skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions.

Not just elite institutions, I would say 99% of accredited institutions in the US. You would be hard pressed to find an accredited college program in the US that doesn't require either SAT or ACT (talking about the general test, not the subject ones).

P.S. That 99% estimation is obviously made up, but I am yet to find a college that doesn't require an ACT or SAT score, and I applied to many different kinds of colleges in early 2010s (out of state, in-state, public, private, etc.), with almost none of them being MIT-tier elite.
Stopword removal for 54 languages in Node.js and the browser
This article is almost completely rhetoric, bereft of quantitative analysis and at odds with what the broader medical community has been saying. The New York Times really does let any credentialed dingus post shit on their website.
I'd bet that it wasn't. This looks like a company trying to sell their filament. The idea (FDM printing masks) seems like a bad one on so many levels.
I have a late 2013 Macbook Air and I love it. I do most of my work on a Xubuntu desktop, but the Air is great for travel, working outside, or carrying around the house. I use it every day. I bought it to replace a heavy plastic dual-boot Dell laptop that was falling apart. It felt weightless and the battery lasted 10+ hours.

Every time I see a new Apple laptop now I dread that I'll have to go back to a non-Apple Linux system instead. In theory a Linux laptop would be great for me, but when I read about my options there's none I feel great about. But my Air with its 8GB of RAM is feeling under-powered whenever I have to run docker/k8s/vagrant, and now the screen is starting to flicker.

I can't tell yet whether this model is enough to keep me in the Apple fold. It sounds like they improved a lot, but they're really parsimonious with those ports. My old Air is anxiety-free: it gives me power, 2 USBs, and DisplayPort. I routinely use them all. So the 2020 model is still going to feel like a downgrade. At least it still comes with a standard headphone jack, I suppose. :-/
"mild" means "you probably have pneumonia, just not bad enough that it could suddenly kill you, so you don't need to be in the hospital (yet?)"
I've had 4 or 5 headphones, and only the really cheap computer lab ones had the wire split in front. The rest all have the wire going to the left ear, then a wire overtop to right ear.

I've never seen one which you can plug it in on either side. I'm in Canada if that helps.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is spreading this way. If not already, then certainly in future.

Having said that, a steady stream of supplies is what will allow everyone else to stay holed-up.

If you can't get the supplies you need to get through the ordeal then you'll start to see individuals go out on far-and-wide "hunting trips" to find those supplies (at best) or you'll start to see societal breakdowns which will give Covid-19 a run for its money on lives and damages.

That's more than just trucks delivering food. It may be trucks delivering electrical equipment to keep refrigeration running, to keep other trucks, moving, etc. Modern life depends on surprisingly deep connections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
Language is a social creature, you can't have language without society and social interactions, if you're not able to communicate with spoken word you simply can't work as effectively with others. Especially if you can't make connections with others.

In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.

The insert bridge here wasn't built in a day, with one person.
Applications, tools and services to model infectious diseases
Also take a look at thymoquinone, which supposedly inhibits mouse coronavirus, which is very similar to SARS-coronavirus.

The effects of Nigella sativa (Ns), Anthemis hyalina (Ah) and Citrus sinensis (Cs) extracts on the replication of coronavirus and the expression of TRP genes family
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933739/

Thymoquinone is also generally protective of lung health in several models:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10520295.2019.16...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31044379
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31143688

It is found in orange peel and black seed (Nigella sativa) extract.
Is this something dependent types could do? Genuinely curious, this sounds interesting.
SQLite takes it one step further.

https://sqlite.org/quirks.html#aggregate_queries_can_contain...

> if an aggregate query contains a single min() or max() function, then the values of columns used in the output are taken from the row where the min() or max() value was achieved. If two or more rows have the same min() or max() value, then the columns values will be chosen arbitrarily from one of those rows.

Also here:

https://sqlite.org/lang_select.html#bareagg

> When the min() or max() aggregate functions are used in an aggregate query, all bare columns in the result set take values from the input row which also contains the minimum or maximum. [...] There is still an ambiguity if two or more of the input rows have the same minimum or maximum value or if the query contains more than one min() and/or max() aggregate function.

Would have been nice if adding an ORDER BY would allow disambiguating.
Simple Tips for Effective Client Communication as a Remote Project Manager
I don't know this particular story, but you can read up on MGP for similar shenanigans going on with Rye and Bourbon.
I'm assuming most everyone taking the SAT subject test is also taking AP tests. AP tests were significantly more rigorous than SAT subject tests and would have provided more useful information to admissions. It took more prep to get a 5 on an AP Chemistry test vs a top score on the SAT subject test.
Ah, ok sure. I agree.
I built a contact-free elevator control system to reduce spreading of germs
That sounds like you're suggesting they'd just be trying to kil everyone instead of trying to treat them. Are you confident in your knowledge of what ventilator is, how it works, who needs it, who can administer it?

