skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They’re not really apples for apples comparisons as people don’t have the same abilities to make money in 12 hours that businesses do. Overnight loans serve a purpose to businesses that people or households don’t have a direct analog to use. I’d recon it’s more useful to offer a household or person a 1-3 month loan or credit line to help cover any lost wages due to sickness or fallout from the covid response.
Using the "Total Cases" graph (logarithmic view) here [0], it looks like Mar 1 is when the US's reported cases became exponential, and is probably a better baseline.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
You've ignored a couple crucial aspects though:

1. while I'm also skeptical re vaccines, we might well have more effective medical treatment options in a few weeks or months. There are a whole range of different phase 3 trials happeninig right now, some of which have shown anecdotal promise, esp Remisdivir.

2. We learn something new about this disease on a daily basis, meaning that in a few weeks we have diff picture of who exactly is most vulnerable (e. g. folks on ACEinhibitors, or we find ACEi actually are protective and ARBs are an issue etc etc
Is that dude still around? Did he not learn anything from going to jail for fraud?
I'd end up simulating my own HN on paper.
Ask HN: How can we help our communities and the world during this pandemic?
In big or small ways, how can we help our neighbors, communities, or the world during this challenging time?

Giving blood? Signing up as election judge? Coding something?

I don't know what might be useful, but I get the sense that the HN community would have a unique perspective on this. Looking forward to any and all responses.
The 0.2% fatality rate depends heavily on access to sufficient medical care. If you infect 40 million people at once, you won't have enough hospital beds and the morality rate will skyrocket.
The sooner Musk buggers off to Mars the better
What do you mean? I'm sure if asked Mozilla would not be in favor of this bill, but I don't know what you'd expect beyond that. Mozilla doesn't do much lobbying in general, $240000 over their entire history and that only started in 2018 to support net neutrality, and it's hard to see the corporate value for them.
No, you are missing the point.

The point is that the amount of money that your workers are making, does not have any significant effect on the demand side of who buys your product.

If your workers make up ~1% of your customers, then them making more money to buy you product, could only really make you around 1% more money.

The argument is just completely nonsensical, that you could spend 100$ increasing a worker's wages, and that is somehow going to get you that 100$ back, because they buy your product.

Instead, you are only going to making back, like 1$ (Because they are less than 1% of your customers). It is an obviously false argument, that becomes apparently if you even do any back of the envelope math at all.

And this is without even taking into account things like revenue vs profit. IE, even if the workers give you back all the money, the materials of the car make up a significant percentage. So, if you pay someone 100$, they give it back to you, you now have to spend 60$ on materials, and you now only have 40$ left.... so you are down 60$.
Your country (whatever it is) likely already has more carriers than UK, and probably will have more carriers in any moment of time in the future.

Anyway, this comment of yours is just offending to the people of UK, non-informative, fear-mongering and does not contribute anything to the discussion.
Maybe not programmers alone, but programmers working together with business/finance/economics folks:

How do we help small businesses weather this?

Gift cards have been suggested, and they work for some scalable businesses, but not non-scalable ones with finite capacity. Barbershops for instance have a finite number of appointment slots, so when people redeem their gift cards in the future, they lose future income.

The question is: how do we creatively come up with a form of an business/economic model that will help consumers help small businesses stay afloat and sustainably ramp back up in the future?
I am glad I missed that.
As a counter to that, unless proven otherwise, you can assume a significant bias in any article on government policy coming from The Guardian, as in the OP here.

That obviously doesn't mean it's incorrect, but try to be aware of all biases, there are plenty on all sides.
my plan would be pretty much what my country is trying to do (I hope) and what South Korea has successfully done already: tell everyone to sit on their asses while massively scaling up testing capabilities so that everyone can test every few days. follow up on every positive case, quarantine carrier and all contacts. test everyone (literally) crossing the border, quarantine as above. this allows to open the country back up while waiting for a vaccine in 12-18 months... or however long it takes.
I think there are some blacklisted video cards. I assume is is not as easy as you think to write the code that detects the perfect thresholds where animations are smooth all the time. I would like to assume that most KDE users are competent enough to at least google the answer on how to turn the animations off and desktop effects too (I mean somehow they installed a KDE distro finding a checkbox should be much easier).
From their "why," some Congressmembers require a full 9 digit zip code to submit forms.
I looked at that paper but it gave no indication of how the app was supposed to implement algorithmic contact tracing. I think it assume that that method would always be better than the current system? If so, there's no presented evidence that that's true.

