skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's more or less unforgiveable that our american healthcare workers don't have the PPE they need to protect themselves. attrition among our healthcare workers is going to be very high, especially because unlike singapore, we use the most inefficient quarantine guidelines when we suspect that they have been exposed.

people are sewing masks to make up the difference between what is needed and what we can supply. the federal government can't seem to supply the states with much of anything. and purchasing domestically-produced masks is becoming rapaciously expensive, with some manufacturers charging $7 per mask. allegedly our domestic manufacturers are ramping up production. but let's face it, that takes time. and we don't have time, because once one of our healthcare workers gets sick, they're out of commission for weeks.

i will not abide by this disaster for our heathcare workers. i am working with an established charity to raise money to purchase thousands of n95 respirator masks from chinese manufacturers so that those masks can be shipped and donated directly to hospitals in epicenters like new york.

i'm calling it the million mask campaign because i hope that we can eventually donate at least a million masks to hospitals in need. in reality, we will need many millions of masks if we want to protect our healthcare workers, but everything we can bring to bear on their behalf will be beneficial.

please consider contributing to our campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-million-mask-campaign?utm_sou...
It's also less approachable for those that do know more than the current class being taught. I had been privately and self taught, going to a CS degree and learning the professor's dry and mangled way of teaching client-server architecture was like derailing a train I had been building for years and trying to drag it all the way back to the start.
Keep this in mind when people claim that money is a modern invention, that it dates from the Copper Age or later, or that it's dependent on the existence of states.
All hope is not lost, but there is much work left to be done.

The trick is to never give up. More likely your opponent does first. The Grand Canyon is a marvel, but the water was what cut through it. Be the water.
De-Googling My Life – 2 Years On
This sounds like a great way to fuel antivaxxers tbh
Tesla cars are way more expensive and non essential
I got rid of smart speakers a few months ago after being enriched with everyone's perspective on this forum; tech is my hobby, not my career. I have zero regrets. It's a little inconvenient now to not be able to say "play [music]" or "play [show]", instead having to use a remote. But the peace of mind that I'm not being recorded is paid for en masse.
Maze Ransomware group already broke their promise not to attack health services
Same as any other failure; functions that may try to allocate memory and fail will return a Result<T, E> instead of just a T.
I guess, subtly, my point was less about making suggestions about how to proceed, and more about just imagining how the small businesses (mentioned in the article) will do if/when the rest of the world is in disarray.

Sure, I have no gripe with the author(s) of the article, but reading it makes me feel like they just don't get the big picture.
Considering that the EU doesn't even have freedom of speech, calling that the free world is quite the stretch.
I imagine a future evolution of this could be embedding it on a raspi with a USB barcode scanner, and putting a control screen in your pantry.
The Snowden documents are old now while this has become the hottest gift.

"Why would a big tech company willfully infringe on their customer's privacy?" to comply with a national security order. These companies are not lawless entities fighting for good.
The only reason I could think of is VC money. Sell the idea, get funding, use cash. Looking at you, Elon.
Or the BlackBerry, which brought out an actual cursor on webpages but only moved the focus everywhere else. That little thumb track-pad completely changes the experience of using a phone, and I'm super bummed that the only modern smartphone that had it (the 2014 BlackBerry Classic) never caught on.
> Am I missing something?

"Freedom."

Edit: seriously, a lot of objection to this is that it's "socialism" (for some definition of the word/concept), and we all know that socialism is bad. "Just look at what happened in the USSR!"
> Currently there is a private tax that people and companies pay: the insurance premium.

We do that in Germany too. On top of (much) higher income taxes, (much) higher sales tax and plenty of extra taxes on products. Health insurance is "free" as in "you pay ~7% of your income and your employer matches it".

There's no such thing as a free lunch or free healthcare.
Merkel publicly estimated 40-70% of the population of Germany would catch Corona this year. Let's assume that holds true for the US. The most reliable public numbers so far suggest 1-3% death rate. Let's assume that holds true in the US also.

US population is 330 million. The lower bound of the estimates above (40% catch, 1% of those die) is 1.32 million people die. The upper bound (70% catch, 3% of those die) is 6.9 million people die.

Just to put the above numbers into perspective. A fairly normal number of deaths in the US without Corona is 2.6 Million from all causes. We're looking at potentially more than tripling the number of people who die this year.

