skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think folks who make these announcements or send these emails just don't want to screw up and copy and paste what they see from other emails / announcements that they see. They just don't want to say something wrong / stupid...

As for the whole "risks" thing, some random administrator at a school has zero clue what the real risks are at this point, let alone even medical professionals who only know of confirmed cases.

This is unknown territory for everyone using that phrase and I'm not sure anyone knows what will happen in a day, two days, a week.

It seems like a tall order to ask people to " But let’s be honest with ourselves and others about the risks we face and act accordingly, rather than out of an abundance of caution. " when they don't know the risks seems like a loop right back to "an abundance of caution".
Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.
Thank you - I blanked out who it was!
Containers with GPU pass through is tricky
Here's the meat of what I have to say (extracted from a very long, upset rant):

Stop blowing your goddamn noses at the table in a crowded restaurant, thereby sharing your disease with a bunch of people who had no warning and no way to get way from you.

Stop licking your fingers to open plastic bags.

Stop wiping your face or nose and then touching other people, ew.

If you are in charge of anything, train your cashiers to absolutely never, ever, ever, ever upon pain of death (okay, firing offense) lick their fingers or wipe their face before handling bags, bagging items or giving change to their victims aka your customers. I have stopped going to some stores over this shit.

Use self checkout. If you run a store, install a good self checkout that doesn't make your customers crazy.

Stop touching people. Keep your hands to yourself.

Stop touching things unnecessarily.

Stop coughing at people. Go to the bathroom to cough, blow your nose, etc. To the best of your ability, try to not sneeze at people if at all humanly possible.

Wash your hands. Especially if you use a public toilet, good god.

Clean your home.

Clean your car.

Get rid of your giant pile of junk cluttering up your closets and going unused and rotting in place.

Walk more so the air isn't so polluted. The world will generally be healthier.

Honestly, this isn't that hard. You already know most of it.

You just refuse to do it and when I tell you "Please don't do that" you act like I'm the one being a bitch instead of correcting your gross, disgusting, bad behavior that spreads disease like you worship Nergil.

My qualifications if you absolutely need qualifications to listen to the same shit you have been told five hundred million times by all the health experts on the planet and just chose to ignore:

https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/2020/02/perspective-and-p...

https://atypicalcysticfibrosis.blogspot.com/p/atypical-cf-de...

I have fantasies I'm going to start a website called Stop Touching Your Face, but the reality is it seems likely that project will be stillborn. Thus, this attempt to say or do something, knowing it will fall on deaf ears, as usual.
The people who don't understand this stuff, aren't failing to understand it because no one wrote about it. It's because they are not white collar or college graduates and are not likely to read The Washington Post in the first place. My father is the perfect example of this. He's dyslexic and so he struggles to read detailed journalism and gets all of his information from cable TV news like Fox News.
How can I be rich
How can I be rich I really want to be rich
you can't lockdown too quickly, because you need a plan for removing the lockdown, otherwise you have to stay on lockdown forever.

In this epidemic the lockdown is meant to avoid overwhelming the medical system while we get herd immunity (by contamination and eventually vaccines) in the general population for when we remove it.
This article mixes some decent points with some very bad (or at least undeveloped) ones. For example, the author suggests that police should never help landlords evict delinquent tenants, but there is no alternative presented. Based on the rest of the article I'm assuming he doesn't want armed owners doing it themselves, but if both those are out then the only thing I can assume is that he wants no one to be evicted ever for any reason. Which would mean the end of private property rental I suppose. Additionally, the argument that because TSA have allowed larger bottles of sanitizer, size restrictions must have been bullshit in the first place does not hold water. I hate security theater as much as the next person, but it's completely reasonable to suppose that the regulators have analyzed the risks and benefits of these rules and changed them because the situation has changed.
Zeno concluded that all motion was an illusion, so that's taking things pretty far.
> The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market.

The virus came from bats. The "wildlife market" in question sold raw bat meat. How else would it have gotten there?
Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things.

But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir...

I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry.

