skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do China sourcing and have decent access to 3-ply surgical masks and limited access to N95 masks.

It's really hard to sell either of those to government bodies, even near cost. Already talked to the Red Cross, wholesale pharmacies and different ministries. They generally insist on payment on delivery, which we can't do for larger orders, as factories sell to whoever has the cash at the factory gate.

Some also want EU certifications (FFP2), while many factories in China only have the local Chinese standard (KN95). And some refuse to pay to a company outside Europa, while wanting to buy stuff from China.

So while I'd love to ship some of this stuff to Europe, currently people there are still blocking themselves. Hoping to work something out soon.
Oh thanks! Yes, it's quite a bit better quality. The mp4 at that archive.org link[0] is 295 MB, 640x480. The best youtube version (with the given link anyway) is 139 MB, 352x288.

[0] https://archive.org/download/DouglasAdams-Hyperland/DouglasA...

The version on vimeo appears similar. (265 MB, 480p)

https://vimeo.com/72501076
It seems like less extreme measures may have fewer unintended consequences. For example, by closing down all restaurants, local grocery stores have been packed all day. I expect there is more cross contamination in your local supermarket than there would be in normal supermarket conditions plus one smaller restaurant setting per day.
>I don't want to be glib, but I genuinely don't think you've thought this through. I just can't see a moral argument for allowing a 10M+ death count at the kind of economic impact we're talking about right now.

Then try thinking through the impact of what could become the biggest economic disruption since the great depression or the great leap forward. Those went well for people. 80 trillion GDP, down to 68, back to 80 in 6 years is a 36 trillion dollar loss in the next six years alone. That's 3.6 million per victim and to be frank, most people aren't worth 3.6 million dollars.

Look, this is a reasonable thing to disagree about but you aren't engaging in good faith.

edit: math
If it's so easy to build a website. Why doesn't everyone scale to the size of Google?
Count and Assert SQL Statements
US/Japan/Germany are leading the World in developing Vaccine for #COVID2019 while India is struck with #CowUrine and #JanataCurfew
This move by California is pretty much step 1 in China's plan no?

>China's strategy seems simple enough. Close off borders of a region, stamp out all existing cases with aggressive testing, then keep the region at 0 cases by requiring mandatory 2 week quarantine before letting anyone in. Do this one region at a time until your country is all clean. Now their biggest problem is teaching the rest of the world this strategy.

It's in all 50 states at this point. Likely in every major urban area. Too late.
At what point will they capitulate and give up?

This sounds like they have completely given up on containing it. We are now left to our own fate.
George Gershwin, Then and Now
US Attorney's Office arrested, charged a Harvard prof for Chinese espionage
This sounds like a real-life kind of trolley problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem ).
Just one tragedy-of-the-commons after another.
You would also need a microcentrifuge and pipettes and stuff, but yes.
Nurses and other staff are not there to make decisions based on firsthand geopolitical and epidemiology research. They have enough day-to-day work to do. This information should be provided to hospitals and other healthcare workers from higher up. This level of resource use / need may be even above what the local management should analyse, because ideally there would be regional stock available to shift to the clinics/hospitals affected by most cases.
I’ve gotten plenty, just for a counter-anecdote. In fact I received one today!
Against Virus as Metaphor
The early CDC tests were not accurate, or the labs were not, correct? I am not qualified to speak to this, however, inaccurate results (positive and negative) could lead to overloading the healthcare system.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615323/why-the-cdc-botche...

While this has been addressed by the CDC, how is bootleg version different to not cause the same issues?
This article needs a complement: Things you can't do with a browser in 2020.
That's an awful lot of people's life savings in their small business that goes poof. A lot of the businesses that can't survive are leaving behind people that are not capable of bringing them back, and people that won't be employed there afterwords.
Cross infection?

