skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they just don’t care. If you look at their open-source tools, they often have compile-time flags disabling code paths with better performance, probably so they can reduce the amount of code they need to worry about.
Fantastic?! Hascicorp?!
Ok, a reply to my own rant, LOL.

To be fair, the WaPo article is laced with caveats like ”without any measures to slow it down”, or ”If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days”. But there ARE measures to slow it down, and it certainly WON’T continue to double every three days.

This is really my gripe with these articles. I like the tech. The interactive ’simulations’ are cool & fun. But I worry they are only adding to the panic and confusion. I’ve had close friends spout ‘facts’ like this to me. Stuff like 60-70 of the population will be infected by the time it’s done.
Being a part of society implies a social contract and some social control, it’s not black and white. Right now environmental impacts are not priced into many of our products (e.g. meat) and services (e.g. travel).
You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.
“and that IRR includes crashes like these.”

No it doesn’t.
I'm not sure there's a "what if" at all, more like a "when will".

At some point, a UBI will become a necessity. The most likely other options are a dystopian nightmare or a complete overhaul of our basic economic principles (i.e. a post-scarcity Star Trek-esque society)
How so? Not disagreeing with you, just curious.
Perhaps Dave is suing his employer for compensation because he developed cancer after working with material which was later found to be carcinogenic. Dave's employer argues that since Dave was a smoker, his smoking caused his lung cancer, and they are not liable. Dave admits thats smoking causes lung cancer, but argues that it did not cause his lung cancer.
Especially among the elderly male Chinese population
I definitely agree about the superiority of RT-PCR and the drawbacks of direct detection. Nevertheless, seroconversion can take between 5-12 days from symptom onset [1]. Therefore it's important to outline the different ELISA strategies (Thank you for doing so!), when discussing diagnostic tests.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502
I tend to recommend minikube to new comers as it provides easy addons like ingress, image registry, load balancer via minikube tunnel. You can run minikube with 2GB
Easy when only dealing with one node.
Once your familiar then I will recommend Kind when you need more than one worker node and test scenario that require multiple nodes or if you know your way to install and configure addons yourself
Let's add some more context: high school, the guy in question was a former student of one of my teachers from a few years before who visited from time to time. I chatted with him occasionally in class. Later in college I found out he worked for a local tech company, which was pretty rare in that area. Got a recommendation, got the job.

It was luck.
“If you owe a bank a million bucks and can’t pay, you have a problem. If you owe a hundred million bucks and can’t pay, the bank has a problem.”
I believe he was asking for specific evidence of negative impact, not people worried it might have a negative impact.
Actually, Comcast has been a hero of late. The have advertised that they will give away basic internet for free, and bumped up the speed of existing subscribers in addition to bumping up their data caps.

Asking university students to leave campus is hard. Switching from on-prem to online teaching overnight is harder yet. But teaching across the connectivity divide, where students don’t have access at home and the state just shuttered all the businesses providing “free” Wifi, is impossible.

I have been wronged many times by Comcast over the last 24 years; at least from my POV, this offer—provided they abide by it—erases most if not all my ill-will towards them.

Well done
Going After the Gigs
They did, using Nazi symbology sometime ago.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-california-gop-naz...
The interview here is compelling. Yang's book is even more compelling.

But what Yang doesn't do here or in his book is make a powerful case to fiscal conservative spelling out just how universal income will avoid demolishing the economy through inflation. Until this happens, UBI is going nowhere.

Although COVID-19 is on everyone's minds right now, it wasn't too long ago that Venezuela, its hyperinflation, and empty stores were the topic of concern.

COVID-19 has brought with it store shortages, which no doubt is a massive shock to most Americans. Nobody knows when those shortages will end.

Imagine what could happen if you dropped a grand in everyone's pocket every month. Also imagine the humanitarian crisis that would result by trying to suppress consumer inflation through price controls.
Ray Dalio has some suggestions, although I don't think they go far enough. You literally want to get cash into the hands of businesses and people who will spend it.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implications-hitting-hard-0-i...
Do you know why development on ReactXP has slowed? Are they abandoning it?
Every UI toolkit on Windows is/was based on Win32 (except XAML). There are so many places where it leaks it's not even funny anymore.

UI consistency isn't Windows strongest point. I'm glad they're trying to fix it.
It's the best in my book :) KIND + CAPI are truly magical. I appreciate all your hard work on the project, thank you!
Yes, verifying the hash of a password is simpler than SRP. You'll still need a password manager and 2FA with SRP. The user will still be entering in their password into a form-field on the client. You'll still need 2FA to make sure it isn't a credential stuffing attack, or someone who phished them. And yes, you can still be phished with SRP. SRP doesn't mean there is no password. You'll still want a different password for every service.