It feels like you're intentionally trying not to understand the point that just forcing air into someone isn't a valuable thing to do. What matters is how, what degree, the amount of control, volume, timing, and the ability of medical professionals to control the parameters. Otherwise you could just use your leaf blower.

Putting air into someone is the easy part.
No. It might have been easier if countries reacted in January when it was obviously going to infect everyone. Now it's too late for anything but a lockdown.
Please do this. I had a few unused leftover N95’s from a furniture refinishing project. I gave them to my neighbor who is a nurse at a local hospital. They’re desperately needed. If “regular” civilians get sick that’s bad, but when nurses and doctors start going down it’s much much worse.
In the discussion of the study over on Reddit, there were anecdotes of physicians prescribing hydroxychloroquine for themselves and their families, in enough numbers to make it difficult for patients previously prescribed it.
Illinois Governor issues stay at home order
Just started drinking tea with freshly distilled water. So much smoother taste! :)
Subhead is better than headline: "There may be more targeted ways to beat the pandemic."

Thought-provoking piece.

And if we had much more available testing, what it proposes could be a smart way to go.

Until we have much more available testing, it's a pipe dream.
If you've got good enough wired internet, a voip based "landline" is pretty inexpensive, and if you run with the G.711 codec, it's basically landline equivalent, with a small latency penalty (much less than cellphone though).

In theory G.722 (AMR-wideband, aka "HD voice") is coming to cell phones via VoLTE and is also available (in theory) via VoIP providers, and should be better than landline quality, but with added latency. Of course, once enough steps have added latency it becomes noticeable, but perhaps the increased frequency range makes it worthwhile; and it requires interop work between carriers.
> Massive and systematic society wide testing is the first step, the second step is the bulk manufacture of demonstrated COVID-19 treatments. The third is ramping up hospital capacity.

By the time we would get tests and hospital beds, we'd already be too deep into the crisis for them to matter much. Millions will be dead.

Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said last night that we are shutting down the city to buy time to get more beds, tests, and treatments. Our leaders have a good idea of what's necessary.
It's "folk advice" based on many years of managing my medical condition and the medical condition of my oldest son, who has the same diagnosis.
Beg to differ - I slam my MacBook Air (2015 i5 w/8GB ram) pretty hard, and I don't run into a lot of problems. I usually have a nice mix of office, iphoto, itunes, acorn, chrome with a dozen or so tabs, jupyter + pandas running doing some data -engineering. It's a pretty good workhorse - I don't run into many issues with the exception that occasionally I'll hit a web page that spins up the CPU hard enough that the fans start making noise (at which point I just close the offending web page) - but that's a CPU (or maybe web page) problem, not Memory issue.
Tech leaders write checks and code to help communities amid coronavirus
No, because the goal is to buy time.

Many things that can create positive outcomes are in motion: vaccines, drugs to lessen symptoms, testing spin up, etc.

However, all of these things need time to come to fruition.

For example, once we actually have enough tests, targeted quarantines now work. At that point, we can start backing off the full lockdowns.

However, we're currently in an unchecked exponential growth phase. The only thing you can do right NOW, is shut down.

Given time, more options may open up. But what we need most right now is time.
EAX Register Meaning and History
That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
This is a beginner CS course, it's a lot simpler than that.
This isn't a good argument, because the SAT (and other tests of the same kind) are normalised to have this property.

The SAT may not be good tests, but that fact has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a normal distribution.
It's kind of amazing that 10% of our economy is basically living on the knifes edge of revenue and liability like this. It might just be a bad mentality, I know in Japan, they have a tradition of corporations building up a massive treasury, but the US is basically the exact opposite
This, I have Safari Debug Mode on purely to disable all the annoyance. And with the current state of things there will likely never be an extension to do that.
Probably was due to their obsession with making things as thin as possible (Ive). Internal connectors take up more space than direct soldering. But, it’s also probably easier to manufacture (Cook), because you don’t have to have a person manually plug in a cable/ribbon. But on the balance, I’d guess that the decision to remove internal ports was all about thinness.
People do it out of habit and because it tastes good. It becomes ritualistic in a way. I'm not sure how disiplined most people are, but I can just stop (and have several times). I choose not to because I enjoy it. If I'm super busy in the morning, I'll just go without. I don't treat it like a performance enhancing product that some may which I'd argue may be why it's harder for those types of people to quit. They rely on it to make up for other places in their life they are failing with.
Great that we’re looking at the same study! I’m not sure what you mean by:

“No patient was cleared of virus after six days using hydroxychloroquine alone.“

Because the percentages there are 57% Of patients on HCQ alone we’re cleared, vs 12% control.
Normal PLA not working, you have to get some very specific and rare PLA.
Same author (kayvonf) was behind this post, "Do Grades Matter? A Discussion About Thinking Bigger While at CMU" [1], a while back :).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694179
Covid-19 symptom checker REST API
I'm finding that the fight against the fight against covid is the most unnerving.
George RR Martin Says Coronavirus Has Led to More Work on the Winds of Winter
So in fact now it's live music with a band :D
Yup. The surgical strike option is long past viability in the US and many other countries. There's already way too many cases, and we don't remotely have enough resources in the form of tests and case workers to track down active infections and everyone that person has been in contact with.
How to Conduct Remote Interviews
Europe sets up emergency lifeline worth billions
Nearly none of the comments are really about what they're eliminating: SAT subject tests (NOT the SAT!)

The main SAT is basically a basic skills and IQ test while the SUBJECT tests are almost entirely about preparation, making them much easier to game/prepare for.

Source: I tutored the SAT and subject tests.
those are good ideas but imagine someone barely making ends meet on an "inflated" mortgage which then loses a lot of value. the bank expects them to pay back $250K but then their home value collapses down to its true price of $150K. you just created a situation where a household has negative equity - literally worse off than if they had never bought the home at all, and difficult to wiggle out of if they live there (very likely). that obviously has massive effects on their economic outlooks.
For me OSX works better than Windows or desktop Linux.
Eh.... no... that's what Italy tried to do, (tried to stamp out clusters, while keeping everything the same and itdidn't work)

Right now they are having massive casualties per day, to almost (if not more) than ww2, and there is no sign of slowing down yet.

"Italy reports 5,986 new cases of coronavirus and 627 new deaths, raising total to 47,021 cases and 4,032 dead"
A simple spreadsheet to track Coronavirus
Yes.

Current approach is a disaster.

I would have asked most at risk population to self quarantine.

Cut on red tape for usage of antivirals. (Hydroxychloroquine a proven safe one said to work has been held back for weeks due to paperwork)

I would have even gone as far as requisitioning private companies to par for the lack of medical supplies and drugs.

The eroding of civil liberties some EU countries is experiencing is plain unacceptable.
Sacrifices You Must Make If You Want to Be Successful
To clarify, SAT subject tests are the ones like physics, chemistry, Spanish, etc. Not the main verbal and math portion. For students smart enough to get into MIT, the subject tests are way too easy. Most students applying to MIT probably have near perfect score already, so for MIT it's probably not a useful indicator.
What’s the point of the subject tests anyway when you already have AP exams?

It was pointless for me to do both in high school, the subject tests were much easier.
Infermedica [1] is a company that uses Bayesian networks [2] to map symptoms to potential causes (they are used to triage patients in call centers, etc.). They have just published a REST API that targets COVID-19 specifically, and made it free to use to everyone free of charge. If you are thinking working on a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic related app, this may come handy.

Feel free to ask any questions, if there's interest I'll try to get someone from the company to this thread.

[1] https://infermedica.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network
Remind me of the relationship between the Senate and testing for college admissions.
There's nowhere to go, unless you got to a cabin for a year. Every state has double digits which is where WA was just a few weeks ago. I guess being with family might be nicer but also a larger cluster of people to infect in your household.
Worse, web sites tend to be written from a position of derision regarding most novice users.
> Under a declared emergency, the constitution turns more into "guidelines".

That's certainly the way it's treated nowadays. That doesn't make such treatment right.
> If instead, we start acquiring immunity in low-risk populations, at a rate that the hospitals can sustain, we'll have a degree of herd immunity and a portion of the population that can no longer spread it.

A fair portion of low-risk people will require intervention. Given that a lot more people are low than high risk, you're still overwhelming the health system, and all those low-risk people are still going to interact with others while they are asymptomatic but transmissible.
Sugar is addictive too. Should we cut that entirely out of our diets too?

The fact that it isn't bad for you doesn't make addiction a bad thing. It's when addiction consumes your life and you forgo the good things in life that it becomes bad.
Because government is an easy way to work together on big problems. Things like charity are great, but the participation rate tends to be a whole lot lower than you can get from taxes.
Nice article, thank you. Still it doesn't adresse the question: statistically, the benefits can sometimes be so obvious that no randomized trial is needed. RCT and large series are needed when trying to prove some minimal effects. The article is more like a sociological study to say invoking this parachute argument is no definite proof based on cases where the parachute argument was invoked and in retrospective was misguided.

That is very true. But unless we are to argue that the virus is not what causes the disease, using the viral load as a proxy for clinical status and contagiousness is acceptable. And unless the effect is small enough that sample selection can affect the conclusion, it doesn't matter much in practice.

I meean, for chloroquine, we have studies showing non inferiority and strong effects. We will not know if it works according to modern standards of statistics using direct survival statistics for another two weeks at best. What to do in the meantime?

