skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hard to imagine a modern patent that's based on the Venturi effect. Entirely abolishing intellectual property seems extreme. But the need for higher standards of obviousness seems pretty obvious. And arguably also limits on rent seeking behavior, especially during emergencies.
I've found that it is basically impossible to have a conversation about China here.
Cynic in me thinks that this is a request from the richest people and other elites, who want to isolate themselves from the infected, all the while blocking policies and measures that would actually help them.

I also want to point out, there are low tech solutions to track and control coronavirus spread. Simply isolate infected or suspected people, not in their homes, but in a hospital built specially for the purpose. Chinese did that.

Whether this is preferable to mass surveillance is your choice. I think it has merits and is less authoritarian overall.
> The restaurant sector generates $3 trillion in annual sales worldwide, and provides employment to a vast number of individuals

Can someone with an economics background tell me whether this is a sound argument? It looks like it could be reasonable to me, but it also looks a lot like the examples of deadweight losses in Bastiat's "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen".

I would guess that we should count the $3T transferred as a cost on one side of the book and as a benefit on the other side, and from an accounting standpoint not care much either way. I'd also guess we should somehow try to compare the relative value of the service on each side of the transaction to gauge somw "surplus" value. People get food they value at $3.1T, and they pay $3T, and the workers would have done the job for $2.9T, so society wins by $200B in aggregate. Or something. But maybe that's nonsense?

I don't know if that's reasonable, but I am fairly convinced that we shouldn't dig $3T worth of ditches just to fill them in. That is deadweight loss.

At the very least I think we can assume that restaurants are not a deadweight loss because they're profitable, though. People often choose to pay that premium over cooking for themselves, and we should trust that those choices reflect personal relative value well.
Be that as it may, it's still way too expensive to be of use when treating millions of patients, even if the necessary quantities could be quickly produced, which they can not.
Even if we gave the feds access to cell phone data and even if we allowed them to cross reference it with border points of entry, it would be useless. Cellphone data doesn’t have a common data entry with info you give at the border, additionally even if that part worked: we don’t have a single EHRS. So getting that info to the people that need it would require some sorta convoluted fax scheme. Basically, there’s nothing we can use from what Taiwan did so don’t feel bad about it. (also at this point it’s no longer being spread by ppl coming from outside, its ppl inside the country giving it to each other.) We need to do two things to be ready for the next pandemic.

1) Come up with a system for tracking it at points of entry.

2) Create a system and process for containment once it’s no longer contained.
Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.20031096v...

Meta-analyses on the pooled data showed that blood group A had a significantly higher risk for COVID-19 (odds ratio-OR, 1.20; 95% confidence interval-CI 1.02~1.43, P = 0.02) compared with non-A blood groups, whereas blood group O had a significantly lower risk for the infectious disease (OR, 0.67; 95% CI 0.60~0.75, P < 0.001) compared with non-O blood groups

As far as I can tell, O group had less infections and also less severe symptoms and deaths if infected.
.NET Core? We are still mostly on .NET Framework land and happily using SmtpClient.
That was exactly my thoughts. The article makes valid points but this does not fit.
IANAL I guess I have to admit I'm not a lawyer but I think well-read laymen are allowed to share what they have learned: Patents provide a monopoly on the practice of an invention, which can be translated into an economic benefit. If I make 10,000 of these valves that is EUR 10,000,000 that the putative patent holder couldn't have. Morally, this is no time for medically necessary parts to be scarce and expensive. Technically, I would want to know how the law applies to the situation.
And if it cost 1 EUR to 3D print, it probably costs 1/100th that to mass produce in an injection mold.
This phanomin has been seen in studies that looks at how people watch films

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17526-synchronised-bl...
in order to copy a part, you need one of them to measure.

edit: also, you really need a working machine to ensure that the design that you have created works is properly functional
Do you have a source for that? The recommendations I've seen suggest otherwise, and this matches my intuition.

Wear creates and enlarges pores, and also, pores of the right size get clogged resulting in more flow over pores that are too large to filter.
Atom version is $277-$370 on their online shop
They got burned by SARS
So I don't know Italian or European parent law. But how would this be illegal? It appears the part was redesigned from scratch, so I don't it used any process that is patented.
Of course maybe patent law is different over there. I also realize it is possible this company is simply try to intimidate. Just wondering if they actually have legal staggering.
Charging this kind of money for a valve should come with an agreement to produce enough of said valve, or providing the 3D file for emergencies like that. It’s actually in manufacturers‘ best interest - imagine we get this kind of scenario more often. I think it’s quite possible that a grey market for 3D printed medical parts will develop as a result, bringing down prices a lot. And it will be tolerated by governments because they saw this happen.
M.2 can be used for PCIe (including NVMe, wifi+bt, LTE modems, etc), SATA (storage only), or other weird stuff depending on the keying.
> But the latter may be more related to your SC function

Definitely seems related to me. It's an interesting angle on it I hadn't considered before.