I also can't figure out why you and are are downvoted for our low-key discussion in a days-old posting, so I've up-voted you.
I don't think it's a bizarre comparison at all. Many of the censored books are only censored in a few countries. They meet your criterion of being available on Amazon. So why are they special but the books disliked in America aren't? And heck, the "self-publish" idea could apply to all of the books in this library. They could also be tossed aside and told to "self-publish."

This is a question the library is going to face. I'm just asking the question. And heck, I didn't choose the most controversial people out there for examples, but I'm getting downvoted like crazy. The hairsplitters will blather on about how only governments can censor, but the downvoting going on here sure feels like censorship to me.
Why do you doubt they are prescribed in China?
The fact they haven't published their models worries me.

At a minimum, I'd like to know what their models are optimizing for. Is it "Minimum number of deaths" or "Minimum economic cost", or "Minimum economic cost taking into account a cost of $XM per death".

Minimum number of deaths probably isn't a smart metric, because the solution to that is to tell 99% of people to stay home in bed for the rest of their lives. Hard to catch a disease if you never leave bed.

Minimum economic cost (with a factor for cost of a death) is hopefully the model they've used, but it's politically suicide to accept that grandpas life was 'worth' $X.
I wouldn't say it's a broken idea. It's just an idea that doesn't scale. Working in a dynamic codebase - especially a Lisp one - basically means you have to be familiar with how everything you're using works. You can't rely on interfaces; you have to fully hold everything in your mental model. When this is feasible - usually meaning that you or a small cohesive team wrote all of it yourselves - the tradeoff is a huge amount of expressiveness. The barriers between the program in your mind and the program in the code get very small, and you can just make things, concisely, unhindered. This is all well and good, but expressiveness tends to be at odds with constraints, safety, and team communication. Lisp is just one extreme of that spectrum.

Personally I feel better having some of those constraints even on throwaway solo projects, though that might not be perfectly rational.

I will also say that Clojure's heavy focus on immutable data helps somewhat with this problem. You can at least count on functions not having side-effects. Usually. Hopefully.
Mandatory community service is slavery if prison labor is. People aren't doing it willingly.
Sources:

- Article on SARS-CoV https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/

- Article on Coronaviruses in general https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/256521#symptoms
Oh I would be willing to pay to put this on Sonos.

Amazing...
So far nobody has shown it can be eliminated from a region. To show that would require that transitional controls on movement of people end and yet the disease doesn't come back.

This is a disease in which people can be infectious yet show no symptoms. How do you stop infected people moving between regions? Do you think a "world wide effort" is going to successfully encompass places like Africa, central Asia, even Latin America? It's out now, it'll be circulating for a long time.
> it's not getting into large crowds and trying to stay some distance from other people (outside spitting / coughing range)

...which presumes you don't live in a place with high-enough urban density that going outside your home immediately puts you into a large crowd.

Like, what are you supposed to do if you live in Manila? Mumbai? Dhaka?

Pretty much the only way to "practice social distancing" in those sorts of places is to never go outside.
The Welt am Sonntag report says "US-Präsident Donald Trump versucht offenbar, deutsche Wissenschaftler, die an einem potenziellen Corona-Impfstoff arbeiten, mit hohen finanziellen Zuwendungen nach Amerika zu locken beziehungsweise das Medikament exklusiv für sein Land zu sichern." which Google Translate assures me means "US President Donald Trump apparently tries to lure German scientists working on a potential corona vaccine to America with high financial donations or to secure the drug exclusively for his country."

https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article206555143/Corona-USA-w...
the problem with saying "just a flu" is that you need to also say "but of course, people get vaccinated against flu if they are at risk", which we can't do for this.
I've heard that the Vibram shoes wear out really fast, as in, they get actual holes in them. The minimalist thing never really made sense to me though, so I can't speak from experience. At least with maximalist shoes, you can still use them with worn out midsoles.
It turned out it was a misstatement by Trump:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/politics/fact-check-copays-co...
Ask HN: Where is Google website for coronavirus?
Where is Google website they keep talking about on news? Is there a domain for it already? Or at least "under construction"? Searched on Google.com and did not find anything useful. Or this is another hoax? Please advice.
I've been trying for 3 weeks to get _a_ 8oz bottle of hand sanitizer. Good luck getting number 2 happening.
Some areas of Italy had a doubling rate of once per 2.4 days.

So Germany, with twice as many hospital beds, gets 2.4 days extra of reaction time.

Exponents are terrifying.
That's because flu isn't a single disease, it's a category of diseases, like cancer. People do build immunity to specific flu variants.
Spanish flu (influenza A) was not a coronavirus. Our anonymous friend's assertion is that extrapolations from influenza A don't apply to SARS-CoV-2, which is a coronavirus (otherwise we'd expect e.g. an annual coronavirus flu season with new strains every so often, much the way there's an annual influenza A season). That much, at least, appears to be correct.