I don't care to get into the debate any deeper than that, just want to make sure we all understand the stakes.

edit: corrected doubling to tripling
you realize this is literally only as of the ACA in 2010? and if the trump administration has its way (there's a supreme court case on the docket to completely kill ACA) we're going back to that?
Until recently Ontario had very stringent testing pre-requisites: 2 or more symptoms, history or travel in the last 14 days. Even then, on average, only 2% of tested people tested positively for SARS-Cov-2. In my opinion that makes the notion of much more larger population having it and not noticing due to the lack of testing, at least at this stage, highly unlikely.
Perhaps within the hazy, inextricable mists of jack, pulse and alsa, there's an answer. I remember feeling qualified for a job at NSA after getting midi and my mic to work (effectively) on my Arch (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, etc) laptops years ago. It was a feat. I can see:

Hacker1: we've got root.

Hacker2: yeah, but how the fuck do we get audio to work?

Hacker1: modify grub to default to windows partition and reboot, or maybe install Virtual Box and run windows. Probably not possible otherwise.

Hacker2: No, waaay too slow, they're on an ATT gateway. Find a softer target.
Huh?

"R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population."
It’s a shame that the only candidate that wants to tear down this ridiculous health system is getting the boot by the party he is aligned with.

The health system in the US is only accessible to those with money. It doesn’t have to be this way. I am not saying socialized healthcare will cure all ailments, but it would definitely be better than the current privatized system.
And that's not the standard but rather in general use.
Neither does the US.
Not much beyond those here assembled.
Any radio hams here have predictions for the use of this technology in amateur radio?
The FBI has been doing this for 15 years with cars and OnStar. They will do this with smart speakers once enough people have them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/15/polic...
For reference, the government of Czech Republic made masks (of any type, including self made or even scarfes) mandatory while out of home. This has been in force for a few days & is actively enforced wit a couple people already getting hefty fines.

IMHO this is a really good idea, especially because people who are infected and dont know that yet are less likley to infect others. How good the mas is at protecting you is pretty much secondary concern at this point in time.
What I've ultimately discovered is that the only time people enter "Can we afford it?" into the discussion, it's because they're looking for an excuse for it not to happen.

Try taking a close look at how the US budget actually breaks down. It's quite a task since it's an enormous budget. But, if you boil it down to a pie chart, you'll find that we spend an absurd amount on "defense", most of which is wasted. You'll also find that Congress will routinely spend enormous sums of money - in the trillions - on things that aren't health care (e.g. wars & combat, economic bailouts, etc.), without ever asking how it can be afforded, and it doesn't cause the whole system to come crashing down.

It's about priorities, and finding legislators to elect who share the correct ones. I believe that we'll get there, slowly, one funeral at a time.
I find Firefox too unstable and everchanging for daily use, I recommend people to use ESR instead (if they must use Firefox at all...)
Covid-19 Is Becoming the Disease That Divides Us: By Race, Class and Age
The Sanderite strategy was to insist that there is only one way to do things, which was his way, and everybody else must simply fall in line. It didn't work last time, it didn't work this time.
How does a chip "physically disconnects" a device?
If the effective transmission rate is 1, yes, more people will get it, and then the effective rate will go below 1, and you enter exponential decay.
I came across Kogito some days ago as I was looking into some alternatives for our drools based engine. I'd like to build some kind of online editor for business people to manage drm rules easily. How would one go about doing something like that with Kogito?
I've been using https://write.as for years and enjoying it. Perfect for plain text, does Markdown and code syntax highlighting.
Why does Russia, population 144M, have fewer coronavirus cases than Luxembourg?
Better prepared and will know the value of it.

We already have remote work. It may have already reduced our vulnerability and lessened the impact of this pandemic.

I'm not seeing that talked about. We have no means to measure how much worse this pandemic would have been without remote work, without the internet, without credit cards and PayPal and a zillion other things that already exist.

In most cases, we don't even try to measure the disasters that didn't happen. That gets viewed as talking out your ass, basically.
I graduated in CS. The education helped me in two ways:

1. Getting an internship and then a job at a large enterprise company right after graduating.

2. About 5 years in professional software development, I was starting to be included in architecture and system design discussion meetings with key decision makers on large projects. Where my non-cs colleagues with the same skill level could not keep up with the conversation.

During the time in the between, what helped the most was having the discipline to follow through on finishing small projects that would fill the gap in areas of software development that I didn't understand at the time.

I can see why most would be programmers would not want to study CS as it won't immediately help them become better programmers. In the long term, I feel that its worth it to have a grounded education in the industry that you work in. After a recent trip to the Bay Area, it doesn't feel that many new grads are about that dev life. The sentiment is get that 4-year, 1-year cliff and FIRE(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement)
That, IMHO is the point that was only implicitely made by the original article : massive testing lets you keep the economy at least partially work, because you know who can go to work safely and who can't.

I really hope someone makes a deep study of the decisions that were taken regarding testing facilities in the various european countries, because i have the feeling, at least here in france, that doctors gave up a little too fast on that option (and i still don't understand why)
> your parable has another side that no one sees - the guy learned a lot of different things in the process

No one sees?! What do you mean? That’s literally the punch line of the joke.