One idea is that it's due to something like compatibility of formats: in order for some information to be 'meaningful' in the context of some other system, its format has to be something recognizable to that other system; and the ability to recognize implies some commonality[0]. That commonality implies a certain amount of mutual information.

I don't feel certain that the mutual information would be sufficient to account for all the effects of semantic content—but I wouldn't be surprised if it was ;)

[0] I wonder if this is something that's been studied: mutual information between patterns and recognizers of patterns... I could see there being some lower bound on mutual information.
Here is a analysis of the options we have enterprise access to (but common tools) in a simple chart I made for my university.

https://sites.rmit.edu.au/sister/2020/02/28/which-recording-...

It also links to how to guides
The goalposts on "good enough" keep moving. When everyone else has a holographic direct-to-eye refraction display, people are going to be as disappointed in a 2020-level smartphone as people were with OpenMoko devices, which still had a pressure-sensitive touch screen with a plastic stylus when the iPhone has just come out with its relatively massive capacitive multitouch display.
I'm from Australia, and I know how to read government documents here. They very rarely lie, but you have to read them very precisely.

If you are well, you do not need to wear a surgical mask as there is little evidence supporting the widespread use of surgical masks in healthy people to prevent transmission in public.

They can say "little evidence" because only a few recent studies show that.

"A common claim is that surgical masks do not protect against respiratory viruses. This is not true. Several peer-reviewed studies in medical journals have found that correct and consistent use of surgical masks in household or community settings conferred a significant degree of protection against influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome and other respiratory virus infections, especially when combined with hand hygiene."

and

"Another misconception is that surgical masks should only be worn by symptomatic individuals. In fact, surgical masks are effective when worn by both respiratory virus-infected persons and their contacts. Furthermore, it is well recognised that even asymptomatic Covid-19 patients can still be infectious to others, rendering this recommendation inapplicable to the current pandemic.

Like other respiratory viruses, Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, is largely transmitted by droplets from infected persons. Therefore, the scientific evidence in favour of mask use against other respiratory viruses is generalisable to Covid-19."

and

"have no hesitation in recommending universal mask usage for people living in neighbourhoods with community Covid-19 transmission"

By Dr Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor, Department of Microbiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong

https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3075103/coronav...

If you prefer, try this:

In this pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial involving 2862 health care personnel, there was no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among health care personnel with the use of N95 respirators (8.2%) vs medical masks (7.2%).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6724169/
Why do you prefer using a VM (instead of using OBS directly in the parent PC)?

Is it mainly to avoid the problem of a message popping up on your screen?
Booting to Linux is just because Google did not want to start from scratch.

If they took a Xerox approach, ChromeOS would have a tiny mikrokernel, hypervisor type 1 style, and jump directly into Chrome.
Many of the known Canadian cases have come from the US.

Personally I think the border should have closed immediately after the PM’s press conference on Monday.
I am sad to say, official sources say that the Bergamo hospital ran out of intensive care units yesterday.

This is one of the articles in Italian, there are plenty if you look for the last 24h news.

https://it.notizie.yahoo.com/coronavirus-bergamo-terapia-int...

You are right that every country and region is different, but collection methods have nothing to do with the hospitals being flooded with sick people, that would be true if there were 1 or 1 million tests being administered.
SoftBank balks at commitment to buy $3B in shares from WeWork shareholders
We tried this tonight for some Jackbox games and it worked great. Thanks so much!
I was thinking the same thing -- it'd be a shame if some "hacker" broke into his computer and posted his 3D files online without his permission.
Looks like the sock puppets have arrived, quoting myself from that thread:

https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/375...

> There also seems to be a small group of devout followers who travel from the Palemoon forums to other parts of reddit, HN and github to spruik the project and derail criticism. I've observed (without naming names) it's the same names doing it over and over again.

They always use the same phrases too "nazi" and "fake news", "false narrative" etc. They tend to refer to themselves as "power users" with a clear tone of superiority to their comments.

I guess it must be the deep state! (sarcasm).
I run a extremely small website and I have never had an issue with being found on google. This is with questions to visitors as to how they found us, and google is a consistent answer. Do you also have anecdotal evidence supporting your claim that google does not host niche content?
> Don't blame the player for crappy rules

Didn’t Tesla declare their IP free use because Elon Musk preferred their propagation for the benefit of humanity’s survival over profits?
Aren't there WiFi and Bluetooth cards using the M.2 interface?
No kidding, biology definitely trumps ink-on-paper in this case
Is your salary paid with ad money?
Translation: we are weakening HIPPA privacy protections because, virus.