The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.
A few people die from it, and most of them die young. Facts presented after a preposition should generally be read within the context of the preposition, not as independent phrases.
It's a common phrase among lawyers, at least.
This is a minor nitpick, but people freshly out of college (generally) aren’t millennials anymore. Thy youngest of that group will turn 24 this year while the oldest will be 40.
Cardiac Arrest Through Volition [pdf]
I was going to say surely not the largest loss of life but you're right, the high estimate of the Civil War was 1 million, the low estimate of this would be a little over 3 million.
I guess if you put all the Indian wars together it might be more, but that seems cheating.

on edit: saw your other comment, and you're correct, little over 2 million is the low but totally unrealistic estimate.
Pcr machines definitely not in 6 figures, unless they are enormous in sample numbers
WHO-recommended handrub formulations
You don't need to rely on the data by the Chinese government, for several reasons:

1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

2) The numbers reported by China are also consistent with the spread observed _outside_ of China. You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases. (Case point - In Canada, we're importing way more cases from the US than you'd expect if there were actually only 1200 cases in the US. This is rather because the US is lagging so far behind in testing, rather than outright deception.)

The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China, still gaining momentum in Europe, and coming in a big way soon to North America.
I'm aware they are the cause of some colds. Something that evolves from a deadly strain I would think has more chance of evolving into a more deadly one than something that is mild evolving into a more deadly strain than COVID19.

Maybe that isn't the case.
Also 3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 = 6^3
One way to test this is to ask random people the question:

"The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?"

I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."
> What are you talking about?

I am talking about it being rude to tell a person who needs a surgery, potentially for an issue that threatens their life, that they will not get it, when you don't actually know. It's just basic decency.
> Amazon is paying effectively more than $2,000 per square foot for the midtown property, according to a source.

That’s... insane?
Not to downplay things, but celebrities may also be more likely to get it because they travel a lot and are in close contact with a lot of other people who also travel a lot.
Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether.

I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.
I thought that remdesivir was the drug showing the most promise? What happened with that one? And my big questions are how soon can they spool up world supplying levels of batches?
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321864

> New research suggests that intermittent fasting may raise insulin levels, damage pancreatic cells, and increase the amount of abdominal fat.

>
Specifically, the new study — led by Ana Cláudia Munhoz Bonassa, a researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil — suggests that intermittent fasting may impair the normal activity of the pancreas and the production of insulin, which may, in turn, raise the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Cheese & butter are pretty dang hard to replace, and yogurt fills a special nutritional niche.

By the way, you profess to object to red meat and milk, but you're basically advocating veganism.
Thank you. Same here in the US. If you are in the US and still shrugging this off, please head all the warnings. The time to act was two weeks ago, and we won't make up that lost opportunity of effort for prevention and precaution.
I use this as a heuristic for people/institutions with out of date risk models. It seems like it usually refers to a Coronavirus response that is at least 5 days behind the timely response, and often much more than that.
Trump Oversold a Google Site to Fight Coronavirus
Name calling will get you far in life. Have a great day!

/End of pointless conversation with you/
Sounds like the problem is with your manager. IMHO a good manager is more than welcome in project management and update meetings and should be a helper to get things done, not a stressor.
Yes, hospital-level serious for 20% of cases. 5-10% require ICU care. The ~2% fatality rate is with ICU support and ventilation. When the hospitals get overrun it increases to ~7%, which is what we saw in Wuhan and now Italy. Your chance of dying if you do need hospitalization but don't get it appears to be > 50%.

Death rates by age range also assume ICU care. It's virtually unheard of for healthy middle-aged people if they have access to good medical care, but plenty of 30- and 40-somethings can and have died from it once the hospitals are overrun.
I think you can draw a direct line between the personality of Johnson and adoption of this strategy.

Covid19 will unfortunately kill a lot of people. As a silver-lining, it may also kill populism.
Do you mean https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusSupport/ ?
Exactly. VVT (variable valve timing) was promising for decades, starting back from the early 1900, then in the 1980's VTEC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTEC ) was much more promising, and now this. The delay between each major step is approximately half the previous one, let's plan for a new one in ~20 years.
Be more selective about the air you breathe!

Take regular 2-3 hour breaks from breathing!

If you must go outside, leave your face at home!

C'mon people! Why aren't you listening to me!
They traced the virus back to November, but at the time it was not a serious threat. They just didn’t have enough data then.

Let’s put it this way, other countries have had a full 2 months of warning and preparation time and they are also dropping the ball.
I'm guessing you have nothing to refute because you don't have an opinion that matters. Have a great day!

