skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am giving Portable-VirtualBox some love. It is an open source software tool that lets you run any operating system from a USB stick without separate installation. A lot of issues with Windows 10 is unresolved: https://github.com/vboxme/Portable-VirtualBox/issues (Any help would be greatly appreciated).

Website: https://www.vbox.me/
People making $16/hr aren't the ones living on Amazon Prime package flow.
Folding At Home Now More Powerful Than World's Top Supercomputers, Combined
In the process of decoupling from the Apple ecosystem after 20+ years knee deep in it.

Kicked off the project by installing and configuring Arch+Wayland+Sway on an old MacBook Air precisely to my needs/desires to be used as a daily driver.
They can, and they do. You can see that in your history because you can listen to the audio of things it decided subsequently was not intended for it.

But unless you have multiple devices, those make up a relatively small proportion of requests, and hence most of the time false positives is something they have a strong incentive to stop because it causes negative user experiences.

[If you have multiple devices it will happen "all the time" when a request is genuinely meant for a Alexa device but more than one device hears the request, but then it has no UI effect - one device will usually answer, and the other(s) will stand down; this is by no means perfect, but it works reasonably well]
The Czech government was advised by Taiwan, I recall. Could this be the basis?

The Taiwanese response has been exemplary.
I was referring to either storebought masks or homemade ones.

Literally some paper towel, wire, and rubber bands [1].

If you're willing to break out a needle and thread you can make a durable cloth one. [2] [3]

> we're also getting advice not to wear them so they can be saved for healthcare professionals!

AFAIK, surgical-quality sterilizing masks are separate from what you'd probably find in the store; you're not pulling from the same stock.

(Though I seem to recall some charity effort of people sewing masks for doctors, so IDK what the actual U.S. healthcare regulations are.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNjpH5lBZ8w (University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital)

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/doctors-are-now-running-out-of...

[3] https://www.deaconess.com/How-to-make-a-Face-Mask

EDIT: "Sheesh"
I'm working on website that's like Last.fm or Trakt.tv but for podcasts. I'm building it together with a friend as we both wanted to play around with Rails, so far it's going pretty well and we hope to be mostly ready to ship a first version in the next 2 months.
Reliza Hub - https://relizahub.com - single pane of glass DevOps solutions that answers 5Ws - Who changed What, When, Where and Why.
Do you think people would actually wear them, and wear them correctly enough that it would be effective?

I don't think the US can be culturally expected to handle the situation the same way east Asia does.
I'm working on workwithgo.com, a job website targetted for Go engineers.

Been developing it on and off for some time though, but now have some extra time to put into it.
This guy is a well respected expert in oncology and head of the hospital.
The wake-word spotting for "Alexa," "Computer," and "Echo" is done on-device. I wouldn't call it AI in any meaningful sense of the word.

Source: worked on project for ~3 years.
A book to help programmers move forward in their career by understanding and leveraging at a greater level of mastery how humans and computers interact. I'm about 300 pages in on the first draft, easily past the half-way point, and now all I need to do is push hard to get the initial content on paper. Then comes the hard work of editing/sourcing. (It's all hard work, actually. I have no idea why people go to the trouble to write books. It is an singularly difficult and thankless job for most authors, more of a calling than an occupation.)
Just because a state has one reported case from one person flying in doesn't mean it was showing up in the community.

Florida was showing up early on even before it was being talked about, let alone the weird anti-talking about it they seem to be doing. I would not want to be living there now.

Overall it has been playing out like you would imagine. Hot spots with big airports seem to light up first. Then the surrounding areas and slowly spreading out via the highway system.

If there every is a real zombie apocalypse West Virginia, Vermont and Wyoming all seem to be the best places to go.

I have been taking screenshots since March 11th (when it seemed to suddenly overnight be "everywhere") so you can scroll through and see how quickly this has spread

https://imgur.com/gallery/IaFgXiF
Is it inaccurate?
Because incompetence doesn't exist in the private sector? Is it really even a private sector when it's reliant on billions or trillions of dollars of public capital injections every decade or so?

