skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shouldn't the burden of proof go the other way around? You seem to be arguing that a product must exist unless the putative author denies it exists?
If you make a bunch of assumptions about the distribution, you don't need a large sample size to make decent estimations about the population. Of course, the only way that works is with random or stratified random sampling. With reporting bias, I'm not sure any country has enough data to make statistically confident statements with any precision.

Folks with a stronger statistics background are welcome to correct me.
> one butcher that isn't paying attention

What are you suggesting exactly--that a slightly inattentive butcher wouldn't notice the difference between a leg of pork and a bat?
This is one of those times where it gets bad so quickly by the time you're starting to respond it's too late.
You understand wrong and these common arguments can be easily seen to have incorrect arithmetic.

There are no countries with mass infections where the fatality rate is plausibly below 1%. Of course, when the health system is overwhelmed, the fatality rate can be 4-5%. But let's just look at a 1% fatality rate to start with.

The US population is 327,000,000. Seventy percent of that is 228,900,000. One percent of that 2,289,000; A little more than two million people if we assume 70% infection and an orderly health care system. But that horrible figure isn't plausible.

Because there's more. Claims you can avoid the overwhelming of the health care system are clearly false. Dividing, assuming, unrealistically that the event could be divided evenly through a year, that means that, that many people dying in a year (365) involves 6271 people dying per day and ten times that many people, ~62,000 people, arriving very sick at hospitals, per day throughout the year. And that is far, far more than could be handled by the US health care system.

Moreover, spreading the deaths evenly is inherently unrealistic, the situation of "flattening the curve" (a good thing in itself), can't stop exponential growth as such. If you decrease the doubling time of a exponential curve, you still have a situation where most of the area, most of the deaths in this case, is in the last double. So the even supposedly flattened curve won't let things go smoothly IF we assume "everyone will get this". And that promises not just 2 million but 10 millions (at the 5% death rate). If assume the US current has 10,000 infections, we approximately 12 "doublings" away from 228,900,000 infections (70% of the population). If we slow the progression to year, half the infection will still happen in the last month, with 10% of those "serious", that 763,000 needing attention per day. We're now talking corpses in the streets levels of horror. And we'd have further deaths from this breakdown situation.

And back to the lockdown scenario. My answer is that Lockdowns are absolutely necessary and thankfully it seems likely in most situations they are coming. The figures above should show that alternative is effectively going to be complete breakdown of the health care system and effectively society.
I think what you'll find is that a lot of companies do this sort of thing, they're just not transparent about it like GitLab.
I think some napkin math with the number of celebrities and professional sports players, who presumably have far better access to testing than the US public (which has essentially zero access), would show that we are at least at 150k-200k infections, if not more. At least, immediately before Tom Hanks announced his infection, I saw some napkin math that showed that since no politicians, movie stars, or professional athletes were positive, the rate was less than 1/2000 in the US. Now that we have multiple infections in that group, we are in the > 1/2000 == 150k infection regime.
by intuitively I suppose you mean feel it, which I guess is true, but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many. That is pretty easy, a politician should be able to follow it.

But as has been pointed out before most people think if you do something big and dramatic to fix an oncoming problem, and it does fix it, lots of people will stupidly assume that you did not need to do the big, dramatic thing because it wasn't really a problem. So any politician who reacted appropriately would run the risk of fixing the problem and losing power in doing so, I would prefer to fix a problem like this even if it meant I would not have the power to fix later problems as my calculation would be if I do not fix this problem now I probably won't have the power to fix later problems anyway.
Ok, but that's not what OP said. Allow me repeat the quote:

> It's not right to vilify these people while we give a free pass to everyone else doing equally unethical things.

Seems to say, we should stop criticizing these scumbag disaster profiteers, simply because there exist equally loathsome corporate profiteers.

Taken at face value, this is quintessential whataboutist bullshit. Now maybe I misinterpreted, which is why I asked, but your new goal posts have not answered my question.
Multi-Language Support in Smalltalk and Historical Lisp Environments
As of late I've become very interested in learning more about Smalltalk and Lisp machines. I wasn't around when Lisp machines were in their heyday, but I've read a lot of Hacker News comments and websites about them, particularly the machines that Symbolics produced. I have also played in the Pharo environment.

There's something very appealing about these "turtles-all-the-way-down" environments where all of the objects in the system are live and can be inspected by using a REPL, and how system behavior can be changed on-the-fly. A part of me is very interested in taking an environment like Pharo and building some utilities within the environment with the eventual goal of using it as a daily-driver operating system, or at the very least an environment I regularly use on top of an existing operating system like Linux or Windows.

