe companies charged $400 for a $2 shoe, I believe society would be harmed, yes.

A competitor would step in, charge less, and win the business. It would only be immoral if competition was quashed or impossible, such as in a hoarding situation.

> If every company hired people as part time only so they didn't have to pay benefits, again, society would be harmed.

I don’t see why this is true. The only benefit of moral significance is medical, and there’s no law of the universe that states that must be paid by an employer.
This is pretty cool - I'm wondering what like, makes it different than just having a zoom call or something on discord? I can tell it's different I just don't know how to articulate it and I'm curious how you'd differentiate it from other ways to hang out online?

Looks really cool!
I don't think anyone will accuse any government of overreaction, given the state we're in - there's many countries, acting independently, with different outcomes / progressions of the pandemic ... it will be very easy to look back in a year or so (hopefully) and say precisely which governments did well and which did not, possibly even precisely which actions led to the outcomes
When it comes to daily essentials like housing, food, medicine, and toilet paper, everybody needs them - that's why they're called "essential". When you have a good that everyone needs, the market-clearing price becomes a function of ability to pay, not willingness to pay.
> The total population matters only when you measure effects that change when the scale changes.

> I see no reason why small cities and countries can't be used as examples in youth health.

This is not correct; you're assuming that every location always expresses the average of every effect.

In reality, small absolute populations mean more variance in the measurement/expression of everything. This is why the top and bottom of lists of statistics per capita are always dominated by small populations. Doesn't matter what statistic you're measuring.

This makes it very dangerous to try to generalize from a finding in an anomalously small population.
A lot of young people still need icu treatments here in italy. If you don't flatten the curve early a lot of younglings too are gonna die and fast considering the very limited number of icu beds and the very high number of early contagions the uk seems to want to reach.
pretty cool, but I'm sure people will use it to the bad as all other similar apps..
Indeed, you buy up time to get more medical supplies or figure out more effective treatments. For example, China is now getting over it, but is still producing ridiculous amounts of medical equipment, which will soon get delivered across the world -- even if you must have a peak, you want that peak to be after you get this equipment, not before.
I’ve seen this attitude quite a lot among younger people lately, it’s just super irresponsible and arrogant. In a situation like this, the responsibility must be shared, no one should consider themselves free from the responsibilities of stopping the spread this virus.
Coronavirus Immune: 4 HR Priorities to Protect Workplace
Could you tell me why rice and beans are problematic? The studies I know are typically in favor of these kinds of food. Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people. Is this some kind of carb-phobia?
> If the end goal is to have availability to sanitation supplies across the population to prevent the spread, then surge pricing is not the answer.

That is just an assertion with no justification that goes against all standard economic theory.
There code is open source: https://github.com/snipsco

Though there are about 100 repositories there. I am not sure if it is easy to put it all together.
Genesis P-Orridge has died
> That said, no car is really loud sub ~3000 rpm, at least not in the way I imagine you're implying.

As someone who loves cars, I wildly disagree. There are modded cars that idle across the street that wake me up through my double-paned windows. A very popular mod is to add a downpipe to some cars, which is illegal in California (for emissions reasons), but people still do it and holy fuck it is just so god damn loud. It's great at the race track, not so great when you want to sleep. Sometimes cars are just loud and obnoxious.
OBE is a political honour, not a scientific one.
Especially the 2% figure holds when intensive care is available. But if you plan to let millions get infected at the same time, there won't be any intensive care- there will probably be no care at all.
awesome work!

how are you funding this? what are the backend requirements on your part to run this site?
Downvoters of this post are discouraging commenters who offer direct personal experience and fact-based arguments, just because they disagree. They should be ashamed.
Codecademy Donates 10k Scholarships for Students Affected by Covid-19
I think I will bother, the use cases are valid and worthwhile to pursue for multiple reasons, many of which aren't even on my radar. Bonus: I can have my cake AND eat it too.
I really wonder why we can't all just slow down the money circulation. There are many business and people endangered by the situation? They can't earn enough money? Well they don't have to pay the full price for basic needs, mortgages etc. People living on this stop gaining money like before? Discounts for them as well, they just keep working for the greater good because we are in a unique situation. Rinse and repeat until we go full circle.

What's the problem here?

The (totally made up number) 15-20% of greedy people who put money first no matter what.

It's really sad.
You could think of this as the advantage of a decentralized world with every country making decisions and experimenting independently. Maybe the UK's approach is the right one, maybe it isn't. If it turns out to be more effective we'll learn something useful for future pandemics. If not then only the UK goes down the drain and we'll still learn something from it. Best of luck.
But that's with the assumption the health system doesn't get overwhelmed. Once we run out of available oxygen, ventilators and ecmos that number starts to shoot up.
Expanding on this observation - mitigating in this manner means the two parties would have to use absurd amounts of time and computing power to calculate the initial hashes to communicate. Not very practical in many cases.
Interesting view, thanks. (:
My siblings are 10+ years younger than me, and have very little technical savvy, despite holding advanced hard science degrees, whereas such things are of my profession. I think part of the difference was growing up in an era where I could break things easily, and would have to understand and investigate them in order to fix them. More modernly, this sort of understanding isn't needed, so unless you have a burning curiosity, there isn't an ambient technical nourishment that is required to imbibe. No eLan Vital, as it were.
Not everyone is scalping, but everyone is buying more for themselves because they're suddenly worried about future supply. There would still be a temporary shortage without the scalpers, maybe slightly less severe.
There's something about a computer's file system that makes it a difficult thing for people to learn from scratch. I suspect it's something to do with how folders can be nested inside other folders to an almost infinite degree, and how nothing in the real world really behaves that way.