Maybe it's not such a bad thing to ask the question of who do we want running these huge ventures, which seem so entangled to the health of the economy and citizens. That applies to the government and private sector.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/03/10/luca-todesco-teases...
can't talk about 8bit minimalistics homebrew computers without mentioning Uzebox:

http://uzebox.org/wiki/Main_Page

it's a great platform, super easy to develop, tons of fun. Highly recommended.
web conference, zoom competitor.
I'm working on a janet web framework

Source: https://github.com/joy-framework/joy
I guess I'm still skeptical about them not off shoring jobs, but that does make some sense at least, thanks
>> As a Bay Area resident, it is incumbent upon me to maintain, in perpetuity, several weeks of food and drinking water as well as various other life essentials. I owe this to my family and everyone in my community as we all live in a place where a tremendous natural disaster and accompanying social dis-integration could occur at any time.

Sorry, but I'm missing the context to understand your comment. Can you explain? What is the tremendous natural disaster that compels you to maintain sevearl weeks of food and drinking water?
> There is a long history of the government using the military to break strikes and fill the labor gap for things deemed necessary

yes

> for national security

not so much. More for capitalist profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
If anyone wants a light-weight version of this, I made a Coda.io template last week and have been using it with my family. Easy to extend/modify as your needs change.

https://coda.io/@kenny/perishable-food-tracker
Also the Open Source Pixel Dungeon and its many mods.
I would say navigating a menu system takes more concentration than reading and tapping a msg with auto correct. Thus this study makes sense
Let's for the sake of the argument ignore all the deaths that would happen with proper care, young and old alike. A low double-digit percentage of all identified cases require hospitalization to survive. A double-digit percentage of those will die if they don't get intensive care. 40-70% of the population is expected to contract the disease this year.

It's not madness to take very strong measures to prevent that wave of hospitalizations from overwhelming the healthcare system. Most healthcare systems operate close to capacity, and people won't stop getting sick for other reasons while the epidemic is ongoing. This is the situation facing all countries with an advanced Covid19 epidemic.

But hey, it's a free market. Maybe one or two free-world countries will go on with business as usual, and we will get to see in practice whether the rest of the world was excessively careful. I wouldn't want to stake my parents' health on that when all indications say otherwise, but maybe someone else is OK with the gamble.
>> Those are, like, the opposite solutions. Government (or the central bank, in this case[2]) can easily loan money out of thin air, but it can't do the same for toilet paper.

If I may offer a brief moment of levity to relieve the tension of the moment, I must point out that if the government can print money then it can create toilet paper.
Common errors when dealing with Epi data
In Czech Republic everyone now has to cover their nose and mouth while being outside, on a public transport or in an office. Obviously there is not enough respirators/surgical masks, so people are just sewing ordinary face masks.

It will be interesting to watch what kind of effect it will have on new infections
If Amazon.com gets nationalized, I'll volunteer for service. Jeff Bezos doesn't need slave labor.
Do you think the government is managing your money better than you would? Aren't you concerned that big part of it funds the bureaucratic apparatus itself? Aren't you concerned that you are not paying for your own retirement and in our aging Europe 30 years from now there will be not enough working people to pay for yours? Don't you think that paying a lower tax (e.g. 25%) would leave you with more money to cover that 30keur for yourself or generously help others?
Wordflow AI: Generate media with AI to automate mundane reporting (weather reports, sports, etc.) and automate SEO content.

Here's a sample of what we made: https://notrealnews.net

You can learn more at https://wordflow.dev
Show HN: Closed/Rescheduled Because of Coronavirus
This is a google form to track what's been closed /rescheduled because of Coronavirus (COVID-19).

https://forms.gle/EPcS9jU7HkkbnbWd9

Description:

This virus has SHUT DOWN so many things that we LOVE. Starting today, we're building a list to track them so we can be READY when they open up again.