However, one question that I have about Smalltalk and historical Lisp machine environments is whether there has been any work done on implementing support for other languages, and what that would look like in these environments. While I love the appeal of a system in which every program is implemented in the same language, the reason why different languages exist is because some problems can be expressed easier in certain languages. For example, there are some types of programs that benefit from Haskell's strong typing and functional programming approaches and thus would be easier to write in Haskell than in Smalltalk or Lisp. It would be possible to write some type of Haskell interpreter or compiler that uses Smalltalk's or Lisp's object model, preserving the "turtles-all-the-way-down" feel of the system despite the fact that the code was written in Haskell instead of Smalltalk or Lisp. However, I would imagine some limitations to this approach, such as porting a C program to this environment.
The world is a lot larger than Europe, and there are documented cases of Zoonosis from all over the planet (in fact, a good 2/3rds or so of our pathogens are of Zoonotic origin). Also, this particular virus likely did not cross over in a wet market, there is no evidence for that.

As for how much better the EU is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_Europe

Is a good example of what can happen here.
> In developed countries, I see no reason why there would be any need for "massive transportation"

Mirioron answered.

> Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive

The very reason why the virus spreads like it does February is because it is difficult and expensive.

> Perhaps we could just leave it to the markets.

The current state of affairs in the US, as in most countries, is crony capitalism, which has nothing to do with 'leaving it to the markets'.

Isn't 'maximising efficiency' the very raison d'être of the 'pan-national effort' you proposed?

Isn't it also the reason why huge amounts of humans live in giant and dense cities, with strong central government powers? From an organizational standpoint those are the main causes of the present crisis: total failure at detecting it early (the Chinese doc was censored), then at devising and implementing adequate measures (the faulty CDC coronavirus test is a prominent case, there are many others), and now at managing a major crisis (in most European countries the reality is that nearly no new potential case can be tested). And just wait for such a Supa Dupa Central Mega Pan-National Gov decision, applied everywhere, which will prove to be an error...

Centralization and transport are sure ways to enforce the pandemics. We may be reckoning that high population density and centralized power not only aren't usefully efficient because the efficiency gain they induce is mainly used to produce nearly-useless (at best) products, and that they are extremely dangerous. We may, instead, appeal to moar of all this.
It would not surprise me if there is a rallying call (state-sponsored employment?) for younger and able people to help out in the coming weeks, especially if a longer-term lockdown is happening. Things like picking up/dropping off groceries and other tasks on behalf of the elderly and infirm.
Or we can also try xmake. https://xmake.io/
> am staying in the house

You are "doing something" then. Not spreading the disease.
That figure may be “% of population >= 85 years old”, where Italy does lead the EU. See p21 in this report [1] from Eurostat for a breakdown by country. About 3.45% of Italy is at least 85, compared to about 2.75 for Germany. That’s about 40% higher.

So Italy is older in the sense of “more people who are very old”. But you are right that the mortality difference so far is not explained entirely by this gap.

It may be informative to watch how this evolves in Greece, and to a greater extent (due to more infection before a lockdown) France and Spain. Those are the next oldest countries in the EU by this measure, and all are well above 3%.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/10166544/KS-...
But Google themselves have said it exists: https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1238989460127338497
Canceling non-urgent surgeries also helps as the hospital can cannibalize ventilators and other life support equipment from the operating rooms and use it as makeshift ICU capacity.
Same in Singapore. Helps having well paid experts run your government and a PM who definitely understands Math (Cambridge Senior Wrangler)
No, that there is a typical one-two step to a Zoonotic event where the jump from a reservoir animal to an animal that is regularly consumed is made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir

For plenty of these events we do not know the reservoir animal (yet). So that butcher will know they are butchering a pig, not a bat. But that pig may have become infected and if the butcher isn't very careful he may infect himself and if the meat isn't prepared carefully it may infect those that consume it. And by the time we realize it has happened these important bits of data may have already been lost.

There is a very good book on the theme called 'Spillover', highly recommended and so far it seems to have been exactly on the money with how this whole thing unfolds. Uncanny actually, it is like having the spoiler for a movie that wasn't made yet.
I have trouble seeing a worse economy for a few months vs a highly optimistic 100,000+ dead having similar numbers of lost lives.
Or at the very least, to divide the UK into two non-interacting populations of at-risk and not-at-risk individuals?
He did it in an ineffective way. US nationals were returning from the EU without any screening. And it was way too late. All a bunch of xenophobia theater.
If it is urgent, you might reach out to them and see if it can be moved forward.
The dev branch version is already as fast as ninja now, and there is no additional step to generate a makefile/build.ninja.
Please provide an accurate source for that claim.