I tried explaining folders to my uncle once. He said "I don't need to understand all that mumbo jumbo, just tell me the steps!" What he wanted me to do was write down the folders he needed to double-click, and the order he needed to double-click them in, depending on whether he wanted to get to photos, music, or whatever. To him, that was easier than taking the time to learn what was actually happening in front of him.
updated:

Agree low torque requirements help, which has a lot to do with the rest of the drivetrain, i.e. how you want to actually deliver power and at what speeds.
The MAA Math Meme and Cartoon Contest in Lieu of Southeastern Section Meeting
Haha, that's actually amazing fact, lol.

Let's create a CONFIGURATOR language (and secretly hide Go underneath)!
Because the models the government's epidemiologists are using explicitly don't account for all possible actions.

Back when this was taking off in China, a bunch of epidemiologists came out and said it was completely uncontrollable there. They were wrong, because they hadn't accounted for the extreme actions the Chinese government was willing to take; it was not even a possibility in the models. The same story repeated itself for Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. They defeated the models by taking effective actions that were "out of the training data" for epidemiology. Given these 5 examples, there's no reason other countries can't defeat the models too.
I wasn’t aware of this - and it’s a testament to the fact that sometimes there are no second chances after image and trust is destroyed.
This is cool, I'm especially interested in YouTube synching so I can share videos with my daughter when she is at her moms. Also so she can chat with her friends while school is canceled and they can watch stuff together. (hopefully being able to talk to each other too?)
He was saying this in Baton Rouge on Thursday.
The Aesthetic Splendor of “The Simpsons”
Well right here I see a simplistic reduction of a complex country and people.

Perhaps it's just a human tendency :-)
I take it as.. yes? That it would do good for configuration as it is simple? (:
Touch typing really pays off when you're typing in things like notes. It literally doubles the speed because you can do it in one operation rather than two.

The touchscreens of today make touch typing impossible.

Also, with my laptop and its cramped, wretched keyboard, I use a full size bluetooth one (they are surprisingly hard to find) to touchtype on. I hate how every keyboard maker has to "innovate" by moving all the non-Qwerty keys around randomly.
Yup, it seems to me that the optimal missile would use mid-course guidance before doing IR / visual light homing in the terminal phase.
Why do you value the idea of preventing people from meeting demand for a good or service? You are advocating for some magical price point that is morally virtuous regardless of the context and dynamic nature of supply and demand. Why? Why do you think that is better than actually incentivising people to satisfy demand by increasing supply or alternatively to signal to those people making irrational decisions that there is a cost to the irationality?

You are choosing to create shortages and encourage irrational purchasing behavior because it is better to "inflict a social cost". I just don't understand that tradeoff.
This is the same thing China is doing, except China is also lying about it and saying they have "contained" it with extreme quarantine, in part to trick other nations into doing the same thing to tank their economies while China is going back to work and letting the virus spread.

Good for UK to step up amidst hysteria. Hopefully other democratic nations will follow suit.
I know that the Red Cross in Denmark are doing it currently, maybe you could try and contact your local branch of it or a similar organisation.
Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding sales?
Recently, I've become interested in how to sell: searching for pain points of clients, questions to ask on sales calls, working with objections, etc. Any good book recommendations?
How would you make a government of 8 billion people reasonably run? I mean the mechanics of it - if your definition of "reasonably run" includes being democratic, and the arrangement is the usual representative democracy, it's not going to be very representative in practice, because a single person can't meaningfully represent millions.
Yes, I love the immutability there!
>'recent studies show you guys are the second largest cloud provider by number of server instances, second only to Amazon'

It is just like any theory of economics. You can have a huge number of $5 Droplet ( aka Instances ), but limited number of high end. Imagine of you have a Million instances and 90% of those are $5, that is only $4.5M monthly revenue.

Having said that, I seriously doubt that studies to be correct. Because there is no way of knowing AWS's true number of instances. And that sentence actually said "serve out", which means they could be counting instances or Address that serve directly to the internet. i.e Excluding instances that are not served on Internet, or background instances. You can spin whatever way you want, by the only single source of truth ( At least at this point in my life and current knowledge tells me, ) Revenue dont lie. You can muddle around with Margin, Net Income etc. But Raw Revenue speaks volume.

