skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition:

Having the ability to test quickly means you can save hospital isolation wards from unnecessary overcrowding, because you can now know whether a person who comes in with respiratory symptoms actually has Covid-19 rather than having to treat everyone as though they might. "It means you can move from a presumptive stance to a more informed stance"[1]

If doctors know you're sick with COVID-19 and your disease is severe enough, they might offer you one of the experimental treatments for it, or you might be offered to participate in one of the hundreds of ongoing research studies.

Testing will also help determine where scarce medical resources need to be allocated, which people need to be isolated, and around which people medical personnel need to wear protective equipment.

Finally, testing will let epidemiologists track the progress of the disease and have better estimates about how severe it's going to be, and possibly predict in which communities it'll get better or worse. This will help public health officials decide where and when to declare or end quarantines/lockdowns.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/fda-approves-the-first-commercia...
Or go outside and exercise without feeling guilty. Being outside is important to your mental and physical health.
Yes, but that isn't a good optic for domestic propaganda. Instead, the COVID-19 virus is being branded as a US Army bioweapon by Chinese state media. They've even published a book about it, already.
endymi0n ... from the planet Hyperion?
How can a software engineer help in this pandemic?
I, like many of you, am a software engineer currently quarantining myself with plenty of extra time on my hands. Does anyone know of a way to contribute to the local, national, or global fight against covid-19 beyond staying at home?

It seems like wishful thinking to assume that a web-app could contribute much right now, but I don't see any harm in asking.
> RT-qPCR is directly a O(2^N) signal.

The signal is actually more like N*2^C where C is the number of cycles (usually around 30). So a huge amplification, but still linear in the starting amount, i.e. O(N). That's actually more useful, generally, since ratios of amplified material stay approximately constant during amplification.
I recently spoke to someone in a big streaming company, and the biggest unexpected benefit has been increased datacenter efficiency. They usually size machines for the evening traffic peak, and the rest of the day are overprovisioned. Recently, traffic has been smeared over the whole day, so they're effectively serving those videos for free.
Something very interesting about this current situation is that I think we're on the verge of a bunch of Democratic talking points getting put in place by a Republican administration.
HBM Issues in AI Systems
Out of curiosity, which "experts" have you seen claim that the virus can be contained at this point, and what is the timeframe for containment?

The only thing that I believe is objectively contentious in my post is whether allowing young people to get exposed would help things.
And most other utilities don’t cut you off if you fail to pay.
> it doesn't actually test for the virus. It tests for DNA / RNA presence

The virus is nothing but DNA or RNA.

The snippet testing establishes a statistical baseline that rules in the presence of the specific dna/rna of the virus to within the required certainty.

In other words, you don't have to feel every inch of an elephant to know for sure you've got a hold of one. Just enough features to make it unique to just elephants.
You’re awesome. I’m the oldest of 7 who grew up in a house that size. Way to go on the big fam!

There’s a two bedroom house on my block that’s sub-1600 sq ft that 9 kids were raised in, so there’s always bigger and always smaller :)

Totally agree with your assessment, btw. It is palatial at times. But we host a lot of people and have big gatherings regularly so still does fill up. It was a fixer upper purchased for $65k so hard to beat.
Just like Uber provides "jobs"?
Show HN: API for ultra-realistic text-to-speech generation
Higher end Roombas have that.
Most people have some vague sense that these aspects are important, and would probably come up with a similar taxonomy if pressed, eventually. But getting the details right and using consistent terminology matters; we don't usually notice how woolly our thinking is until we make a real effort to be precise. Think of something like the SemVer standard: "everyone knew" this was what version numbers meant, but writing it out explicitly in a precise way was actually really valuable.
Elon has been consistently playing down the risk from coronavirus/

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21179291/elon-musk-corona...
Miller 5.7.0 – ports, bugfixes, and keystroke-savers
It would be nice to think that a lot of the new jobs would be in carbon and environment management.

I'd like to see the government pay anybody who wants a job to plant trees.
“emergent vomit cascades” gave me the laugh I needed today.
Just canceled a trip to California and the reverse of this was a very real concern. Popping positive in Cali and having no place to stay...
That is good news. But why 3-4 days? Because once it settles in the lungs it's out of reach for both treatments?

And do you mean 3-4 days from the appearance of symptoms or from the initial infection? From what I read, 3-4 days is not always long enough for someone to even know they have it.
> allowing time to clear the virus from the body without raising an excessive immune response ("cytokine storm")

Citation requested, that cytokine storms are a common pathology associated with Covid-19.