Of course ‘learning things’ is a secondary benefit, especially if that’s actually one of the goals you specifically set out for. Still I’ve personally watched programmers live that joke, and overengineer something that could take a day into a year long project, to solve a problem they didn’t have. I’ve seen it enough and cause enough problems that I try hard to write code with specificity and stick to the problem at hand. So much so that I have an actual problem with not abstracting things soon enough. ;)
China’s Autonomous Delivery Vehicles Navigate the Coronavirus Outbreak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARYP83yNAWk mentioned that the notion that C++ could handle out-of-memory was a purely theoretical wishful thinking. In practice it could not.
While your point is valid, it also illustrates how the U.S. subsidizes European entitlement programs by implicitly reducing those countries’ defense spending. If the U.S. were to cut back on defense, European countries would have to cut back on social welfare programs.
Thank you. To me, that's what it's about. I'd rather try and fail and learn from that, but people just telling me to put a sock in it isn't something I can learn from.
Luke Smith video?
Definitely, I didn't mention the US at all, but at least the US doesn't have blasphemy laws, for example.
Google glass was the best solution to this IMO. Able to look through the display and still see the road and more focus on voice control.

We need advancements in integrating with computers already so that our brains can interface with them directly.
Insurance implies you have a choice in the matter (i.e. it is optional), but in this case (Obama-era health insurance) it wasn't optional. So why not just call it a tax, which is what it really was?

To me it sounds very similar to social security tax - the young being forced to pay to subsidize the old.
Small companies step up to big role in Covid-19 testing
Interesting that almost all of your examples of "contours of infection" are places that people don't need to go to, and the last one can be replaced by teleconferencing. That makes it sound easy: if you don't want to be tested, or it's too much hassle, just don't go there!

I assume in your system that everyone would need to be tested before going to work every day, because that's the most common in-person gathering for most people. The USA has run fewer than 50,000 tests in the months since this began. Your plan would require 100,000,000 tests in the USA every day.

No need to make the test stations "mobile". You could put 1,000 in every city, and they'd never have time to be moved. Every sidewalk downtown would be lines of people waiting for a test -- which itself would be a bigger gathering for me than just going to work.
The limits of convolutional neural networks – one of AI’s greatest achievements
Fastmail for me.
And what are the deductibles and co-pays? What are the bankruptcy rates and how many of them are because of medical bills?

Plenty of Americans "have insurance", but if you go (or are taken via an ambulance) to the 'wrong hospital' you're not covered. Even if you go to the correct hospital, but are treated by the 'wrong doctor' you also may not be covered:

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/23/out-of-net...

Do a search for "out of network hospital" or "out of network doctor". So yes, the health coverage in Germany is certainly not "free", but you're actually covered. Just because you pay your premiums in the US does not necessarily mean much.
> Don't Germany and Switzerland both have universal coverage with private, non-profit health insurance companies?

Germany has a dual-system. You get basic coverage with public healthcare, and you get premium coverage with private health insurance providers. Want eye glasses paid for? You need private insurance.

Doctors get a fixed rate for most things, and they exist mostly by treating private insurance patients, because they'll get 2.3-3.5x the rate from private insurance companies, while treating public insurance patients is close to being a net loss.
Android Auto is my favorite buggy product. When it works, it's amazing and I keep on using it even though it fails in every possible way.

When it's working well it's not distracting at all. When you run into bugs it's very distracting.
You'll note that "OK, Google" works when your phone is on flight mode. Google aren't constantly sending your microphone data to their servers, the recognition of that phrase happens on your device.
An hour of karting did that to me...
Pandemania: Day Seven
> We should pause the payment terms on all contracts by 90 days (and more later if needed). This plan, in effect, extends the Fed’s zero percent interest bailout to everyone and not just the banks.

This sounds like a very interesting solution. Although from a technical point of view, it seems impossible to implement.
From filtering point of view viruses are dust particles of roughly 100 nanometers in diameter and aerosols. Lots of filters are designed to filter this stuff, pretty much all ultrafine particle class filters.
Yeah, I have 3 kids, and my employer pays $3k/month for our health insurance.
I was thinking for a “simple” recipe that link sure has a lot of steps. I’ve been making bread like this for a long time. There’s no need to do most of these steps.

I mix all of the ingredients together at once in the beginning. Stir and fold with hands. Will be lumpy.

Come back two or three times after about 20 minutes. No need to set a clock just wing it. You’ll know it’s ready once the dough becomes smooth.

And I don’t buy bread flour. Why keep an extra type of those? I buy AP flour and keep vital wheat gluten (available from places like Whole Foods) in the freezer. Mix in one or two tbsp depending on how you like the texture.