Never mind that a “health emergency” should not really be uncharted territory for a healthcare system, but that’s America for you.
Real-time Covid-19 map
What in this online world would make you say such a thing? It seems that the opposite is true more often than not.
http://linuxgizmos.com/files/dfi_ghf51_block.jpg

this block diagram makes no sense

USB 3.1 Gen 2 output made up from ... a Gen 1 and an USB 2.0 link? That's not possible you need to feed Gen 2 signals into the socket to get Gen 2 signals. While the USB standard is a mess, this is crystal clear: Gen 1 is 5gpbs and Gen 2 is 10gbps.
Just put a towel or whatever over the keyboard / hands while practising.

That way, when you're using the mouse and just need to press "#" you can glance at the keyboard to do so.
I’m sure it wasn’t the author’s intention, but the article has a lot of the patterns and phrasing I see in denialist literature (global warming, for example).

I agree with the author that we need more data. But he nerfed the urgency of his plea by using wording that downplays the problem, and seems to only be talking about the situation in the U.S. and U.K. No mention of the data points collected at great cost by China and Italy, not to mention Iran (which seems to be digging mass graves).

I’m confused. What does the author expect from publishing this piece?
Well said. Law is just a framework not the rules of life.
They will close the markets for a while and then they'll reopen them just like the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. This is like the 4th time this stuff makes the jump to humans there, and they're getting exceedingly efficient at it. Russian Flu (H1N1 epidemic of '77, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/702749), SARS, Swine Flu (H1N1 '09), COVID19. Did I miss anything? Some argue Spanish Flu originates there also, since China did not have an epidemic in 1918 unlike the rest of the world.

That's not to say shit like this couldn't happen here in good ol' US of A. Apparently prion disease in deer is one possibility for a cross-over, and that'd be very bad news indeed. As of right now we're not screening deer for it. We should.
Estimating actual Covid-19 cases
Measuring the physical attributes of something certainly counts as "reverse engineering".

You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does the reverse engineering and writes spec, and another team implements it from the spec.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Maybe law can be created to allow state/local government to collect and use such info when "declaration of local infectious deceases emergency" by state governor. Especially allow for department of public health to access the Google's Sensor Vault data in emergency situation.

I would support that BUT I also understand how that might open the "pandora's box" for all other government requests/laws like the existing geofencing warrant.
Dollar Funding Is Freezing Up, and the Fed Knows It
Wishing good health to our Canadian brothers and sisters. We'll grab a beer when this is all over.
Fun fact, one of Sweden’s most influential music- and culture journalists was being interviewed on national television about a weird documentary wearing a pink “Pink Flag” t-shirt with a modified Black Flag logo. Beyond meta.
A great step. I wonder who's testing efficacy of chloroquine vs. hydrochloroquine.
Had it not been for iPhone, and we would all still happily using Flash, instead of waiting 10 year to still catch up with what was possible in 2011 regarding 3D on the browser.
The t-shirt was all pink of course.
I don't think all nurses and doctors are using N95 quality masks. At least from the videos I saw, many of them don't, and simply wearing surgical facemasks.

That is what we have to live with.
> My point is that the number of exclusions make this policy a joke

Bullshit. You are changing your stance once it was called out as wrong.

These were your examples for "I will say that lots of places are ignoring the shelter in place request". Doing things that are exempted from the request isn't ignoring it.
I'm not 100% sure if I understood the problem right, but maybe OBS [1] could be an easier solution. You can use it to record screens and webcam streams. You can layout "scenes" with the video sources and use it while holding to lecture to switch between webcam and screencast. It's usually used for livestreams of all kinds, but works for recording as well.

With my little experience in video editing, I'd say 30-45 min for a whole lecture is very optimistic, so maybe this would be an easier solution.

[1] https://obsproject.com/
Pandemic and Fox News
The retail price of a 3M N9501V before the Cov-2 was about 4 Yuan, in mainland China, for a box of 100, plus postage (I used to buy for staff and leave on the front desk for high pollution days) which accounting for CNYUSD at the time was about $70. $40 for 10 sounds high. The current price is an order of magnitude higher (consistent with article material sourcing prices). Pricing seems very demand-elastic, and not only masks, the Just-In-Time supply-chain, regardless of China or anywhere, seems very vulnerable to low-probability (but inevitable, don't like to use the term 'black swan' as it's not, something big happens every decade) large impact events.
At least in criminal law there is the concept of "necessity". That is, an illegal activity may in certain cases be legal, if it is necessary to prevent serious harm.