Another point worth mentioning is these sentences are often without context, much like the recent headline "Dow has the largest drop in history", ( or a slightly better headline would be) "Dow has the largest point drop in history". It is irrelevant without knowing the percentage. Dropping 10,000 point when Dow is 1 million would only equate to 1%.
Not to mention A16z is a board member of DO, so a clear conflict of interest and remember to read it with cautious, as they are designed to trick its reader into thinking, for this instances ( no pun intended ), DO is the 2nd Cloud Provider. So they could market themselves as big enough for many other customer.

> i can accept this. but are all "new cloud startups" doomed this way? (I work at Netlify so I have a vested interest in this haha). At some point there's some sort of Glass Ceiling where you run out of everyone willing to Not Buy IBM.. and then the Big 3 clouds just clone you and run away with it? seems pretty bleak for the risk/reward of innovation/VC money.

Absolutely not. History has been clear most big companies fail to innovate. I will point you to a tweet from the same A16z BE [1], "Zoom, Shopify and Stripe are three fun examples of companies that were obviously impossible because the 'tech giants can easily expand into new areas and squash competition'. And Zoom wasn't even doing anything 'new'. Combined value of $123bn."

And for DO, they are still doing great. They are growing, just not as fast as they were, they are not aiming to be AWS or Azure, they are perfectly happy within the 2nd Tier in Cloud Hosting. They are expanding SaaS model with Managed Database. The market itself is still growing, there are plenty of space for everybody, including Netifly. Which in its own niche is possibly the best there is.

No one has even reached or seen the ceiling yet. Not for another 5+ years at least. And when that point is reach, you pivot into other relevant thing. Apple didn't start by making a Phone.

[1] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1234622648363163649...
> No one will be able to afford an electric car.

I realize my opinion may not be the mainstream one, but I think the 2008 financial crisis did more good for the environment than all the "green investments" of the past few decades.

> the stress of the main earner being unemployed

That can indeed be a problem for families. I hope the crisis will bring about some reduction in consumption/travel, downshifting, rethinking of priorities, simpler living.
Nice art works and slick experience. Some suggestions

1. While waiting for the art to be generated, get the user to do a hot-or-not between some existing art to get a better sense of what they like and then generate them something

2. Have a little more feedback on how much longer they'll need to wait while generating

3. Once generated, show the artwork framed and hanging somewhere not just the rendering

4. When a user kicks off a job, kick off a bunch in parallel using some other styles in case the style they pick really doesn't work well.
> so preventing breakouts is just flat out not possible

Why not?
Oops, of course!
I got the same impression. Those photographs are attention-grabbing but call for a separate article, perhaps on photography, or sports or movement. Besides, the shadows don't align in the same perspective since the photographer took pictures at different times of the day to compose single images, which is even more distracting.

You can find a link to the whole series at the end of the article if interested in photography: http://pellecass.com/crowded-fields-2017-/1
If you are well informed you could just cook once a week and eat that. I do that on the weekend with my family of five and it's quite a nice ritual. We cook rice and potatoes, put beans and sauce on top. And then put it in 20 containers for the week. I can prepare these meals within 2 minutes with a microwave. Breakfast is basically the same every day: Oat meal with some fruits. In the evening we eat bread with spread (which we also make on the weekend).

I would say we spend way less on food than your typical American. It's really THAT cheap. Also we have a lot of food for CoViD-19 as we store a lot of food in our cellar all year around (lentils, whole oats, canned beans, etc.).

Ah, and we are not poor in any way. I'm among top 5% in Germany. I think it's just healthy and sustainable (for the same reason we don't own a car).
But where is South Korea going with its strategy - are they going to keep doing that forever? And whats China's long term strategy? Wuhan is still locked down.
I worry more about parked cars, and people in them opening doors than I do about buses. Buses have the exit on the other side, so they are very safe.
In your A: situation you are explicitly saying that the normal suppliers are not raising the price. I am saying that the best solution to this problem is for the normal suppliers to raise their prices so that scalpers are disencentivized and regular consumers are judicious in their purchases.

So you are forcing a false choice between your A and B scenarios.
> keep it ticking along there nicely through the spring and summer and have this thing wrapped up by the end of the year. It could all go very badly wrong.

It certainly will go badly wrong. If you use all your NHS capacity for treating COVID-19 alone, and expect the majority of the population to get it, and don't want to overload the NHS, then simple estimates that anybody can make indicate that you're going to need to keep it "ticking" for 100 years. Any faster, and you will overload and cause the death rate to soar.

The government surely knows this, so I don't know why they're acting like they don't.
Then why are they out? They have no excuse. My parents are older and so I'm not going to visit them, and instead call regularly. That's unfortunate but that's the safest thing to do.
THe strategy in Asia seems to keep the virus under control but people in those countries are much more disciplined than European, not sure the measures they take would be as much effective in Europe.

The strategy of UK seems valid as long as you protect the more vulnerable, which they don't do.

What is the strategy after a lock down? You go back to work? It needs only one person infected to get the virus propagating again...
At the very least it might show humans on Mars!