F! This solution might be worse than the disease.
> "Letting the virus infect everyone" at a 1% death rate means 3 million deaths in the US, right up there with the worst catastrophes of the 20th century

Every year nearly 3 million people die in the US already.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Are you saying we experience the worst catastrophe year in and year out?

The hyperbole and exaggerated fearmongering over coronavirus is something to keep an eye out for. Also, if everyone gets infected, it likely means that the virus is far less deadly than you assume and the death rate is far lower than 1%. Think about it rather than cherrypicking data to push an agenda.
Very glad to see this on Hacker News.

I had the fortune to meet her, as my dad was the architect of the new expanded hospital that opened in 1999. Amazing woman.

Sydney Morning Herald obituary here : https://www.smh.com.au/national/gynaecologist-named-a-nation...
Let this be a lesson to learn for western democracies to not put all of their eggs in one basket. Diversification, localization and strategic globalization of the supply chain should be at the forefront of the issues to be discussed, ratified and acted upon after this pandemic is over. When one country manufactures 90% of world's goods (not accurate, to make a point), while the top 1% gets their bonuses for increasing profit margins, this is what we have. We've lost skills, we've lost our stance to manufacture things in our own homeland. It is depressing, deeply worrying and feels like the entire world has been gutted out by one country. Just to make it clear - think about this scenario - what would happen if one country made the food for the rest of the world? (Thankfully, we don't, but it can happen). What about pharmaceuticals? (Unfortunately, 90% of the world's generic drugs are made in Asia, primarily in India who in turn depends on China) [1].

[1] China is the world's largest raw materials exporter for Drugs: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-opens-door-to-foreign-dru...

Edit: I just realized that some of the startup and entrepreneurs around the world are on this forum, if you'd like to get into manufacturing, want to learn about more abstract concepts of manufacturing, I implore you to checkout: Manufacturing Planning and Control for Supply Chain Management reference book - https://books.google.com/books/about/Manufacturing_Planning_...
This book is absolute gold. Manufacturing is like playing this game Factorio (google it) but in real life. It is an exciting field ripe for innovation, many very hard problems and unlimited potential (and a lot of risk as well).
If the tests could be done on someone who is asymptomatic, then it could be hugely beneficial.

For anyone already feeling sick... stay home and self-quarantine.

If we could _just_ test everybody regardless of symptoms then we could quickly isolate people spreading it in ignorance. That is the main benefit I could reason out. Probably early detection and better planning as someone with it progresses, too.
Just curious why are you waiting for a request? Why not call the nearest hospital and say "I've got 4 n95 masks, do you want them?"

There is a problem with issuing a request - not everyone will know about it. As you mentioned, you think there was no request. But there were multiple: here's one example https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/hospitals-are...
This. In theory it’s open, but in reality, people just want to get this work done mostly.

Also, if something is that important, people can and do perform the same calculations using different packages or different algorithms.

Write two algorithms in MMA, or one in MMA and one in something else, and every so often spot check a few cases by hand.
Yes, but I'm sure there are ways around it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
It feels like testing is a lagging indicator at this point. Whatever doubling happened, already happened.
The statistical models I am running all consistently show that the exponential factor for the spread of the virus is 3 times higher outside of China than it ever was inside of China. Wuhan isn’t the worst case scenario. It is the lower more flat curve we would desperately like to put ourselves on.

The estimate Newsom presented is credible.
They're not legal if they're fakes, most of those look like fakes
A doctor who helped defeat smallpox explains what’s coming
Indeed given many lives lie in the balance, shouldn't there be something like a bootcamp get smart people up to speed on this quickly?
It's for gamers, so of course it looks ridiculous.
It's incredible seeing this on hn. For context, while the FoHo is sometimes good for very, very breaking and recent stories, it's a little hard to overdo the niche it fits in Stanford culture: it's pretty much the main and only tabloid for fast-paced news and (sometimes) absurd 'takes' on things happening around campus.