At the end of the day, I'd much rather advise developers to hash & salt than hope that they can properly implement the 7 or 8 step process of SRP. That's an insane amount of complexity for authentication, with plenty of room for mistakes to be made. Developers have enough trouble getting even OAuth to work.

SRP gives you the same amount of security (arguably less, if the user chooses a weak password and/or the client code doesn't properly stretch the keys) as the conventional hash & salt.
The closest thing I can think of to prefetching branchless SIMD code was some numpy scripts I did some work with, but I'm not sure it would be quite as tightly optimized.

It's really quite fascinating, and I'll have to see if I can handle the pattern matching as well as the more experienced APLers here. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!
My work set up Discord for voice chat during WFH despite mine and my colleague's efforts to promote setting up a Matrix server with federation disabled.

We self-host just about everything else ourselves, but for some reason everyone flocked to Discord.
They could not have more last minute timing. Now everything melts and the time of funny money is over.
I would expect rationing of the available bandwidth to become more important, not less, as the entire population is stuck at home using it all day.
No, there are no good Rust Qt bindings right now - it's a bit of a byzantine process to tie it all together.
Covid 19 Worldwide Growth Rates
I’m a bit confused why would an anti-parasite drug be used now for covid-19
Lock down a list of concerns, max / min pressures, limits of pressure change rates, etc. Generalize the device so it can be dialed in.

If a ventilator can be powered by a brushed motor blower, this is quite doable and scaleable. There are unique opportunities to get maker grade devices enhanced and tested for production when lives are being lost. Certainly worth the effort while we sit on the sidelines.
I haven't seen any better or worse ideas from either side of the political or national spectrum. As far as I'm concerned, every leader and every country seem to be acting in earnest, looking for their best solution.

Now is not the time to lose your mind and regress into confirmation bias. Listen to your leaders (National all the way down the line), follow the instructions, try to help everyone recover. In this way, you'll likely live to push your political views another day.
IIRC, Linux has also deviated from the Single UNIX Specification/POSIX in some respects that would make it fail certification even if they tried.
Yes, again, I'm not minimizing anything or saying coronavirus isn't a problem. I'm only explaining why statistics wouldn't currently detect a bunch of unknown cases.
Show HN: Card Shuffle for Classic Mafia Game
Until you get a good bit of random antibody tests, it is all speculation. Nobody really knows how widespread this thing is, what its actual death rate is or anything else.

I personally wouldn't be surprised to learn the number of people who had it or have it now is hundreds of times higher than the "confirmed cases". I would also speculate that this virus has been in wide circulation for months now.

But my guess is as good as anybody else. Until we get actual, statistically valid high quality data.... all we have is speculation. I sure hope we are making the right call shutting things down as much as we are. People have to remember that there are serious physical health consequences to the actions being taken. Suicide rates will climb, alcoholism & addiction will jump, crime will go up, etc.

A few weeks of this kind of economic pause is one thing but at some point in the very near future people are going to want to know what the end game is.
I'm still left in entirely in the dark about what the UK's strategy actually is. As far as I can tell, it's "do less than other countries to avoid experiencing as much economic disruption." Which is fine (for the purposes of this discussion), but everyone defending the UK's policy should at least just own it.
We do with driving licences, at least in Quebec. We don't have to pass a test to get a licence here smh.
>this will cause the price of natural gas to spike

If you drive US frackers out of business, you'll also spike oil prices. Fracking has added so much supply to the world that it's turned the US into an oil exporter on occasion[0]. Removing that much supply from the markets would cause it to tighten, and by doing so would make fracking viable again.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/business/us-oil-exports-saudi...
How does that apply to self hosting? Are they obliged to push changes to their repo that implement the policy they are obligated themselves to follow? Are you obliged not to fork and remove such changes? How?
Maybe it's the masks. Not by avoiding people catching it, but by reducing the spread to others. How tragically ironic it would be if the West has derided the most effective measure.
I’m guessing 90 or 95% of enterprise desktop apps (trading, cad, Point-of-sale, medical, ...) is windows like they always were. Sure, a lot is moving from the desktop because it should be webapps, but few companies outside a very small niche (those that make apps for broad markets of consumers like Spotify or Slack) worry about cross platform.

The exception is and always was media creation, where Mac always had a foothold.

But for every normal boring enterprise out there, so long as every customer is a business where everyone runs windows, that’s your target.
Im guessing they meter users differently for traffic going inside and outside the country. On the upstream/provider side it’s not uncommon to see a 2-10x price difference between connectivity inside an island/country vs international carriage.
Keep in mind there are going to be a lot of instances where people are infected but are not confirmed. I know a couple of people who were / are sick, had C19 symptoms but were not tested because they weren’t considered high risk enough.
I had the chance to work with Armon as a contractor at HashiCorp when I was in college. Armon was absolutely one of the most down-to-earth leaders I've ever seen. Even though he was technically brilliant and I was only an undergrad, he never made me feel like I was stupid or inexperienced, but rather patiently guided me towards the best solutions, so I was able to gain a lot of confidence and grow a lot along the way.