ETA: unsure why the huge up and down vote swings. OP claimed only one company made masks in the US which is not accurate and then they edited with their source. No idea why I’ve went -1 to +5 and back for originally asking for a source.
instead of pennies, she probably said $1 the first day, $2 the second, ... and then you would still have chosen the $100 a day, and not become billionaires.
Good job. Fun to experiment with!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22abundance+o...
> The number of times I have seen junior programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.

In what context?

What you describe is an example professors used during my education to motivate theoretical CS studies, i.e. you don't want to be THAT guy.

However, while this is true, I haven't yet seen many junior programmers on the job trying to solve the halting problem. I don't quite understand why that would be common. But maybe you are talking more about online communities and side projects?
And at the very same time, a bunch of bars are probably packed full of people. Maddening.
> They’re saying we should do the stuff that China did, starting from the decisive action part

You do realize that some of their “decisive actions” included enforcing quarantine via welded-shut doors, right?[0] I don’t think you’re ready to handle the kind of “decisive action” that China took.

0: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818
Nation's Nerds Wake Up in Utopia Where Everyone Stays Inside, Sports Are Cancel
> If it is possible, STAY HOME.

People need to stay home, period. Unless you work in healthcare, a grocery store, or some essential service, or are going to one of the same, you need to stay home. I know there's lots of reasons people aren't staying home yet, like they don't have paid sick leave, but still, none of this overrides the sheer importance of stopping the pandemic.

So the phrasing should be "Stay home, period." Not "Stay home if possible".
Ya don't say... https://twitter.com/cjjohnsonjr/status/1238868541689880576
iPhones do this sometimes. Thanks for letting me know - I will add this to my to-do list.

Thanks for trying it out!
Thanks for giving it a go!
Because many places have only announced school closings of 2 weeks. If I were betting I’d say realistically it will end up being more like 8-10 weeks when it is all said and done. Also probable that there is a second wave of outbreak later in the year. Historically these things come in waves from what I’ve read.
I checked your link. It says the exact opposite of what you claim.

The second list says -
Sweden Ethnic Fractionalization : 0.060000

US EthnicFractionalization: 0.490100

So it says America is 8 times more diverse than Sweden.

Sounds about right. That makes Sweden a lot more homogenous than the US.

The first list is really screwed: it lists Italy and China as among the least diverse - which is rubbish.

That’s because it only includes linguistic diversity- not ethnic diversity. So Sicilians and Milanese are grouped together, as are Han and Tibetans.

Latin America becomes much less diverse, because the many ethnicities speak Spanish, etc.

Look at how undiverse Cuba is!

America has a large number of different cultures, ethnicities and religions, but to get a decent job you need to English.
5 year old NUC attached to one of my good monitors from work shoved onto the space I work on miniatures at. Communication using Rocket chat + Zoom for meetings.
I am not holding out much hope for the people responsible for this to face consequences for their mismanagement. Here in China Xi Jinping has already been recast as the man who led the country to victory in the "people's war", mere weeks after widespread condemnation of his administration's disastrous failure to respond. Once the media switches their focus from outrage at the politicians to feel-good stories of community solidarity, people will forget how angry they were. The political elite will weather the storm, even as thousands die on their watch.
Trump's life during coronavirus: Same routine, more Purell
A chemical reaction in ancient Roman concrete makes it stronger over time (2017)
Does this control for the fact that celebrities and politicians do way more travel and meet way more people?
Canada has a population of 38 million, and only 150 confirmed cases.

But one of those cases is the Prime Minister's wife.

Do we really think there are only 150 cases?

It's obviously way, way, way higher than that.
Which countries DON'T yet have Covid-19?
Yeah, I know that's the UK strategy, that's why I asked if there are any examples of it being done, because it doesn't seem plausible to me. For starters if everyone is out getting infected rapidly, who will be taking care of the vulnerable people?
except it may not be successful yet

you are just taking for granted the data provided to you by an authoritarian state
Don't pretend that WFH makes it OK to have your dog barking in the background all meeting. Yes, we had a ton of WFH newbies this past week, and this in particular is driving me nuts.
Yeah, ok, I think I agree with this. I have to believe that a sustained effort to develop coronavirus vaccines would bear fruit, whether actual vaccines or merely processes and knowledge, even if the particular motivating disease was no longer in circulation.
I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.
Test Drive?
>>From what I'm aware, if hospitals are able to handle the patients, it shouldn't be up to that level.