While I don't doubt the story, I would always take it with a grain of salt. I don't personally know the person they claim is running these "under the table" tests, but the tests are very simple, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually true. (Most first or second year biology/bioengineering students can easily run RT-PCR without an issue, especially if they already have the primers available.)

EDIT: I was just contacted by one of my friends who knows of a few students and their labs doing this. Apparently there is more than one.
I would say I want more tests kits, more protective gear for health professionals, more unified and clear communication. What use are said laws and elections if they are not able to provide security for the citizens. They sound great in theory and that about it. Because of these clowns so many people are going to pay with their lives or their daily livelihoods or both. If the only option to removing incompetent people from gov is a military coup then we have a bigger fundamental problem. It can’t be binary. World can and does operate in shades or gray. So no military coup is not what I want.
> Cross contamination is not a concern when someone is dying here and now and likely has the same disease as the guy next to him who is also dying

If COVID evolves into multiple strains, then there is a real risk of cross-infection that would make the immune system forced to work harder? Moreover, a lot of the pneumonia deaths are not due to covid itself but rather due to opportunistic infections (often bacterial) that end up causing the pneumonia that causes death. Letting two COVID patients share a ventilator could mean that now one is exposed to a novel bacteria in the other that causes them to develop pneumonia.
World feared China over coronavirus, but now the tables are turned
> we're about to enter an unprecedented public health crisis.

this is where you lose me... it’s not unprecedented, quite the opposite. Throughout all human history this has been common. Recently (since WWII), we’ve been able to limit the lethality of most diseases and/or reduce transmissions.

But this should have been prepared for. They (the government) even had a playbook for it, they had evidence it could even be from this family of viruses.

This is a massive mistake by hundreds of our leaders.
I'm going to wait until those features get added to firefox.
This guy lifts.
Elizabeth Holmes 2.0?
My guess: non trivial to do it safely and non trivial to get accuracy rates you'd get from a professional lab.

Doing all those things by hand also takes some time. Thinking back to my days in a lab at MIT, sample to PCR probably took a full day (rough approximation). Big labs can probably increase the parallelism a lot.
They aren't having trouble scaling up... They already have. 200 million masks a day, 20x in February.

If we (America) can't scale up we are in deep doodoo. Trump has been pissing off China by calling the Corona virus the "China Virus".
I mean say what you will, but that kind of is the American way since the founding of the republic. Don't trust the sovereign to take care of you, because just sometimes that ends with the cops welding people into apartment buildings

Does that mean people should hoard and price gouge their fellow man during a pandemic, of course not.
You don’t have to get a sense of doubling via unreliable test data if you look at the doubling rate of the fatalities.

People count bodies much more reliably in pandemics. I don’t trust our confirmed case telemetry data much, but I do trust the fatality data. Unfortunately it’s about a two to four week lagging indicator. But the fatality rates also currently show this to be spreading much, much faster than it ever spread in Wuhan.

Wuhan is what happens when the curve is flattened. Not what happens when you don’t.
There are many Japanese words with similar or identical pronunciation, but the difference is quite clear when written in Kanji (or given some context). 縛り and 絞り don't look particularly similar, they just share the 糸 radical.
the united states is not a democracy, plain and simple. the u.s. is an authoritative state that can barely run itself.

and further, what are your practical recommendations outside of theoretical possibility and platitudes?

how does a citizen stop the president from blatantly and petulantly renaming "coronavirus" with "chinese virus"? how does one make the government back in january actually prepare for the viral outbreak instead of just banning travel (and secretly denying visas and withholding passports with valid visas from immigrants and non-immigrant workers), stop generating racism towards the chinese and east-asian population in general, stop creating an agoraphobic aura, then stop them of washing their hands of the situation, as if that's all that was needed? how does one control the government communication and media that continually sends the wrong message to the people, who are already all too willing to panic? how does one keep the government from withholding information or making poor decisions that ignore international knowledge and recommendations? how does one keep our government from secretly and illegally profiting off of the virus? how does one keep the government from flat out lying?

statements like yours are infuriating. you're acting as if a vote four years ago mattered or any future vote matters. it didn't, and it won't. what matters are the actions of the people actually in power. and as of late, these actions amount to treason, felonies, and unethical behavior.
I can't answer any of your questions except the last observation, there will be an uptick in the sale prices for sure.
Nice initiative but you'll struggle to publish the app on the app store and Google play(mildly put) with all their restrictions in relation to COVID19.
> I prefer copying the link to the page I'm on to share. No popups, native or otherwise.