I don't disagree it's a possibility, but influenza A isn't particularly informative on how likely the possibility is.
None of what you just said is responsive to OP's question, which is simply wondering to what extent ibuprofen increases expression of ACE2.

When you say that a supposed association is being debunked, do you mean to say that the debunkers are citing research that ibuprofen does not increase ACE2 expression? Because that is the kind of debunking that would answer OP's question.

If the debunking is instead "people are spreading unfounded rumors, pay no attention", then maybe that's useful as a default posture to hold regarding unsubstantiated rumors, but it doesn't help anyone arrive at the truth of the matter.
I agree he was a chronic pessimist, world is overall a better place than it used to be.I hope the trend will keep on, especially for the weakest and poorest.op

Just one point with suffering - too little makes us 'weak' when we inevitably have to face it at some point, in some amount. I still prefer it this way, but as with everything, there are some drawbacks.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

Soon mankind will be tested due to covid pretty harshly I believe.
1. China didn't need to.

2. China did.

3. So then there isn't any point to herd immunity.

4. Only younger people who are in good health. There are many disabled and sick young people.

5. It could be the new flu. Or it could be like SARS/MERS.
UK urges car manufacturers to switch to ventilators
OK... but... isn't that what everyone is being advised to do right now?

Yes but that's expected to, uh, not work. It's only expected to slow the progression.

One of the frustrating and anxiety-producing things here is that we aren't getting very consistent messaging from the governmental authorities and experts.

The only sane course of action the extreme lockdown we are now seeing in many countries. But politicians, being gutless cowards, are coming up with other ideas until their hand forced ... I hope. The alternative of actually believe this stuff and sticking to it would horrific.

I mean, everyone should be definitely be isolating and doing everyone that they can to slow the infection. But we are going to need much stronger measures than individual action. This is a real war, not like drug or terrorism wars, OK.
I know people with high-functioning autism. Please do not tar them with Elon's personal flaws.
Aren't masks and other stuff on short supply? At least Italy didn't have enough and France is restricting exports. Even if it is a good idea to restrict the economy as little as possible, how do they prepare for the moment when there are no masks and nurses will drop out en masse due to being infected?
> Your country (whatever it is) likely already has more carriers than UK

The UK is pretty high on the charts...
I don't know, it was already in very old, popular massive-multiplayer games like Ultima Online.
Most of the issue here is not features or limitations of VPN architecture, it's the decision to completely air-gap certain systems, which is a common practice in both government and industry with critical systems. Just e.g. "doing BeyondCorp" does not address the problem that workers cannot interact with an air-gapped system without being in the special room in the special building.
Monte Carlo simulation or hidden Markov models?
What's plague got to do with it? Plague vaccines exist that give up to a year of immunity:

https://contagions.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/generating-immun...
Verily will launch pilot to expand access to Covid-19 screening and testing
The situation today is:

+ treatment plans not well understood, but evolving rapidly

+ not enough face masks

+ not enough sanitizer

+ not enough test kits to identify and isolate outbreaks

All four of those elements are absolutely critical to controlling the virus, and all 4 will be in a much better place 30-60 days from now than they are today.

If you want to go the route of herd immunity, do so when you are at appropriate levels of preparedness.
I also have had bad experiences with scons and much prefer declarative build systems with options to escape to external executables when you really can't help it. Because the vast majority of the time, you can actually help it.

Having friction to using bespoke compilation steps is a feature in my experience, it means that devs will use standard build elements whenever possible and if a problem occurs the "wildcard" external binaries can more easily be probed and reviewed.
Just wanted to point out that this kind of response puts off many would-be users of any software.
This is correct. I was super confused for a minute when I read the original comment.
The problem is the alternative is even less feasible. Containment is very unlikely to work, and slowing the epidemic too much leads to it happening in winter.

The only thing which they should have done is delayed a decision on this. They are a few weeks behind other countries, and could have observed effectiveness of social distancing in arresting spread. If it worked, it could be copied (ina modified form) and if it failed, it would be much easier to sell to the public. Currently it’s a brave (but likely correct) position it would seem.

But then again, what do I know. While I’m a doctor, I’m
No specialist so my opinion is of limited value, and experts seem to disagree with each other. This is what makes this so difficult, no one seems to know what is the best option this current data.
This highlights a really common problem with many administrations -- where funding is brought down to a level where you can 'operate' the public good, but at best it's brittle and at worst it's actively damaging the people its meant to serve.