With an absolute best case CFR of 0.6%, that's near 2 Million dead. I struggle to think of a larger loss of life on US soil.

Assuming hospitals reach saturation fairly early, yielding a 5% CFR, and we're looking at 16.5 Million dead. That is... a lot. Like we have nothing here to compare that to. To put it into perspective, the US only lost 400 THOUSAND in WWII....
> Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth.

This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/
For other coronaviruses that infect humans there the adaptive immune response isn't particularly strong and doesn't last. E.g. immunity to HCoV-OC43 lasts no more than about 12 months.

This is a reason to suspect that a vaccine may not be easily developed; so antibody therapy (and/or anti-virals) might be the best we can do.

If the antibody therapy was highly effective and could be produced at scale for a tolerable cost, it would probably be a pretty effective tool. Though monoclonal antibodies aren't known for being particularly affordable.
I'm not sure what your point is here, the comment I replied to said that many of the parents of kids will get infected and die.
Just to clarify, that was a Louis CK bit. I enjoy both of their comedic styles.

Louis does it in a stand-up special, but here is a good Conan clip, with a great title: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4
It was in earnest. What seems to be going on here is that we have a very different understanding of what "responsible for a flow of money" means.

In my mental model, someone who handles, protects, counts, transfers, etc. money to and from customers is fairly literally "responsible for a flow of money".

I suspect you believe your definition requires a higher threshold and/or type of responsibility that these roles do not entail, but I don't see where that is in your definition.

I think maybe you what you mean is that our hypothetical banker is independently making some decisions around how / where / etc this money flows with some degree of autonomy ?

My point here was primarily just to say that it is maybe a bit thornier of a thing to define than you realize given that your definition in my honest opinion and in what I consider a reasonable reading did not clearly leave out one of the primary categories of employee that you intended it to exclude.

Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.
So what is the basis for your inference, any evidence? Or just subjective or intuitive?
They did not imprison him.

They did squash discussion of it.

Once the national government found out, they fired the local officials and lauded the doctor as a hero.
Slack has a far superior UX from the last time I checked.

If UX and productivity does not matter then Teams is fine.

There are also open source ones like Rocketchat.
As has been pointed out ad nausum, what Google said was "Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time." which clearly does not match the product announced by the executive branch (i.e. it's not for everyone, there's no existing plan for rollout beyond the bay area).

And pointing that messaging mixup out is part of the job of good journalists, because the public deserves to know what it's getting (i.e. if you're in Seattle or NY, Google has announced nothing for you but hope). And in particular because this administration has a terrible record with delivering a clear message. Yet some people insist that as long as there is some reasonably charitable reading of a statement that isn't an obvious lie, that somehow the messaging problem is the media's to solve?
> and that science has too long been discredited and ignored.

There are scandals in the sciences too. Peer review rings, studies that tend toward positive bias due to the pressure to publish, some studies being paid by big companies that favors their vested interests, etc.
Civil unrest should not occur. Society and order will not disintegrate, and people will keep working (one of the better ways of dealing with the anxiety of this situation for many people, I imagine).

There isn't a food shortage; there will be a slow down of cargo movement because of extra safety precautions and less people working, but there is no reason to expect people to go hungry and riot over this. Food shelters will not be closing down. Water, electricity will continue working.

Things will get quieter for a little while, shopping malls will be empty and then running in a reduced capacity as things return to normal.
How have you addressed the challenge of things getting out of sync? (eg. Suppose two people enter a room via the same entry at the same time, then one leaves the room later; power outage; missed detection, etc.)

Would you share the sensor(s) you're using in the device?
Syllogism Validity Checker
How much difference is there between the r0 value of 2 and that of 3? Maybe we can't flatten the curve to fit it under the threshold, but we can probably reduce the area above it?
Test Drive maybe (1987) ?
I'm more focused on groceries at the moment..

https://www.walmart.com/ideas/discover-online-grocery/google...
Both of my parents I really consider generally smart in that they knew a little about everything.

They didn’t have fantastic memories but they could talk really about anything with some basic knowledge.

Having inherited that skill it’s felt like a superpower compared to peers.

Not once have I been top of my class in anything but I’m running a lot of classes.

Lessons learned one one domain very often apply in other domains, that becomes exponential as more and more knowledge is obtained.
I agree that it seems like this should be a solvable problem, but I'm not sure who would be working on it.

As a side note, to engineers (or anyone) who wants to help design an open source ventilator to alleviate the potentially severe shortage:

https://www.projectopenair.org/
Might wanna read the news.