Here is HOW:

This virus has SHUT DOWN so many things that we LOVE. Starting today, we're building a list to track them so we can be READY when they open up again.

Here is HOW:

ADD events to this list.
Our team at usehappen.com will do our part and TRACK when it re-opens.
We'll EMAIL YOU when it's open / rescheduled.

Live list here: https://bit.ly/2xilqTy

Examples
Events - F1 races cancelled, Virtual Grand Prix Sunday Mar 22 @ 8pm GMT
Conferences - E3 2020 cancelled
Concert - Mariah Carey Hawaii Show rescheduled

All the best,

@usehappen

All suggestions are welcome, feel free to DM us.
This is the main reason some conuntries, such as the Czech Republic, made masks mandatory in public.

Also if you are protecting others from your ilness, a sinpler home made mask is enough to greetly limit possible spread.
woof touchscreens (though the chart makes it seem like voice is a problem too)

the US navy is removing some screen-based controls after an accident -- this is less about distraction and more about the complexity of the interface, but still

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john...

mazda the car company made a similar move last year

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...
Also note that Italy has a substantial elderly population, skewing the numbers.
Working on a timer.
Detecting moving objects (asteroids, TNOs) in TESS data:

https://www.benengebreth.org/dynamic-sky/TESS/sedna/
Trying to figure out how to host an online hackathon now that all universities are closed. Requires a lot less logistical work and _way_ less funds but hard to drive engagement. Hopefully people will be bored enough in a few months and we can still get great prizes from sponsors
Physical buttons are much safer, and this is well known within the industry. But touch screens are cheap and easy - so automakers won't go back to physical buttons unless they are forced to by regulators.
No, I don't hate anyone. Dosage. I have taken Chloroquine before, it is not as run of the mill as you think. Extreme side effects.
My current pet project is Vaulty. It’s a service that allows you to send email attachments to your cloud storage account. At the moment, I’m considering pivoting this slightly into an email archiving service, but haven’t yet decided.

I ended up learning quite a bit about how email works and how to setup an email server from scratch. The email backend is written in Rust and hooks into a Postfix server as a filter. Since I am not storing any mail, I’d like to eventually migrate to either an LMTP server or a custom SMTP server.

I also used this as a chance to learn Ansible. I’ve been pretty impressed with how much easier server provisioning becomes, especially when compared to a more manual approach.

Currently, the mail backend is fully working for Dropbox. Right now, I am setting up a landing page to gauge interest. After that, most of the work will be on the web app side.

The project is open source, for now: https://github.com/aksiksi/vaulty
Kind of like sometimes you fail to hear when someone calls your name and other times you think someone was speaking to you when they weren't?

It's not like people are perfect at doing this task either.
Although I haven't touched it for a few weeks I was working on reverse engineering our smart home heating system so that I can integrate it into Home Assistant. Managed to get the auth with their remote systems done and building out the web socket based event bus.

Not sure if I'll ever be able to share it since it feels like this lives in the grey zone legally.
People shut in at home don't need hand sanitizer.
rm doesn't print anything on stdout.
As an ML practitioner I am curious about how you decide what is ML vs what is signal processing. I really cant tell. Its the same freaking problem, be it information theory, machine learning, signal processing. All of us are stuck at the same impasse -- do optimal rate-distortion of a continuous valued signal efficiently and uniformly.
Networks and Risk in the Age of Coronavirus
personally I prefer US sushi places, local salmon in particular is an insanely buttery and delectable slice of raw fish, Ive never understood the japanese obsession with rice, it’s fine but salmon is better imo
For anyone downvoting, it's a serious question. We're debating these kinds of algorithms as interview questions at my job, and I was curious what this brings to the table versus, say, building a CRUD API or constructing SQL queries or anything else.