Since the manufacturer was unable to supply the part, I would argue that 3D printing it was most certainly a "necessity", at least until either patients stop requiring it, or more parts can be procured.

There are some civil law analogs such as being able to trespass someone else's property in emergency situations.
Dos and Don'ts in Open Source
I would expect regulatory capture plays a larger factor than patents in the success of the medical device industry.
Still that makes them awful rules when almost every other industry couldn't survive doing the same thing.

> Let me ask a question: when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...

Remember this is something that we decided to add. Absent the laws, and more importantly the captured regulatory process which enforces it, it wouldn't be happening.

I'm not convinced this is a requirement to having rules at all.
I wonder if this change would be a net win for U.S. healthcare:

- Healthcare regulations (HIPPA, insurance coverage, etc.) are updated to make this the new normal.

- Each household is supplied with a decent-quality thermometer, BP cuff, and camera-enabled ear/eye/throat scope. I.e., only 1 step down in quality from what physicians have in the offices. Rudimentary training is given to any interested adult for using these, under the supervision of a physician.

- When someone gets sick, they schedule a Skype-like call with their doctor's office. During that call, the doctor/nurse guides someone else in the household to use those devices as appropriate to gather the data. Based on those results and interviewing the patient, the doctor then provides guidance, and perhaps sends a prescription to the pharmacy / blood lab, and/or asks the patient to come to the office for a more thorough exam.

I would imagine that benefits everyone involved, and perhaps reduces the risk of infections spread at the doctor's office.
Afaik large share of embedded WiFi/BT and 3G/4G chips are USB ones?
This is a relief! For the last 2 weeks I've been scrambling to kludge together Zoom for Healthcare and Skype for Business meetings for 90 clinicians/social workers at my agency so they can keep seeing clients and bill services.
Do mega-corporations just live “paycheck to paycheck”?
You saw what happened in the EU. No borders but also no shared decision-making and responsibility. It quickly deteriorated to a situation worse than in the US, with each country doing its own thing (including closing most borders), and very little cooperation and helping each other.

Trump might not be making the best decisions, but at least he's making decisions for the US! Noone is even trying to make decisions for Europe...
Firefox has long stop being a requirement on the acceptance criteria for Web project delivery.

I keep testing it, because it has been my favourite browser all the way back to Netscape days.
Agreed. The use case I am hoping to help solve for is health care workers (eg. Nursing home aides) who have a very limited supply of N95 masks that they wind up having to re-use for multiple days / weeks at a stretch. If they have access to a quick affective way to sterilize them without ruining them (I like the microwave idea too) then they can stay healthier, and their patients can stay healthier.
Ask HN: How can we help each other?
We are an Italian dental chain, with more than 6000 patients, I was wondering how to get involved in new ventures.
Think about your company how could it be useful to dentist? any way? if yes, just let me know and lets test it.
For eg yesterday i was talking to a VR company and we agreed it would be nice having the ability to show to our patients very clearly their deasise. We are also thinking how to let them see how we will fix it and the final result.

Let's have a chat and see if we can help each other!

send me an email nic@lookdental.it
I've been posting that link in various comments on the web over the last week, it's a very interesting article. But Taiwan is not the US; they have shown a very healthy trend away from authoritarianism over the last 33 years since the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 (and the 40 years of 'White Terror' [1] that preceded it).

Also, on the question of authoritarianism, I think there is a case for greater tolerance of it during a defensive war, where a nation is battling for its survival. And I think a pandemic can be characterised as a defensive war against an invisible, completely merciless enemy. Not to say that blanket authoritarianism should be allowed but measures that make sense and help in the battle should be shown greater tolerance for a limited duration. Of course this is the whole idea behind (duration limited) emergency powers legislation. Going back to Taiwan, their 40 years of martial law also shows the risk of abuse, however I would describe the KMT as an invading power, not a native, somewhat trusted authority (as is more the case with their present, democratically elected government).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
http://archive.ph/xg3op
... and sunset this so once it’s cured, remove the capability whatsoever. But it wont
I agree with the sentiment, though it's practically still legal to own slaves in some places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
It doesn't "all come down" to that, the testing regime and thus the proportion of infections that are actually detected is an enormous factor.
False is the identity element for Or, similar to how Zero is the identity element for addition.

True is the identity element for And, similar to how One is the identity element for multiplication.
I just use the interactive mode of Ghostscript when I want stuff like that. (Just type "gs" by itself for interactive mode with graphics.)