Because (a) I haven't seen that in the literature, & (b) it's at odds with the published age-banded mortality rates.
I think this is great for a certain kind of dataset. I love the idea, and I think the idea to make it a KV store was a great design choice to make the implementation simpler.

I'll be hunting for a reason to use this in the future~
The Smithsonian has a microchip collection! I had the good fortune to see the physical exhibit when it was at the Museum of American History.

http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/
Right here: https://www.wired.com/review/review-irobot-roomba-i7/
Sorry dang; my intent was to express how urgent it felt in my own internal dialogue, not to express aggravation to anyone else here. I'll edit.
GPs won't prescribe on the basis that you might get sick and require a particular medication. You can't walk into your GP's office and ask for antibiotics, for instance.
I really like that post, this is very good. I always loved NLP and that gave me a different angle. Where are you going now? I would love to know.
Most schools will offer online courses, and that is an experiment itself.. of course many students will suffer because they don't have access to computer/internet/food/working environment at home.
By the way, while the "punch" of a sentence is often placed either first or last for stylistic reasons, and both are fine, there is another kind of phrase for which final position is strongly preferred.

I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.

I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.

[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."
> Given the simplicity of the testing process using PCR, why does it seem like the US is moving so slowly with getting tests in peoples hands?

This has already happened in the US, with 1.5 million tests ready to ship, with emergency approval from the US government. In April they will be producing 5 million tests per week. https://ir.thermofisher.com/investors/news-and-events/news-r...
The publication is from 02/18/20 (as stated in the footer). Why didn’t gain it more traction?
I got the sayl chair. It was around INR 45,000 I believe at that time. The aeron was around INR 85,000.
Have you heard of Jira, perchance
Wireguard will likely replace OpenVPN.

But it won’t be faster than IPsec (basically the same framing overhead), and won’t be replacing IPsec.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Not common but very serious.
I've had the same experience, absolutely love Microk8s, though I am hopeful about k3s and k3d (k3s in Docker). As of right now they "mostly" work, but unfortunately that's enough to break things.

Also, you can't beat the one-line snap install for Microk8s.
If you don't mind, would you mind sharing the source for the hydroxychloroquine dosages you mentioned? I clicked your links (understand Italian) and as far as my computer gave me, none of them worked, which was strange but maybe a problem with my browser.
Great post. Especially the addendum about github being super weird about personal information. Wish it wasn't on medium though! They're worse than github.
What is the purpose of Vault if you’re already on AWS?

Even though I prefer CloudFormation, Terraform is quite popular. As far as Consul and Nomad, they are both nice for on prem infrastructure - I’ve used both - but once you’re on either AWS or Azure, the native solutions are a lot less of a hassle and Nomsd (sadly) will never get the mindshare of k8s.
The quality of the demo is very impressive. I can imagine a lot of use cases, particularly in mobile apps. People want to consume more content from Apple Air Pods. E.g. this can be a way to get your Twitter feed and Hacker News read to you while running in the gym.
What You Can Do While in Quarantine
> in big drops there's a chance that the 3x ETF may actually implode

Huh, I didn't consider this possibility because I can't imagine the underlying index (this one's related to the S&P 500) going up enough for that to happen. But then again, I suppose those speculating in XIV didn't expect those volatility spikes either.

For me, though, I figure the downside is capped for the relatively small amount of money I put into this 3x inverse ETF: if the fund goes all the way to $0, then I've only lost the original investment. (But also, if it goes to $0, that's probably a good thing for the rest of my portfolio.)
Blocking direct flights from a single region? What else?
The words and icons should be what's directing your eye, not half the screen's fields being magenta.
It would be better to know more about the patient who received the Remdesivir. A downside of HIPPA healthcare information privacy rules is that they inhibits the transfer of useful information about new therapies. Researchers can't require a patient to waive their privacy rights as a condition of receiving an experimental therapy, but they should ask them to voluntarily do so. Although someone at death's door is in a pretty vulnerable position to be asked to do anything, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail.
Or just be explicit and share. "Hi, I need to extend my stay from 3 nights to 2 weeks. I'm just returning from a high risk area of Italy and need to quarantine myself!"
There may also be spending on bootstrapping a return of industries that had been moved overseas that we now know are a huge risk to not have at home.
Comprehensive testing and surveillance lets you concentrate resources on the contagious and minimize undesired effects on the well, permitting the economy to function at a higher level.

Evidence is developing that as much as 75% of transmission events is from non-symptomatic individuals.
> There is no one way to preach or advertise

But writing articles about a particular premise then barely discussing it or offering a solution, that's not it.

> The programming competition is an original and clever idea

It's not that original; competitions for languages, especially to develop particular solutions in a language, happen all the time. That's how plenty of lesser-used languages wind up with some of the 'batteries' that erstwhile appeared to be missing.