/End of pointless conversation with you/
Most people don’t know what Alphabet is, or that Google and Verily are under it’s umbrella. I think it’s fine that they just used Google as a general place-in term for the article.
"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate." - Michael Leavitt, former HHS Secretary under President George W. Bussh
That may have been the case initially, but is clearly no longer true if you click through to the statement I linked. I'm not sure if Google was planning this prior to Trump's announcement or if it's reactionary, but the relevant portion is here:

"Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information.

This is in addition to other measures we are taking, including:...Work being done by our sister company Verily to launch a pilot website that will enable individuals to do a risk assessment and be scheduled for testing at sites in the Bay Area..."
Show HN: Kweb, a front-end web framework for back-end developers, in Kotlin
No I haven't seen that skit, link it if you can.

Louis CK tells a similar anecdote on Conan "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy". The passenger beside him is upset that the on-board wifi went down.
https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4?t=119
The whole clip is hilarious.
Yep. Would be nice if they let the user play around with the parameters. Might not be feasible to animate thousands of objects in a browser though.
You are missing the fact that it doesnt matter if it "comes back" or not, what matters is that the rate at which it "returns" doesnt overflood the healthcare systems.

This idea, UK policy makes hae will absolutely collapse the NHS.... But who knows, maybe that's their idea all along, to collapse the NHS, and after this is done, they will start passing laws to "reform it" and sell it by the kilo to US private healthcare firms....
Chinese App enters spotlight as it abandons GMS in favor of HMS
You change your status. Others would then know (or should know) your status before reaching out to you.
To think that with the modern internet, there should be less incentive to be physically present.
It's so crazy seeing him pop up like this. I used to work with Tomas on viral facebook apps like Astrology and Birthday Cards. Obviously working on viral apps is not the same as epidemiology and growth hacking.

He was quite a character to work with, and I'm not sure how to put this .. on the one hand his doc seems more or less correct and it's good that he was able to present things in a way that drove action, but on the other hand like you allude to one shouldn't necessarily believe things about epidemiology just because he's saying it.
Many people see no real difference. They don't really care that their personal data being used, because it's so ephemeral, untouchable.
Your presumption is fairly incredible. (1) I wasn't talking to you and (2) maybe that person would rather be informed than bamboozled with feel good news that ends up being false.

Basic decency is to assume that people can think for themselves and do not need to be treated like toddlers with feel good lies and cotton balls.
I'm in the US, no one cared about this until a few days ago. Now, some stores are getting low on food supplies, and people are posting about it. But, I was at a store today where they were completely stocked, and the only empty shelf was the toilet paper supply! It's insane.
I always wondering why CMake can't properly support filenames with white space. Is there a reason why no one can fix it rather than recommend CMake users to avoid white space?
Just don't distract me from what I'm doing: popups, interruptions, making me do something unrelated. I opened a program to do X, not Y.

Don't prompt me to update when I open your program, especially if it's a long update process. (Visual studio on Mac is a big offender, Photoshop used to do this, but I haven't used it in years)

Don't move text while I'm reading it.

Almost all alerts, emails, and other ploys to increase engagement
Covid-19 pandemic: An exercise of human adaptability
They only did that to people that refused to self quarantine.
That argument might work at a national level. It works less well at a community level, and I think stops working for any community once there is observed community spread there.

After that point it is mathematically clear that you're going to have deaths, and that similarly situated communities who react days later will have a lot more deaths. At that point the political calculus you're arguing for flips the other way around and encourages an over-reaction. ... except innumeracy is so common, we're not seeing too much evidence of that happening.
Silver lining in the epidemic that more folks might get used to biking to work over the next few months due to social distancing, so that becomes more normal and cities start to adapt even further.

General city traffic will be way down and bikers will have a lot more freedom, so it feels safer, so more people adopt, etc

Could be a positive step in making the cities more liveable
Those sound like long-term interventions. The main thing you can do to help the health care system is to act as if you are infected right now, even if you feel fine, and stay home to avoid potentially infecting others.

You could also order a quality thermometer, to help test yourself and anyone you live with, although it won't give results early enough to be reliable for avoiding contagion.
The questions were rhetorical. There isn't a free market, and yes, markets should be regulated.