If you are an aspiring distributed systems engineer (as I was), I highly recommend applying to HashiCorp. They are solving some of the most fun challenges in distributed systems and they have a great engineering culture, not to mention that they are remote-friendly.
Counter point:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/opinion/airlines-bailout....
This is the kind of nitpicking pedantry that the rest of the internet makes fun of HNers for.
Assuming that someone who died from coronavirus is far more likely to have been tested for the virus than someone who's been infected by it, the true death rate of someone infected by the virus is probably far lower than the calculated death rate. (# of confirmed death / # of confirmed infections).

S.Korea did extensive testing, which reduces the number of unreported infections. So the calculated death rate in S. Korea is 4x lower than a comparable country like Spain, which has similar # of confirmed cases, population, GDP, and GDP per capita.

If we assume S. Korea's calculated death rate(<1%) is closer to the true death rate and apply it to other countries to derive the total # of infections (reported + unreported) based on the reported death count, we can see there may be far more infections than we know.
>We'll mop up society's collective bills at a later point in time

Very much doubt faceless corporations with automated billing cycles will take such an altruistic view on this but perhaps I'll be surprised.

Most will do the exact opposite I believe. The last financial crash caused massive cashflow issues for the big corps.
The fear is that in order to reach feature parity, they'll cripple macOS, not enhance iPadOS
>Overall, our findings indicate that a large proportion of COVID-19 infections were undocumented prior to the implementation of travel restrictions and other heightened control measures in China on 23 January, and that a large proportion of the total force of infection was mediated through these undocumented infections (Table 1). This high proportion of undocumented infections, many of whom were likely not severely symptomatic, appears to have facilitated the rapid spread of the virus throughout China. Indeed, suppression of the infectiousness of these undocumented cases in model simulations reduces the total number of documented cases and the overall spread of SARS-CoV2

This paper is about undetected carriers spreading SARS-CoV2 across China prior to the Jan 23 lockdown. It does not imply that 86% of all total infections that we see currently are undocumented, it only reflects the relatively narrow testing that was happening prior to Jan 23 (likely only the severe cases).

After Jan 23, China expanded its testing much more broadly, and other countries (such as South Korea) have done so as well. You should not take this paper to mean that the actual number of cases for these countries is larger by a factor of 1/(1-0.86).
soon we'll have to quarantine TCP to avoid congestion
Their execution is impressive. Very impressive. And, execution is what often separates the leaders from the pack, rather than some "unique" aspects.

However, HashiCorp seems unique in a few regards:

1. A pioneer in monetizing OSS via SaaS services.

2. Many successes. Can't think of a recent startup in this space with so many successes - can you? Sentinel, Consul, Terraform etc.

3. Arguably at the start of the curve, e.g. service mesh automation is really difficult?
The main counter to that is, that's people who have earnt less money, not able to defer to the future, and instead have to perform a fiscal recovery.
> Name 5.

WoW, Runescape, CS 1.6/Source, Slack, uh... Tribes? I guess?
People actually were locked in their apartment compounds for about a month, at least in Beijing.
> It seems like there's no ex-Apple weighing in.

I think you’ll find that they often do weigh in, but without announcing it because they’re trying to avoid providing information that would force them to put the disclaimer you did ;)

> I'm not 100% sure but IIRC the issue with having python bundled is the OS is that the specific version then became required to ship meaning we were stuck on ancient versions of Python2/Python3 internally (& same for Ruby probably) to make sure that externally people relying on specific behaviours stayed functional. Additionally having them (or at least Python) installed at the system level caused all sorts of havoc in terms of interplay with other Python versions installed via homebrew if you weren't super-careful with how your paths resolved (& sometimes even then).