For example, I've been in the industry for 15 years and I've never had to construct a linked list (much less reverse one) in my career. I have had to build APIs, construct DB queries, create distributed systems, etc, etc. So I naturally wonder why constructing a linked list might result in rejection for a job, unless it's something you're actually expected to do on the job for that role.

Am I missing something?
You can for a couple hours, after which a mod has to do it. But we're happy to take such requests at hn@ycombinator.com.
> A low-distraction interface is going to be more expensive to develop and manufacture than a touchscreen that can be largely assembled from commodity parts and some software.

That seems bizarrely counter-intuitive as a more-or-less standardized low-distraction interface already exists for car radios.

Okay, sure, you add the touch screen so you can do GPS and stuff, but is it really that hard to wire up a pre-existing car radio knob and buttons to an Android device along with some software to map twisting the knob to adjusting the audio volume and so on?

It just baffles me how little apparent attention was given to this sort of thing. I wonder if these people are dogfooding.
I think they said there were only like 17 deaths for younger people.
Free Project Management for Software Teams
You can make your own from a piece of clothe - there are thousands of people doing just that all over Europe, making masks for themselves, their family and friends.
This seems like a potentially game-changing discovery - if we could trivially diagnose 30%+ of cases, that could drastically diminish growth rate.

Are there standard anosmia tests? I'm wondering how to make this actionable in the most efficient way.
yes, in theory the point of the limit is that it should be safe
It's a very challenging game that exercises different muscles than other games, especially if you've never played a deckbuilder before. One of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that skipping a card reward is often the best play. The key insight is that every card taken decreases the probability of drawing all of the other cards in your deck.

Another tricky aspect to the game is that any given card may be great in one deck and terrible in another, to the point where taking it makes your deck worse. Strong players (such as jorbs, whom you can find on twitch) tend to lean very heavily on the card remove feature in order to get rid of bad cards.

There is definitely a luck component to the game but skilled players are pushing that boundary every day. Winning streaks on ascension 20 (the hardest difficulty level) are possible and always growing.
> no doubt that it would not miss

ERROR: Stack Overflow
But our perception of many things can effectively be band limited with no loss in generality to work with the data. I'm unconvinced this is the case in places ml is often used.

Note, I have to hedge and say I am not convinced they are inapplicable. Just not convinced they are applicable.

Also note, I hadn't gotten the article to load when I fired off my concern. I keep the concern, but ack that it is not applicable to this article.
Why not both?

For 60% of the cost of my MBP 16, I built a liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3900Z beast with 64GB of fast RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, RTX 2080 GPU, driving two 4k displays.

I run nixOS on it, my MBP only sees the light of day for things that absolutely require macOS, or when I’m out and about.

For normal, mostly stationary dev (Go, Rust), the desktop is miles better.
Revising materials for already out and incoming booklets at https://www.tenproblems.com : the pandemic made about 1/3 of my references obsolete. Also starting with the SaaS skeleton of my Materials Informatics consultancy for http://www.cudmit.com ... all in all, busier now than one month ago.
> I'd love to have been wearing a mask every day for the past two weeks

Well, that’s the reason they are sold out, and heath professionals are desperately asking for donations.

You don’t need a mask unless you are sick. For protection you need a mask and glasses, but keeping your hands clean and away from your face does 95% of the job.
You’re explaining how electrical power generation can cause pollution, not water electrolysis (what is being discussed).
Yep, this situation is a socialist wet dream

Of course socialism is a failed economic model but hey maybe this time it will work /s
People often lose smell when they have a cold. Is this loss different?
Where would we find operation masks? s far as I can tell they’re still sold out literally everywhere.
Oh man, shame they only offer their keyboard layout as US.
The sample is 70+ year old, but the conclusion is not that people in that age range are the most at risk, it's that if you have a pre-existing condition, you are at risk.

I don't think anyone is trying to say this is an overreaction. On the contrary, if you or any of your loved ones have a condition, you should be extra careful.

