skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A general question to all. Disclaimer, I'm no epidemiologist and not even a statistician. I may totally misunderstand something here. That said, I copied the data from the US, UK and Italy on cases (go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_outbreak_of_no... and click on the relevant flag in the table, copy the data off the graph, scrub with regexes).

I dumped this into Tableau, graphed it and put an exponential trend line over the top. The UK and US data dropped almost perfectly onto an exponential (R-squared > 0.99 for both, P value better than 0.0001 for both, whatever those mean). The visual fit was remarkably good.

The italian data very obviously did not fit so well. It clearly was flatter than the best fit exponential (strange, given that covid is totally ablaze there) and it had an R-squared of 0.946, though it's P value was still less than 0.0001.

Can anyone comment? The raw data for italy is below.

date,cases
2020-02-21,20
2020-02-22,79
2020-02-23,150
2020-02-24,227
2020-02-25,320
2020-02-26,445
2020-02-27,650
2020-02-28,888
2020-02-29,1128
2020-03-01,1694
2020-03-02,2036
2020-03-03,2502
2020-03-04,3089
2020-03-05,3858
2020-03-06,4636
2020-03-07,5883
2020-03-08,7375
2020-03-09,9172
2020-03-10,10149
2020-03-11,12462
2020-03-12,15113
2020-03-13,17660
2020-03-14,21157

Edit: for comparison, US data is below.

date,cases
2020-02-26,15
2020-02-27,15
2020-02-28,19
2020-02-29,24
2020-03-01,42
2020-03-02,57
2020-03-03,85
2020-03-04,111
2020-03-05,175
2020-03-06,252
2020-03-07,352
2020-03-08,495
2020-03-09,643
2020-03-10,911
2020-03-11,1182
2020-03-12,1577
2020-03-13,2184
2020-03-14,2628
HTTPS: //www.arabsexegypt.space/2020/03/blog-post_97.html
isn't the current government disproportionately voted in by the old? It seems somehow short-sighted this.
The British Approach to Coronavirus
Right. For some reason I misread your previous comment as miners, not mixers. But now I don't fully understand why you brought mixers up, mining is a different activity.
There is a huge flaw in this thinking which is that the disease takes about 5 days before symptoms and another 5 before hospitalization.

And many places put the virus doubling time in several days. So the hospital situation will get 5x to 20x worse after they initiate lockdown.
This comment reads like someone who worked with the language very briefly. The gripes are all things beginners might say and aren't real issues.

This isn't a critique that's really worth giving much thought to. "A pile of shite"

My guess is that they were a grad with FD for a short period and had a bad experience.
This has the same kind of infuriating quality that most cmake documentation does. It explains in detail how to do obvious stuff but has nothing to say about what the execution model behind the syntax is.

I mean, if you learn classic make, one of the very first things you learn is "this is a target; it's just a file; the stuff on the right are dependencies; the commands below will be run whenever the dependencies are newer than the target". Now, there are implications to learn, but that is the model, and it's obvious: make runs programs to create files when the stuff needed to create the file changes.

Now, how do I do that in cmake? It's almost not even here! It's all about C++ files and libraries and how to define variables and write functions and include other cmake files. But what is it going to do with that stuff? It's all just magic. Type it like this and it'll work. Cmake understands your compiler better than you do.

What docs there are on creating a custom target are buried in two paragraphs inside a subsection named "Running a command at build time". And it barely tells you how to do this at all (this being a topic I've actually struggled with in the past). In particular it fails to mention that a target is is not the same thing as a file in cmake, and that this has implications that are likely to be surprising to make experts.
NightCafe Creator has been my side project for about 6 months. It's a PWA built with TypeScript, React, Next.js and Firebase; and the style transfer jobs run on Algorithmia.

There are plenty of neural style transfer apps online. Some of the features that set mine apart are:

- Multiple style images with relative weights

- Style masks - clip a style to a certain region of the content image

- Free image search built in (via Pexels)

- No signup required to create (uses Firebase's anonymous users)

There are still a lot of improvements to make - I want to improve and speed up the back end algorithm, add public user accounts and the ability to 'like' creations, along with a never-ending list of smaller things like pagination - which I've avoided adding thus far.

This is probably the most effort I've ever put into a side project. Would love to hear your thoughts and am happy to answer any questions.
They're shelf stable, which is useful quality if power goes out and you can't keep your refrigerator or freezer cold.
Check out Anvil: https://anvil.works/
Israel shuts down all leisure venues amid Corona outbreak
The idea of not testing except the most serious cases, wait for herd immunity is starting to attract criticism from many scientists

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51892402
Who determines what a serious need is?