It just seemed odd to laude market competition keeping prices low, while also complaining of people taking advantage of those prices.
Ask HN: What can programmers do to help with Covid-19?
What about smoked BBQ bat?

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/08/07/15822...
By contact tracing, quarantine of people who are suspect, and social distancing.

Look at taiwan , singapore, hong kong, macau. You can totally slow it down to a reasonable number of new cases daily such that the hospitals can handle. Just don't start like wuhan, iran, italy...
Earliest I found (in terms of books with a year next to them) is from 1689:

https://books.google.com/books?id=4zJWAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newb...
Indeed, the contrast is low and probably not very accessible. Their design system should consider that so it’s not up to some designer or developer to decide case by case during crunch time.
Sponge 1.30: A website crawler and links downloader command line tool
Ah, perfect timing:

https://twitter.com/judegomila/status/1239030650499248130
Especially those who have been infected and are immune. (I'm not sure we know to what extend people become immune though?)
(2015) but very relevant today.

The other phrase that gets my goat is "for your convenience and safety". When I hear that, my first thought is it will be something inconvenient that doesn't improve my safety.

You could combine these two phrases!

"Out of an abundance of caution, we now require you to $SOMETHING for your convenience and safety."
Here in the U.S.A. in Indianapolis, my 60 year old dad is out at a club right now dancing with his old people girlfriends. He is a smart dude (on paper - tenured professor of finance), but he doesn't think he has a thing to worry about.

I hope we get a lock down here. Many people are too selfish, arrogant, and stupid to make the right choices even when it is obvious.
The tailor daring Hollywood to dress differently
You don't have to lockdown but you should be gathering evidence and preparing contingency plans for different scenarios. The saddest shit ever is I assumed this was all going on behind the scenes and serious people in serious suits were sitting in serious meetings looking at all the China data and drawing up plans that would all get revealed to the public at the right time.

The last few weeks have been a sad disconfirmation that this is not the case. If even world leaders are getting this, it's strong evidence that nobody in their government has any fucking clue what they're doing (or at least the people with the fucking clue were not empowered to act).

Trump holds a press conference announcing this is a national emergency and even during the press conference, people were standing less than 1m apart, people were constantly touching their face, each speaker adjusted the microphone at the exact same spot and touched the podium at the exact same spot without sterilizing in between, nobody was wearing a mask and everyone was shaking hands except ONE person who did the elbow bump. Sure, some of this can be attributed to optics but they should also be demonstrating best practices if they want others to be taking those best practices seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-has-17700-bottles-of-ha...
This argument doesn't negate the fact that a "flatter curve" means fewer people in hospitals (or turned away from hospitals) at a single time. The fact that we probably can't slow the virus enough to prevent overloading hospitals does NOT mean we should just throw up our hands. For instance it would be better for hospitals to be at double capacity than triple capacity.
> "Hospital ICU units are not overwhelmed which puts a limit to total infections."

I wouldn't say that; reports coming out of Seattle look pretty grim.

"...Reports from the Seattle area, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, indicate that some of the city’s hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. One hospital’s note to staff, shared with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, says the “local COVID-19 trajectory is likely to be similar to that of Northern Italy.” The hospital is down to a four-day supply of gloves..."

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-hospital-wor...
What is this special nutritional niche that yogurt occupies? The majority of humans don't eat it and seem to be doing ok.
Chloroquine + Liponavir/Ritanovir may cause fatal arrithmias, in the case anyone out there is self medicating. It's one or the other.
Yes, the idea that only those 70+ are "at risk" is weird. But they probably can't afford to isolate everyone 50+ - both from an economic and herd immunity viewpoint - so they will risk losing 3.6% of people aged 60-69 and 1.3% of people aged 50-59.

According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/281174/uk-population-by-...

8.96 million aged 50-59, 7.07 million aged 60-69.
It's too late for the U.S. There isn't a clear, organized, unified direction of testing and action plan for all humans within its borders. That's the only way to get and organize an effective response.

We're canceling/closing off large groupings of humans and basically hoping/praying? for the best for the next few weeks. It's sad. This type of haphazard response drives conspiracies and confusion that is then opportunistically taken advantage of by all sectors of power.
For me, they create space and bank emotional energy to better enjoy the non-routine things in life.