I tend to agree, but this puts us both in the 5% of internet users who know how to do that. (And no, I'm not celebrating that low number.)
Ideally? This cop should do at least five years on Rikers!
I’d be curious to the answer to that too. I can think of quite a few reasons, but I’m sure there are nuances that are completely unknown to me.

I’m more interested in the parent question at the moment. I know almost nothing about the subject matter. What are the blockers for deploying a simple virus test at the scale we need?
National Park Service to waive fees at open parks to aid social distancing
The mortality is affected only in as much as you avoided the much worse mortality rate for the no ICU capacity scenario. This is what we saw in Wuhan and now in Italy. The difference seems to be something like 5x higher mortality or so (1% => 5%).

All of us getting sick in an orderly fashion has a huge benefit even if it turns out that’s the best we can do. But perhaps we flatten the curve for long enough we buy time for treatments to come online and to get closer to a vaccine.
Many ISP’s have significantly more and largely unused bandwidth between users vs the overall network. This is often done for simple redundancy as you want a minimum of two upload links if not more. However, it’s much simpler to run a wire between two different tiny grey buildings in a neighborhood than run a much longer wire to another section of your core network. Ideally that’s just a backup for your backup, but properly configured routers will still use it for local traffic.

Another common case is if you want X bandwidth from A to B you round up to hardware with some number more than X. This can result in network topology’s that seem very odd on the surface.

PS: I think you’re confusing what I am saying, this is not pure P2P it’s very much a hybrid model. Further Netflix was seriously considering it for a while in 2014, but stuck with a simpler model.
Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/harvard-university-profes...
Agree it's trivially easy to do, but as anyone you does a lot of qPCR knows, they're rife with false positives.

Any environmental contamination will show up as a positive, particularly using the non-quantatative end-point method mentioned above. There's simple controls for that, but still....
My understanding is they are good for 4 hours. When the masks are saturated they are not effective. Maybe it's better to have 2 and rotate them out.

I saw someone else post this on HN... Worth a look.
http://www.imcclinics.com/english/index.php/news/view?id=83
If you're interested in giving this a try, this is a great introductory indigo dye kit. Just a need a bucket and something to dye (pillow-case, dish-towel, or an old t-shirt).

https://www.amazon.com/Jacquard-Indigo-Tie-Dye-Mini/dp/B003I...
It's not just the US. This happened across countries in Europe as well; Italy had it happen, Germany had "Coronavirus Parties", even. It happens because some people are idiots, and others aren't quite aware of how serious the situation is.

Once reality sets in, only the absolute idiots that don't care for being socially ostracized (or in some cases even legal consequences) will continue that behaviour. And luckily those are normally a minority.
People will never abide by a two month quarantine in this country. The number of people who say "I'll just get sick and risk spreading it" starts at much greater than zero and will rise every single everyday.

There will need to be back-and-forth quarantines, or targeted quarantines, or some other creative method of allowing people to live roughly normal lives after a few weeks.
Erectile Dysfunction: Cure and Prevention
I think the staff at the tourist camp just tries to accommodate the tourists, so I'd guess they'd mostly stay on Chile time, but I don't really know.