No ones needs a sports car. Or a 40” TV. Or to go golfing. Or Broadway shows. Movie theaters - for that matter, no one needs movies at all! Recreational international travel - totally unecesssary. Why does anyone need more than one house? A house larger than 2,000 square feet? Why does anyone need more than 2 kids?
Stop it because it is incorrect or stop it because it is insensitive?
> The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected

The risk is already not that low at 55-65. These are people that are working and thus very likely to catch it.
Some Fun with Knights and Knaves
Rust guarantees this, actually.
> Only downside of course is that it isn't free.

Another downside is that it consumes insane resources (our servers are in the dozens of TiB of ram, with huge NVMe based storage arrays directly attached)

Another downside is that you have to maintain connection to p4 to do any VCS operations (stashing included).

Another downside is that branches are very "expensive" (often taking days) and are impossible to reconcile. We never re-merge to MAIN.
Learned how to spell quite young to use a CLI, first word was "DOS" lol.
Sounds incredibly risky to me. I suppose if all countries end up crippled anyway then it would be good to be the first to recover.
Shameless plug, i've created a GUI for Salt:

https://alcali.dev

feedback welcome!
>I think this is similar to what everybody else is doing -- using a thermocycler to run PCR

What method do you propose without a thermocycler?
It's worth noting that "lifestyle" decisions, are mostly not decisions. They're based on the systemic implications of a person's class, wealth, and status. If a person has more time, and money, and is of a high-enough class, they will be better educated on self-care and health, will have the time to devote to continually ensuring good health, and will have the money to afford high-quality food and activities. Diabetes is a disease of poverty, not of character failure.
I guess we'll see, won't we. I mean for all the panic about Wuhan, fewer than 3.2K people died there so far, and when it all winds down, the death toll will likely be below 5K people. Probably fewer than died of flu complications in the same time frame. Given that the vast majority of the cases are not acute, probably most of their metro population was exposed to the virus, which is tens of millions of people.

I know that extreme measures were taken to stop the spread (and such actions are infeasible in the West), but they did contain it: there are very few new cases or deaths.

So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that, especially if older people are isolated.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Hiome, a smart home startup focused on private by design local-only products.

What actions are you looking to handle with the assistant?

Reason I ask is because a voice assistant is a command line interface with no auto-complete or visual feedback. It doesn’t scale well as you add more devices or commands to your home, because it becomes impossible to remember all the phrases you programmed. We’ve found the person who sets up the voice assistant will use it for simple tasks like “turn off all lights” but nobody else benefits and it gets little use beyond timers and music. They are certainly nice to have, but they don’t significantly improve the smart home experience.

If you’re looking to control individual devices, I suggest taking a look at actual occupancy sensors like Hiome (https://hiome.com), which can let you automate your home with zero interaction so it just works for everyone without learning anything (like in a sci-fi movie). Even if you’re the only user, it’s much nicer to never think about your devices again.

Happy to answer any questions about Hiome or what we’ve learned helping people with smart homes in general! -> neil@hiome.com
Look at the FDA testing protocol [1] for their Covid-19 test kit.

They use molecular water (double-distilled, deionized, likely de-salted water), and DNA and RNA degradation solutions, some PPE, autoclaves, bleach, and lots of workflow procedures to carefully mitigate cross-contamination.

I'm curious why the life sciences folks aren't standardized upon something like semiconductor SMIF to isolate the samples and point of contact of equipment into a modular sterile environment, and limit cleaning to interface ports optimized for sterile operations and maintenance. My first swag at such interface ports might look into some design that can be clamped and autoclaved, and submerged in some degradation solution, for example. Generally, the current open standard is terrifically manual labor intensive and prone to mistakes.

All the automated solutions I've been able to read up on so far (BD MAX, Seegene All-In-One Platform, Roche Cobas 6600/8800, BioFire FilmArray Torch and FilmArray 2.0) seem to lock in customers to proprietary panels. I'm curious whether that is more of a commercial decision or a scientific decision. Of these, only BD MAX allows user-designed protocols at all.

So far, I've yet to see a persuasive argument that an automated molecular diagnostics system must use a proprietary platform for scientific reasons. A generic automated platform that can use anyone's glassware, molecular water, primers, master mixes, etc., will need many more sensors for quality monitoring, and those need constant calibration, so there is a significant engineering tradeoff. But I'd be surprised if any of the proprietary solutions are much more cost-effective; it seems all of these kinds of solutions are following the John Deere lock-in servicing model to generate profits.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
Econ lenses can be quite useful, but econ 101 ones rarely are in a context like this - it's the econ equivalent of they physics "assume a friction-less spherical cow in a vacuum"; i.e. ignoring some of the things that make this an interesting real world problem, doing X should mean Y. Except it doesn't, for all the reasons you assumed away.
This has to be some of the most flawed logic I’ve ever heard. Would that mean a pedestrian walking in the middle of the freeway wouldn’t cause congestion either? They take up even lesser room, eh mate?