At the end of the report linked by other commenters (https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...) it also says that the few <40yo people who died also had existing preconditions.
For the elders point only if they have some disease that can impact the family. So it also makes sense their death rate is lower
Google Gives Cover to Trump’s Lies
I can only agree diesel had (maybe still has) a serve bug around connection reuse and panics.

Panics in rust originally where a pretty nice way to have a error kennel pattern and as long as you always kill the whole error kennel in which the panic occurred and don't share mutable state between error kennels this fully save from any inconsistent state.

Sure panics across FFI boundaries can't be done nice at all, but this can still be handled by making sure there is no FFI boundary insider of an error kernel, just in between.

So I would push panic usage for error kennels, and just that. But also the unwind safe traits need an refresh: Enforce them (by linting against inconsistencies) and better defaults for what does and doesn't implement them.

For example a type which is sync but doesn't implement the referential unwind safe trait is broken/bad in 99% of cases. (Either it should implement unwind safe market or not be send). The remaining 1% are edge cases between the usage of catch unwind and thread local storage.
> standard executive pay...which might be high, but that's another issue

It's not. It shouldn't be "another issue" every single time we discuss a company having financial trouble, just because it's widespread.

> By your logic, you very quickly get to a Chinese level of state ownership of businesses. Practically every large cap company would be on that list.

Not really. Any company that's not a natural monopoly can go ahead and go bankrupt. Utilities and transit would be on the list. Banks could be on or off the list depending on how you handle them. Not much else would be on the list.
I believe your analysis may be somewhat imperfect, I will endeavor to explain my reasoning. If you see flaws in my reasoning, I encourage you to point them out to me so I may sharpen my own logical tools.

The way I see it, what you have presented is a narrative. It could be 100% correct, it could be 100% incorrect, and it could be somewhere in between.

For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume it is true, or true enough.

Once a person holds a narrative such as this in their mind, it subsequently facilitates the ability to make a broad range of very precise predictions, both of the future, and the unknown in general. But don't forget: your mind is producing predictions, but sometimes these predictions have the nasty side effect of not being distinguishable from facts. Fields like psychology, neurology, etc have done significant work studying the particulars of this odd behavior.
Wear a scarf. The OP didn't say criticize people for not wearing mask-alternatives in a time of a shortage, they critized people for not wearing anything. DIY masks may not be as effective, but they still help (some top HN post claimed 70%-80%). This isn't a situation where if you can't do something perfectly you might as well not try. This is a situation that calls for doing anything within reasonable measures (don't raid hospitals for masks etc).

Paper masks are in shortage in Vietnam but that doesn't stop people from wearing big respirator kits or cloth masks that they rotate out.
Who wants this? People who ask themselves, "Y'know, if I only had an ERP system to manage my refrigerator and batteries"? This seems very poorly conceived.
I bet they'd prefer $20 or $30.
https://saasify.sh - trying to make it easier for developers to monetize their side projects.
FWIW, this was announced this afternoon. Not sure if any of their plants are still in the US though: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/pharma-and-life-sciences/trump...
That doesn't mean it's the wrong approach in general, just the wrong approach at this point in time.

In the short term, the curve needs to be flattened at (almost) any cost, while treatment and testing capacity ramps up.

In the long term, we need to gauge the risk and isolate more selectively. There is no way around herd immunity, we can't shut down almost everything for two years or more.
Please stop. You have nothing here.
May be true for start-ups related to solving pandemic, but not for all.

So far, nothing really changed for us at Reliza (https://reliza.io). My plan for this year was to launch MVP and work on it, which we did late February, and then work on it. Regarding funding, we were planning to look into raising funds towards the end of the year - early 2021.

It currently does not look like there is more activity from investors, on the contrary feels like raising money is harder unless your project directly relates to something that may be used to tackle the pandemic.

So for us it just means we should be prepared to defer possible funding round for later. I'm afraid, for many startups this time would be extremely challenging, especially if pandemic lasts for many months.