It's a clever idea, yes. However, mention of the competition is also barely a paragraph's worth of text's mention at the bottom of a blog post that, I re-emphasise, gives the impression of discussing programming language evangelisation but then almost immediately makes no interesting remarks on the topic other than "some programming languages are still obscure", immediately launches into a poorly-demonstrated list of reasons why Pharo is apparently so good, and then a sentence or two about a competition.

The competition isn't even really discussed, how well it did, how many participants it drew, what came out of it. As it states, the success of the experiment is yet to be determined — which makes mention of it even more confusing.

We have a blog post with a broad, general scope that finishes with no real conclusion to its own thesis. This isn't advertising, this is spam.

> I'm not sure how one can "demonstrate the benefits" of a programming language

- Code examples (like GTK+ new website)

- Interactive widgets on websites (like ReasonML's website)

- Demonstrations of how a specific idea is better/more easily/more stably solved using that language (like most functional programming languages' websites)

- Interviews, often as blog posts or podcasts, with developers who've deployed applications or services backed by the language

There are plenty of ways that plenty of languages (and other technological artefacts, such as libraries and runtimes) can demonstrate their benefits, many more than I've listed.

Anything has to be better than saying "yes, it's better" without being able to reasonably demonstrate how or why to the satisfaction of people whose existing set of tools already ably work for them.

> Does trotting out these projects prove anything?

Yes, actually. It does. Most programming websites are falling over themselves to demonstrate that their languages are successfully used and deployed in all sorts of situations, some more domain-specific than others.

It proves that something not only is ready for the big time but also can do it something so much better than competing solutions — and, again, will demonstrate how or why.
Everybody Should Get an A
1.5 Million high throughput Covid-19 tests ready to ship in the US, 5M/week soon
Who would have thought that a loudmouthed self promoter with an overinflated sense of his own intelligence and a history of making thoroughly unrealistic and unscientific predictions would get this one wrong too?
Probably cuz this time around, the ones that understand the situation realize they they are directly in peril, and the ones that don't aren't even paying attention to begin with.
We can start with new cars.
It's good for the stock market.
I don't think GP's comment was negging or passive-aggressive at all. The original GP said "That must make you nervous over at GitLab, no?" so it only seems rational to explain that they see this as validation and not as a risk.

Somehow, you took this explanation of why they aren't worried about this and turned it into a passive-aggressive stance..
Netflix gives me little gratification. And so, it's a great source of relaxation for me. Whereas social media is addictive for me.

Keep in mind, dopamine isn't a "pleasure hormone". It's a reward anticipation hormone, one that drives you to do painful things for a reward that might not happen. It mixes both excitement and anxiety... excitement to get you started, anxiety to force you to finish.

It doesn't trigger in things that are actually relaxing. That's why people who are actually having fun 'procrastinate' less on some sites.
> If oil is used less, it will cost less. Supply and demand.

Indeed. I was able to put a bit over 15 gallons of premium in my car tonight for ~$45. I was shocked, pleasantly so. I had gotten used to paying nearly $70 to fill my 18 gallon tank.

Yeah, I don't drive the most fuel efficient car, but I've also only put on a little of 50k miles over the 8 years I've owned it. That's 6250 miles per year. Far less than most (US) Americans with a car.
Coronavirus: The Silver Lining in the Storm
My government told us today that they have excess capacity and will not run out. They have been preparing for this crisis for “over a month now”

In fact, they are still going ahead with cutting doctors pay in the midst of it all. Maybe we deserve it for electing a nut job who only cares about budgets (Alberta)
Given that Microsoft for all intents and purposes killed Atom (along with their really promising xray project [0]) almost immediately after the acquisition [1] even after explicitly claiming they wouldn't [2], please excuse me for not seeing the GitHub acquisition in the same positive light.

[0] https://github.com/atom-archive/xray

[1] They never officially announced it, but they almost certainly de-staffed it to the point where it's barely on life support: https://imgur.com/a/jQBHsUk

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...

Update:

What a surprise, the VSCode fanboys are coming in droves to downvote and say nothing more than how Atom was going to die anyways.

Sure, maybe it was, but that's not the point. The point is Microsoft _actively pulled development resources away from Atom after explicitly claiming they wouldn't_.

I get that a lot of people like VSCode better than Atom, but _please_ put things into perspective for a moment and consider if you'd make the same comment if the same thing happened to _your pet project that happened to be #2 in popularity but then got axed after being acquired by the company who owned the #1 after claiming they wouldn't do exactly that_.