Electric anything (this includes most city buses and cars, and some newer motorcycles) has a way lower environmental impact than any IC motorcycles.

But hey, you do you, and keep telling yourself you’re getting 100 mpg so you’re doing better than most people.
Tokyo Olympics will go ahead, says Japan's PM
I don't really disagree. Tech types tend to dismiss outsiders who don't have specialized knowledge in a particular area.

That said, in many contexts, no one can have a useful perspective on everything. Yes, a Lou Gerstner can come into IBM and be successful. But, if we're talking beyond high level management, you probably need some domain-specific expertise.
You've probably not heard of the RCR, or the relative citation ratio, that the NIH has instituted in recent years then?

Anyways, by citation rings I mean more than about the h-index or just the citation counts. It also includes cliquey things such as who cites who, who's a friendly reviewer and who's not, how do you continue to keep publishing in a way that makes you look like the expert more than finding out the truth, etc. But seems like you're an expert who knows better so I'll leave this conversation here.
You are just doing the same thing

The “elderly” and the “young” are not faceless masses but people with their own interests

There are more young voters than elderly voters and yet here we are still blaming previous generations

There are more female voters than male and yet not a single woman has been president
See "COVID-19: residential care, supported living and home care guidance"[0].

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-resident...
Since there's already a pandemic, I'll assume when you're saying "pandemic" you mean more specifically "epidemic in the UK". Even then, there's some fallacy in your list.

In the best case -- if action is taken and it contains the spread -- then there is no epidemic and it looks like overreaction. Even if it slows the spread allowing the health care system to keep up and keeps the fatality rate fairly low you'll get people claiming it wasn't as big a deal and that whatever action was taken was an overreaction.

This happened with Y2K [1], it happens with hurricane warnings when the storms fizzle out, and despite the glaring evidence of what happens with inaction (China, Italy) there should be little doubt people will be talking about 'overreactions' in any countries that do take action that turns out to be effective.

It's the same problem that nobody goes to a show and says "Wow, the sound technician did a great job, because nobody backstage had a hot mic while they were in the bathroom!"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22556156
In any case, the health services are not, and will not be, in a position to handle 40 million cases this year.

The curve must be flattened over years.

Scientists have written that much in a letter to the government today.
I think it varies from field to field.

For example, the US auto industry has mostly moved to metric for designing new cars.

From what I've heard, the vast majority of civil and structural engineering in the US is still on customary. (A few state highway departments tried to move to metric, but actually ended up moving back, since using metric when the rest of the industry was still on customary was costing them more money.)

US aerospace is still mostly customary, but NASA has been encouraging greater use of metric in space applications (due to the Mars Climate Orbiter debacle). And you'll notice SpaceX's webcasts all have metric units for telemetry – I believe SpaceX prefers metric wherever possible.
https://read.cash/@Jiang_Zhuoer_BTC.TOP_CEO/serious-advice-f...

"Is the death rate 0.5% or 5%？It depends on whether the hospital is overloaded. Let's take a look at the data."
This is utter, utter madness. Assuming UK has 66M people and 2/3 need to be infected, that's 44M people. Coronavirus has, depending on the quality, affordability and accessibility of the healthcare system, a fatality ratio somewhere along 0.7% in best case and 15% (at least!) in old and pre-conditioned people... which means that there is anything possible between 300k and 6.6M (!!) deaths.

tl;dr: absolutely fucking nuts to risk more people than the UK lost in WW2. If BoJo really tries to execute that plan, he has to be stopped.
The ocean and its gravities (poem)
There are three things to consider:

1) Even if they contained it inside the UK, it will be imported every day by people returning from the continent/USA. Unlike the quick flu tests, its 2+days for a result in testing

2) Vaccination at scale is a year+ out (as in at least may 2021)

3) flu season is only 7 months away, which means doing this all again, but with a newer version of the virus. This virus might be more mellow, or not.

Look at the infection rates in spain, france, Nederlands and germany. They are in lock step. Containment has failed.

update THe last, possibly most important point is this: the voting base most at risk of this virus is Boris's. Its really not in his interest to let them all die. I find the man abhorrent and selfish, but I doubt he's stupid enough to let his vote base disappear.
That's not how it works. There are loads of planes much younger and more sophisticated than the B-52 which are no longer in service. To name just a few high profile examples: the SR-71, F-117, and Space Shuttle.
How do you target young people exclusively? You can't.