In this article, the comparison to flossing in the intro is not good: lack of flossing does not entail mortality rate >.5%.

And all the other approaches selected for study do not feature infectious agents creating a risk of death, so the conclusions of the article are not very transposable to the problem here. For chemotherapy, surgery, etc. yes, they have a point. For microbiology, no.

Everybody seems to be doing armchair critique of the methodology used. I respect the desire to understand, but I believe the critique stands: we do not have RCT for parachutes. And at the moment, we do not have RCT for chloroquine either. We have a long experience of using it for other diseases. It's an old drug with well known side effects and toxicity.

If you are infected, you are free to wait until there is a trial to accept the drug. Yet, based on the information available, I still think it is a wrong decision, akin to asking for a RCT on parachutes aboard a burning plane.
Coronavirus in US in Charts and Maps from Politico, Time, NYT, and BuzzFeed News
Google meet does this if you have G Suite.

https://whereby.com/ looks promising as well, although I've never tried it.
> Taking your numbers as fact, that would be a .001% death rate.

Death rate for GBS is more like 7.5%, not 100%. Though for today's challenge, the relevant stat may be that ~15% of GBP patients end up needing a ventilator. But even that wouldn't be a problem if we had such a vaccine for this coronavirus.
Diversity in knowledge across the working population would seem preferable to homogeneity to me.

Sure you want some core things, like all engineers being able to solve 2nd order DEs, but outside that you want diversity if you're looking for innovation and application to diverse fields.
Even uncontacted tribes in Brazil may face coronavirus risk
Copying comment from previous thread:

Systemic issues:

* Creds scattered throughout source code, including DB / AWS creds, "fixed" by removing but still present in git history

* Numerous crypto vulns: nonces / AES-ECB

* What's even the point of blockchain, it just makes everything worse

Selected quotes:

"Trail of Bits was only provided a backend for live testing on the second-to-last scheduled day of the assessment"

"The system is unusually complex, with an order-of-magnitude more custom code than similar mobile voting systems we have assessed."

"Voatz's voting processes are error prone and manual, relying on manual verification of voter identity and long-term storage of this identity on Voatz's premises"

"E2E-V systems allow voters to cast encrypted ballots such that ballot counts are verifiable to anyone, but individual voters’ preferences are not revealed. ... Voatz is not E2E-V."

"Storing voting data on a blockchain maintains an auditable record to prevent fraud, but this comes at the expense of both privacy and increased attack surface. Clients do not connect directly to the blockchain themselves, and are therefore unable to independently verify that their votes were properly recorded. Anyone with administrative access to the Voatz backend servers will have enough information to fully reconstruct the entire election, deanonymize votes, deny votes, alter votes, and invalidate audit trails."
> I would say the same thing regardless of the man on the podium.

Must have been hard for you to stomach 2009 then when 60 million Americans got infected with H1N1, nothing whatsoever was done, and the CDC budget was cut the very next year.
Thank you for acknowledging I might have a valid point.

As for your comments about dosing livestock: That's kind of like saying "We don't need to combat rapes and robberies because murders still happen and murders are so much worse, so no point in even talking about what to do about rape and robbery until there are no more murders in the world."

I beg to differ.
What's a good JavaScript-based solution to render SVG into an image? html2canvas doesn't work well with SVG, especially those heavily styled with CSS.
I am afraid that we will sacrifice (a LOT) and the same people will die anyway. Let's face it, maybe we'll extend their life by 7 weeks or so. Many are alive that to millions of dollars in medical support for their last years.

But then no country will just say, "let's let our people die." However, unless a vaccine is discovered soon enough or the virus miraculously is manageable, people will be very uneasy.
Zoom Connectivity Intermittent
My 2011 Air has 4gb and it's too little. 8 would be fine in it. But I wouldn't buy an 8gb machine today.

Swapping's also not as big a deal on SSD machines, as it used to be.
Mm no, a lot of people are already wondering how to pay rent. If anything, that $1000 needs to be higher, and adjusted for cost of living by area.
Conducting air pollution research during Covid19 mitigation efforts
Now is an incredibly unique time for conducting air pollution research. Because of work-from-home and social distancing policies, driving is likely significantly reduced.

This is a plea to air pollution researchers to record as much data on this as possible. With this research, it may be possible to convince companies to consider work-from-home policies in the future, and to inform governments on what the effects of reduced driving may realistically be.

Anecdotally, I've found some highly trafficked areas have become very pleasant to be in, and I believe this is from the subtle effect of having less particulate, CO, NO, and other pollution.
There's a similar discovery by chance story (not that I remember what it is) about "East Hastings" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the film "28 Days Later".
30 mins at 8 feet distance. 10 seconds if within an inch from what I remember.