I believe this is LLDB linking against Python 2 in a way that is pretty much incorrect. I think Python 3 got a bump recently? For once this isn’t completely Homebrew’s fault :P
No, it does not mean the mortality rate is 10x lower because dead people who were not tested also don't get counted in the rate.
It seems this company has a similar mode of operation as e.g. Docker: put a thin layer around Linux, and sell it as if it's something new.
A few maybe, but there haven't been large numbers of additional pneumonia deaths beyond those attributed to coronavirus.
One disadvantage to RT-qPCR I forgot to highlight, and an advantage to direct detection ELISAs (and ELISAs in general) is that ELISAs are relatively robust when fully developed. RT-qPCR requires a lot more gear. See pregnancy tests. Sits on a shelf for ages, all you need to do is pee on it, works reliably, needs no extra equipment.
Can you link to your company. I've always thought it would be cool to 100% work on LP, MIP, and Nonlinear models. Do y'all use CPLEX/GUROBI for the big stuff and Prolog for more discreet items?
One thing to consider is every region has very different testing protocols and levels of testing. There is huge variation and bias in the dataset that makes it very hard to derive any kind of meaningful predictions. Not to mention population and socioeconomic factors vary widely from place to place.
Due to self-isolation we switched from weekly playing mafia (werewolf) game offline to online (via zoom). But we needed a card shuffle mechanics, so I wrote this over weekend. Thought maybe this would be useful for somebody else ;)

Note, this assumes classic rules with only 4 roles: villager, mafia, godfather, sheriff, sample rules here - http://englishmafiaclub.com/how-to-play-mafia-by-classic-rul...).
And I was wondering what was going through Facebook's mind when they decide to have Instagram / WhatsApp by Facebook Brand.
I guess every person who was put in a cage near the border of the US was a huge danger.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border...
But that's kinda my point: CS servers weren't really independent. If Valve/Steam/VAC/etc. stopped working, CS servers were all down effectively.
In Canada Rogers (and I believe Bell), two of our biggest ISPs, have removed data cap fees on internet and ended long distance fees for calls in response to the virus:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/03/16/rogers-waiving-long-d...
> If merely raising the issue in such a note is sufficient to count as "freedom at all costs libertarian fetishism" these days, then by all means, sign me up for freedom at all costs libertarian fetishism.

The fetishism I refer to is one that is distinctly anti-social, since the premise is entirely "others are telling me I shouldn't do this thing, and obviously I know what's best for me, so I will do it to exercise my freedom". You are falling into the same trap.
Two Point Hospital does fantastically as a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlaOYMU8qA
Could you please substantiate your claims?

This is what I mean and what I do, by always allocating the same amount of savings per year, in good or bad times [1]. You can see how in 2008 such portfolio had a drawdown of more than -50%. Despite that, it performed well above the 8% IRR I mentioned.

Another interesting data point, by investing lump sums of money at the very peak of every market cycle, immediately followed by a massive crash [2]. I believe the IRR in this case is still above 7%, which is absolutely phenomenal considering the horrible investing timing.

If you don't agree, please tell me exactly why I am wrong and why you are right, so I might learn something. I come to HN to read HN-quality comments, not Reddit-quality content. Thank you.

[1] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...

[2] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
Its usage/install stats for the product itself, so Microsoft. They make an excellent free telemetry product if you want to use one in your own app.
UK hedges its massive coronavirus gamble
If the reduction is maintained until there are no infectious cases (and any virus outside bodies has either been sanitized or died on its own) then you can reconnect the social graph and the virus will not re-emerge. It's not magic after all: the physical virus has to actually be present to restart the outbreak.
This analysis seems largely correct but for one thing, the author assumes that people who contract the virus will develop immunity that lasts long enough to bend the exponential growth curve as herd immunity develops.

(The curve will slow for other reasons as a sufficient number of people get infected such that there just aren't enough people who haven't been infected to be newly infected.)

I didn't see a source for that --- it seemed like an assumption --- and everything I've read suggests that this is a major unknown at the moment.

It's possible the author has a source that was not included. Either way, the author should either include the source or more explicitly take describe the epistemic status of that hypothesis and work through the consequences of it not being true.
Yes, of course many do in fact enjoy using tools outside of Xcode and crusty shell scripts that someone else on the team wrote years ago :)
If you're interested we are working on various mechanical ventilator designs which don't require actuators or electronics. There are actually devices like that in the market, you can learn more in our collaboration docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R25O2mKT3TfSjXTmheGEevIk...

Edit: Another design we're considering based on an Army prototype: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hcuu-55q2a3_-LmBwg0uBdgM...

If you would like to help please join us at the #project-pneumatic-ventilator room of the Helpful Engineering Slack: https://helpfulengineering.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-c...
That doesn't mean that it won't work, or that the others will work. If the others turn out to work and because they are more tried in general great, but right now all approaches are worth exploring
This is my line of thinking, too. And I second your point of not trying to minimize it, but there appears compelling evidence this is already hit. Trying to determine what I could watch to get more or less confidence in this view.
Holy crap. I’ve been in Beijing for the last month and even they didn’t ban bike riding.
This is not really valid due to fatality rate being heavily dependent on age, comorbidities, and healthcare quality (which is itself dependent on case load), and the distributions of these differ greatly across countries. But, sure, you could try to normalize these to infer the actual case load.