The only thing that has worked is China/South Korea style careful tracking, rapid and extensive testing and strict quarantine measures. Nothing else so far is working.
I find this post very condescending. You are not better than your devops guy at managing infrastructure because you can code in Clojure or GoLang or whatever other programming language.
> Article's author note: As Zooko commented, Ross Anderson admitted in the second edition of his book that he recently discovered this history is unfounded.
I think computers used to be cool but are no longer perceived as such.
There was an "...In Mice" meme about this very topic that was even featured here on Hackernews.
Hi, I am a generalist. I think you're right, but for me, it's not a strategy, it's how I think. My brain is really bad at remembering facts, and really good at seeing patterns and modeling systems.

There's a big divide between people who think "facts" are knowledge and people who think understanding models and systems are knowledge. Our culture fetishizes facts as "knowledge" when most often, what's important is knowing how and why something works. Probably the most effective people who are great at doing both.

Neal Stephenson perhaps said it best:

“Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
I changed my business recently to a situation where I deal with alot of millenial aged college graduates. For all the talk of this generation "growing up with the internet", I am consistently surprised by how poor their non social media skills are. Things like copying files from a thumbdrive to a computer, filling out a spreadsheet, adding a header or footer to a document - sometimes it is quite shocking.

I graduated from High School in 1994 and had some computer classes leading up to that. I learned how to type a letter in wordperfect. I learned how to save it to my floppy disk. I learned how to use a spreadsheet to make a budget.

What has happened that we don't teach these basic things any more? Social media is important as a medium but basic job skills are really being left to the employer to teach.

Of course, it could be the kind of young person I am contracting. But they are finance majors, political majors, and so on.
> there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic

I don't see that this is a criticism. This kind of decision-making should be based on expertise, not emotion.

It seems unlikely that they're unconcerned with the harm done. Minimising harm is the entire point of responding to the pandemic, after all.

> you can't "nudge" people to adopt certain behaviours in one country when the rest of the world is doing the opposite to what you advocate.

You've not shown that the nudge-based approach will be ineffective.
Of course the death toll in Wuhan/China has been relatively limited BECAUSE they took drastic measures.

When people start to say "all this panic for that..." it means that the measures taken have worked, not that they were unnecessary.
The temperature is too high for "organic molecules", between 2500C (4500F) when it is hot, to 1500C (2700F) when it's cold. (1500C is slightly hotter than the flame of a candle.)

Tungsten has a higher melting point, so perhaps there can be some live metal blobs of weird tungsten alloys, that have some internal parts that are not totally melted and can save some information. We have not seen nothing similar before, and as far as I know nobody expect to see something like that. It would be very very very very very very very very very weird, but I don't like to use the word "impossible".
I work in NYC and the Select bus has all door boarding. I'm sure you already know that. What surprised me was finding the 14A, which is one of the routes I take weekly, just switched over to Select service.

What's more, NYC is rolling out contactless payment for subways. Some of the select buses _appear_ to be equipped for this service as well. Currently, to use the Select service you must buy a ticket curbside at the stop.
I'm somewhat puzzled about this doomed economy idea. Many businesses are doomed of course, but some opportunities arise: economy changes, it adapts to the environment. We've been building the perfect tool for this scenario during the last 25 years, if we manage to sustain the logistics the economy won't stop. Had this happened in the early 90s we'd have been in deep trouble.
If people slight me then I should be able to slight them back...
RTPCR has way too high of a false negative rate to do anything of the sort. It's about 70% sensitive on a nasal swab of symptomatic patients-- in other words 30% false negative rate. Asymptomatic patients may have even a lower sensitivity.

Some of this may be sensitivity of early tests, but it's mostly that not everyone who has the virus has copious amounts of it in their snot all of the time.
This is also 99% of “podcasts”. Except instead of 1 dude in a basement, it’s usually a few people on a conference call.
It's missing Lawsonomy [1].

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lawsonomy
F-15s have pulled well over 10g without killing the pilot, however it damaged the airframe beyond repair. An aircraft that could routinely pull high-G manoeuvres would have to be reinforced to the detriment of its weight (and thus its size/range/load capacity) and cost.

The expected direction of drones is as loyal wingmen (i.e., to carry sensors, weapons and/or fuel) and to be low-cost (i.e., disposable). If your drone costs more than an F-35 you'll want to get it home again, whether there's a human inside or not.
Something like 99.9% of the people from 3rd world countries who currently don't use the internet would end up being lurkers even if they did get connected.
So no, nothing would really change apart from ad revenue and view counts perhaps.
Excerpt:

"The --trace option will print every line of CMake that is run. Since this is very verbose, CMake 3.7 added --trace-source="filename", which will print out every executed line of just the file you are interested in when it runs. If you select the name of the file you are interested in debugging (usually by selecting the parent directory when debugging a CMakeLists.txt, since all of those have the same name), you can just see the lines that run in that file. Very useful!"
Rhasspy author here in case you have any questions :)

If you're looking for something for the command-line, check out https://voice2json.org