At the research station though a normal schedule is mostly followed, at least for meals. Some people keep odd hours of course, and I think there are people on night shift for certain things (e.g. meteo is always manned).
Right, in some countries doubling was every 3 days.
The Newton team ended up becoming the BeInc team. iPhone might have happened earlier. BeInc in 1999 focus shifted to internet appliances and had tablets on their minds. The iOS revolution would have happened 5 years earlier.
The best case scenario for controlling this epidemic is containment through contract tracing. That means we find people who have it, figure out who they got and from and gave it to, and get those people to quarantine. This strategy is failing in the US due to insufficient testing.
Can you email me (email in profile) and I can connect you to some people in the US trying to solve this.
why? i don't know where you live but i bet a whole lot of things you use and trust daily are made by "some chinese company"
Worldometers shows CA with 1060 cases and 19 deaths. Where does ~8000 come from. If 8 weeks is 56 days and cases go up 20% a day as they have been then 1.2^56 * 1060 = 28.8 million cases.
Cezve and grinder? That's not a costly equipment.
no linux :(
Curious, I'd think there are a bunch of people willing to provide financing, no?
Ask HN: Are you worried about your government's reaction to pandemic?
Firstly, I understand the "Coronavirus CVOID-19" situation is a serious matter. It's just the way governments are reacting, reminds me of their response to a terrorist attack.

Here in Australia we're urged to stay at home and are banned from gatherings of more than 100 people. It seems each week there's more restrictions on personal freedom's like; travel, attending events, what you can buy, even how to greet people...

I feel like the laws imposed on civilians during an event like this are extremely hard to revoke after the fact, kind of like how airport security was permanently increased after 9/11/2001...
If you're not transacting for physical cash, isn't your money going directly into an account at another bank?

Unless people are withdrawing mass amounts of cash, I'm relatively certain you can't have bank runs against the banking system as a whole, you can only have runs against a particular bank.
My relatives live in Iran. Sanctions devasted the people's lives, not the government!
You need a quantitative real-time PCR machine, not just a PCR machine. Not cheap.

EDIT: You can't just put this on a gel. Something that comes up at 35 cycles (likely negative - needs re-running) looks exactly the same as something that comes up at 15 cycles (likely positive). The quantitative part is important.

2nd EDIT: it uses dual-labelled probe - end point PCR is absolutely not good enough.
I'd advise against a Twilio number, Support told me they can't handle Short Codes so its very unreliable for SMS 2FA.

I was using an Android device, KDE Connect app and a Linux box to view 2FA messages. Works, but it's a string of hacks.

Hope some better solutions come up in this post.
Oh yeah, toxic as can be.
About 25 years ago I was on a local plant identification hike along the Mendocino coast of California, the leader pointed at some and asked if anyone knew what it was.
It looked like Dill to me, not knowing about water hemlock, so I quickly snapped a small stem and took a whiff expecting to smell Dill.
When I awoke a couple of minutes later, the whole group was looking down on me with concern.
I was told that I sniffed it, and said "That's not good" and fell to the ground, I don't remember saying anything, but do recall seeing "stars".
It was half an hour before I could walk again, and a couple of hours before I felt anywhere close to normal.
Please don't be an ignorant fool like I was and sniff plants you don't know about.
It's a shame an article like this doesn't tell the economic enslavement story. Ethiopia and other poor countries are unable to reap profits from the coffee they grow thanks to extremely restrictive WTO tariffs that essentially prevent them from processing it before they export it. This means they're forced to export raw beans for pennies, and they'll never really make much money doing so.

It turns out coffee growing countries only receive about 8% of the total coffee revenue annually and Germany is actually the fourth largest exporter of coffee in the world, despite never growing a single bean.

Schoolyard bullying, on a global scale.
Well, to nit a point slightly, his comp alone should indicate he was not a small-time engineer. He effectively had a bigger payout that most founders with a semi-successful startup exit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/waymos-uber-lawsuit-reveals-...
For one thing, the Qiagen kits are in short supply.
Arrow Embedded to Go Free Online Conference, and 3k Development Boards Giveaway