Whatever your opinion might be on Atom vs VSCode, can we not at least agree that this kind of behavior is something we should hold acquiring companies accountable for? It might not make any difference to their bottom line at the end of the day, but the least we should do is hold them to the fire in the court of public opinion.
Care to elaborate why? Do you assume the company forces this on the engineering team?
So instead of being “locked in to the cloud”, you’re “locked in to Hashicorp”. Meet the new boss....

But the idea that you’re not de facto locked into your cloud provider once you are at any type of scale is a fantasy. To paraphrase Cory Quinn (?) “Infrastructure has weight”. Its a major undertaking fraught with regressions and unexpected costs to migrate from one provider to another and the benefits are usually not worth it.
Point taken. I should try a different dynamic mic. I hadn’t considered the one I was using was designed strictly for guitar amps.

Anyone have dynamic mic recommendations for vocals?
AND... I didn't say it was a bad thing.

But it is bad that you have two people leaching off some hypothetical other person's WiFi, neither of which is willing to pay for their own or help her. And you aren't "fixing BGP thingies" for free or if you are out of work.

Why isn't the mooching neighbor helping pay?

I'm ALL for the ISP's relieving bandwidth caps and not cutting service due to emergency related financial difficulties - for their subscribers.
That's pretty much the exact set of circumstances that chloroquine is usually prescribed under.
You're describing the Strategic National Stockpile. Apparently it didn't get restocked after the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. https://abcnews.go.com/US/medical-providers-fearing-equipmen...
Plans were posted last week on here. If it’s life or death triage choices made by a doctor, rudimentary machine could save lives.
Being curious about internals and giving users the means to understand them doesn't conflict with the goal of a) putting them behind a hiding layer that reduces the aspects a user needs to keep track of and b) avoiding dependence on those internals staying the same.

You can still teach people how things work or you can still have a list of potential implementations of an interface.

Where the internals matter you would either define very strict contracts or not use abstraction mechanisms that hide internals. But where it matters is not everywhere.
Very cool. Shouldn't the input transmission rate also be fixed for the last "test" ? It says to try to flatten the curve to reduce the % dead, but being able to control the transmission rate is cheating.
> Why didn’t gain it more traction?

It did. Since then they've done more studies, have started even more studies, and have deployed it en masse as a treatment. It's part of the official treatment recommendations in China, South Korea, Poland, and Italy. It's been described as a "cure" where it was used in Australia after Chinese patients demanded they be treated with it, and Australia is starting a nationwide trial. Pakistan had Bayer start up the closed production line and deliver 300,000 doses.
> Otherwise, the article would be pretty darn brief!

It is pretty darn brief. The title and first few paragraphs would lead one to believe that the article is going to be about programming language evangelisation.

Instead, it's nothing of the sort. It's nothing but a dishonest segue into listing the author's favourite merits of Smalltalk/Pharos then briefly mentioning the programming competition.

No dissection of existing approaches to programming language evangelisation; no analyses of successful approaches and lessons drawn from those with lesser success; no examination of the correlation between a programming language's long term succes and strong community-based evangelisation and/or support from a major, well-known player in the IT industry.

None of that.

The mention of the competition is literally in the last two paragraphs, the last of which is only one sentence.

Let's be honest: this isn't really an article at all. It's clickbait, and we've all been had. It attempts to write a cheque it can't cash.
So are they going to then tell Apple how much to charge for a licensing fee? Are they going to make Apple make MacOS work well on other x86 machines? What happens if/when they move to ARM?
Dude...don't jinx us man...

On a serious note, there are many, many things we're doing well on that might change, the financial aspect is only one of them. If we're doing bad, we could be doing so, so, so, so much worse. I can't stress that enough.
Think of how much money he will make selling these workers pee-bottles too
Such as...UBI? The Clintons were famous for 'borrowing' the ideas of their opponents during elections, stealing that thunder. What's good for the goose....
"Students who missed one month of schooling not lagging behind previous cohorts, study finds. Should the school year be shortened?"
Which utilities are those? Electric and gas utilities will absolutely cut off customers who are several months in arrears. Although some areas restrict cut-offs during cold weather. Water utilities usually won't cut off service completely but will install a flow restricted that will allow you just enough water to live.

Most areas also have some kind of rate assistance or subsidy program for low income utility customers. But they still have to pay.
At least some of that could be due to the fact that Australia is way larger geographically though, right? It's a lot more cable to run.
Does anyone have a breakdown of the different open source licenses for the other projects apart from the kernel?

from wireguard.com

License
The kernel components are released under the GPLv2, as is the Linux kernel itself. Other projects are licensed under MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0, or GPL, depending on context.