And as you say, no need to preheat the oven. If you’re in doubt stick a probe thermometer in. Bread is done after 190 F.
What, specifically, has byuu said in the past that has lead him to need to disappear?
Yes! I had a bill recently and thought the way that the list price of the services were represented was a cruel joke. It only adds to the confusion.

I feel like the insurance companies get blamed all the time but it seems like the problem is really the pricing that is set by providers.

Can’t we pass legislation governing these list prices?
Bill Gates’s Prescient Internet Prediction
Change in behavior can change basic reproduction number. That is what happened with SARS. Making basic reproduction number smaller is whole point of those curfew laws and of closing shops we now have. It is also the point of washing hands often and keeping distance.

It is defined as "expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection". And that is possible to influence by behavior. If no one even meets anybody, no sick person can generate next case. If people live in over-crowded houses, one person will infect many more.
What’s your point? It’s true now.
One of the tasks was finding a song on Spotify. Siri is pretty good at this with the right command (ex Play ‘KV Crimes’ by Kurt Vile on Spotify). But trying to find that via Spotify UI is nearly impossible while driving.
It works if something happens to enough of the electorate opposing it (about 5k people over 55 die each day, the older you are the more moderate or conservative you skew [vs progressive] per Pew Research). This ignores death spikes from black swan events (COVID-19); they bring about change more rapidly. “Progress occurs one funeral at a time”, apologies to Max Planck.

Just as interracial marriage, womens’ voting rights, the legalization of abortion, same sex marriage, and the slow sweep of marijuana legalization and prison reform come eventually, this too will arrive. We’re just arguing the timeline, which is frankly insane we’re willing to wait so long to save the lives of so many of our fellow citizens.
Nah, it doesn't.

There are upper limits for the national health insurance which is based on a fixed percentage of your monthly income. I've passed that border this year (earning around 66 k€/year) and from now on, I will not have to pay more, so my procentual share actually goes down from now on.

If I'd marry now, my wife and any children would also be covered by my percentage, it's called "family insurance". Pretty fair after all. (Some limitations apply, but if my wife would stop working, she would be covered through my insurance.)
But they don't have civil forfeiture, they have a less tyrannical justice system, they have fewer incarcerated people per capita, so there's that.

Americans claim they are free, but only if they contort the definition. There's more to freedom than guns and free speech.
Touchscreens are simply cheaper. No need for switches, design of the controls, all the wiring, etc.
Isn't Python just a language? AFAIK there are many Python interpreters (or implementations), like CPython, Jython, IronPython,....

Couldn't a Python interpreter enforce type checking and raise errors whenever a type doesn't match? I'd be happy to use such an interpreter in many scenarios.
Show HN: Fast database for React Native with multiple data-type support
> You talk of "engaging with the facts" but you don't present either facts or arguments in this post - plus alleging motives, etc.

You are clearly or for an argument. 1/5th cases are not as you say. That's a lie. Plain and simple
Twice as High Diet-Induced Thermogenesis After Breakfast vs. Dinner
> CS doesn’t teach you how to program (anybody can learn that). CS teaches you how to think critically and analyze problems.

And in my opinion that's perfectly fine. On the other side many jobs that are "just" programming really shouldn't require a CS degree. It should be up to the job market to come up with reasonable requirements, not the Universities to churn out graduates with a different skill set to comply with the market.

> At a certain point, it becomes a test of your resolve as a person vs your ability to program.

I feel like this sentence goes somewhat counter to what you said before. If CS isn't primarily about programming, which I agree that it isn't, why should it be a test of my ability to program? I disagree that it's merely a test of your resolve, however. Sure, you need to have resolve to complete a hard degree, but the same applies to many other subjects.

I'd much rather say it's a test of your ability to think abstractly, generalise and recognise patterns.
Google Coronavirus Website Launches
It depends on your deductible, though. If you’re on a HDHP, you could end up paying quite a bit more than 10% of the cost.

But the expectation is that you “negotiate”, which is one the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. Why can’t my insurance company do that? I already have a ton of stuff to handle, and now I have to worry about negotiating my health bills? It’s a joke.
I have a CX-5 and think they did a good job with the infotainment even if it was a bit delayed. The touchscreen is off when car is in motion and there’s steering wheel buttons + a rotating dial. tbh I just interact with Siri to set music or waypoints and maybe occasionally glance for gps.
For those interested here’s a detailed description of what the anti-evil team does. Used to be called “Trust and Safety”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/9qf5ma/on_reports_...
Microsoft is behind an initiative called ID2020, which is exactly this. I'd imagine it'll only see use in impoverished nations that don't have proper identification ( he details in Inside Bills Brain on Netflix that a major hurdle to get over is Islamic groups intentionally withdrawing from vaccinations and lying about it)
I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?