Once the brittle thing is broken, this is used as an example of why government fails or why we shouldn't fund public goods. The American idea of social/public housing is a poster child for this, but you are seeing it with the CDC today as well.
DeepSource integrates with GitHub checks [1] and via the dashboard, you can select the issue types (anti-patterns, bug risks, performance and security issues, style, type checks and documentation), which when detected, will cause analysis runs to fail and pull requests to be blocked.

[1] https://pasteboard.co/IZfSThC.png
[2] https://pasteboard.co/IZfT8uw.png
Best Python Reference Ever
Since asking this question, I have been searching online and found the following articles.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S168411822...

2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.25740

3: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0301_article
Just because those companies say that doesn't mean the Trump administration doesn't think it can buy an exclusive cure for itself. That they can't doesn't matter as much as they appear to be trying.

The Welt am Sonntag report says "US-Präsident Donald Trump versucht offenbar, deutsche Wissenschaftler, die an einem potenziellen Corona-Impfstoff arbeiten, mit hohen finanziellen Zuwendungen nach Amerika zu locken beziehungsweise das Medikament exklusiv für sein Land zu sichern." which Google Translate assures me means "US President Donald Trump apparently tries to lure German scientists working on a potential corona vaccine to America with high financial donations or to secure the drug exclusively for his country."

And the German health ministry confirmed the Welt story to Reuters.

https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article206555143/Corona-USA-w...
The only real network computer security is achieved by unplugging the network. And even then...
It's an odd comparison for sure. Italy has the highest car deaths rate in the EU, with 3,378 deaths in 2017. The Coronavirus has caused 2,177 deaths in just a couple of weeks.

With that said, the real comparison is the Flu that had 24,981 deaths in the 2016/17 season.
Short rates are determined by the Fed. And they target inflation, not growth. The Fed has relatively little control of the yield curve at long maturities.
Bild software that helps (especially elderly) people avoid loneliness.
The problem is the alternative is even less feasible. Containment is very unlikely to work, and slowing the epidemic too much leads to it happening in winter.

Containment has worked in Wuhan. Containment is being attempted after-the-fact in Italy. Containment is possible, it's just a matter of how extreme gets. But even the most containment does not look the hundreds of thousands or millions dead that letting everyone be infected looks like.
Opening this gives a glimpse into the nightmare that must be collecting and organizing these statistics. You can see that every state has a different method for presenting infection and testing stats. I can't imagine how hard it is going to be to get to consistent data over the whole world.
The house that Jamie built
One percent of one third of 328 million is 1.09 million. So more than a million, and those mortality and infection rates seem optimistic?
No it isn’t. It excludes almost everyone.

That bill is an embarrassment. Doing something about that is kind of exactly what I’m talking about.
If you’re eating out or getting food delivered by a courier, tip extra if you can.

Food service workers are exposed to many more people and typically lack the salary/benefits programmers get. If they get infected by the virus or laid off from economic slowdown the extra money will help them the most.
Yes, but the UK does call far social distancing as much as any other place? And likely soon self-quarantine for 70+ and other risk groups.

I thought the UK (and Sweden, Finland etc) differed mostly in not closing schools yet. Are there other significant differences?
This is not how you should think about making something new.

What you're optimizing for here is your experience. Your desire for tidiness.

To make a real change in the world, you need to optimize for the experience of the people who will adopt the new thing. For example, how would people using the the web benefit right now from replacing 802.11, IP, TCP, and HTTP with one monster protocol that just did the same stuff? They wouldn't. And neither would most protocol implementers, because a) they have to throw out everything they know and learn it all again, and b) they'd have to rebuild everything that currently exists.

And even if we push past that, it still won't work, because it's based on what I think of as the Architect's Illusion, the notion that a sufficiently smart person can just look at things and think real hard and have a perfect solution appear. The truth is that real products evolve over time as part of a dialog between and among users and makers. Even the simple paperclip, for example, evolved heavily. [1] If smart people can't get the paperclip right on a first try, there is no way they'll get a massive protocol stack right. And even if they did, next week somebody would come up with something new that doesn't fit, and we'd be right back where we were.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zip...
How in the world is that "anti-competitive"?

It sounds like you are saying that these workers were worth a lot of money, as they determined the quality of the cars.

So... that means that they were actually worth those higher wages.

Anti-competitive would instead be if a company did something that was unprofitable in the short term.

This wasn't unprofitable in the short term! It makes perfect business sense to pay lots of money to highly skilled workers that are legitimately worth that money!
Technology doesn't help once the number of cases needing intensive care exceed the capacity. Healthcare doesn't exist without technology.

Italy exceeded that limit in the last two days, so now they have to decide who has the highest chance of survival, and those people get intensive care, if it is available.