skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would really like HN to institute a policy that only publicly-accessible articles are valid submissions. I am tired of seeing links to dozens of stories in newspapers/journals that I can't read. I am all for paying for content, but I can't be expected to subscribe to all of these newspapers/journals. Paid content is fine, but it is not part of the open web, so should not profit from HN traffic.

HN should be a link site to the open web.
> They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net.

This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies after experiencing suffering without them wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Sometimes things must get worse for them to get better.
I’m surprised that Ada isn’t listed
The folks at TWIV (This Week In Virology) noted that regular influenza numbers were sharply down in Japan as a result of people's changing hygiene behaviors.

Exactly what we'd expect. It's a silver lining on this whole mess.
I would like to be optimistic and think we all learn valuable lessons from this but realistically most people will just double-down in their convictions and blame some other externality as to why their own political/economic ideologies didn't pan out.
Is there actual evidence of antibodies? I have yet to see the evidence.
Minor point - Rail industry was privatised by John Major. Thatcher was against or at least indifferent to privatising it.
The other comments are great! Great resources and points.

I think what is crucially important is to have someone to talk to. To engage with another human being in a discussion, at every step of the learning curve.

I studied physics in Germany 2005-2010, an then did my PhD 2010-2015.

In hindsight, I must conclude that being forced to discuss things with other people at every step was what taught me the most, was long-term the most rewarding.

About my own level of understanding, about judging my abilities, about how to actually solve problems.

Examples from my time studying:

- discussion among two people: trying to grasp and crack the same exercise

- discussion in the larger study group (5 people): when helping each other out, having to admit not having understood a certain thing, and specifically trying to address the "wait, I don't get this yet"s everyone has.

- discussion in exercise class (20 people): presenting "your" solution in a concise way, seeing other solutions, discussing caveats, pros, cons, elegance, deficiencies

- discussion in seminars: presenting "old" concepts to each other, discussing them and their historical relevance

... and so on.

In hindsight these countless discussions in smaller and larger study groups were _priceless_ towards understanding what physics is about. I mean it! After all, physics is science, and in science you can only contribute in a meaningful way when you understand the mental model of your fellow scientists reasonably well, when you "speak the same language".

I understand that this might be in conflict with "self-studying physics". If it is then it's important to be aware of it, possibly to try really hard to compensate for it (to find someone to do this together with, maybe!).
Yeah I do worry that the uncertainty and fear... just leads to more poor views of the poor, etc.
> This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the '08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.

I think we need to couple the two events a little more closely. The 2008 Financial Crisis accelerated inequality, political instability, asset inflation, and the rise of precarious work to such a degree that the damage of this hit is being greatly compounded.

To my mind, the hole that was the 2008 crisis was papered over and someone just came by and dropped a brick on it.
The rate is hard to determine since it’s per state. There have been many reports of online systems going down and phone queues being insanely long:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/coronavirus-unem...
It's a matter of scale. Humans have thousands of years of history codifying rules for communities. From Hammurabi to your HOA, people have found its easiest to enforce rules when you write them down.
Red Hat Shares the Value of Community Management in Open-Source Software
I don't really know data science but in assay validation, sensitivity basically measures false negative rate, and specificity measures false positive rate. Accuracy and precision are measures of assay consistency or tightness. (statisticians may not purely agree with my simple explanation)
I doubt HFT firms are writing apps in C++.
Hypothetically, polishing turds and giving them away is also thankless work. Not saying musl is, don't know the first thing about it.
And what do you think about the learning curve?
The financial crisis didn’t prevent most people from spending money on entertainment or eating out. People scaled back spending or went to cheaper places.

People are fearful and a lot of folks are supposed to be sheltering in place. Business are being told to do takeout only which is a huge difference.

I was in the restaurant industry during the last crisis. Lots of places stopped hiring and slowed down but business didn’t suddenly stop.
You would have to implement it in a way that redistributed wealth, i.e. increase marginal tax rates.

The goal is to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and educated. One option is to just give them housing, food, and education. Another is to give people money and let them choose. Yet another is to loan the money and to put them in debt forever.
Aren't they originally from Scheme? I remember seeing a Scheme implementation years ago.
I think my understanding of the current situation is about as good as any layperson. I have been following closely, I called all the policy changes in my state to within a day or two, etc. I don't think that the evidence on what will happen next is so clear that all right-thinking people will come to the same conclusions, as you imply.
The guy was moving at 60kmh which is about 37mph.

The only way you do not notice incoming shit at this speed riding a bike is because the shit literally jumps at you.

I know only too well what the "courts of law" are like in Russia. My opinion is that the guy got a wrong lawyer who either could not pass a bribe to the judge, or the other side passed a bigger bribe.
All of these NYT stories bring up a blocking modal dialog requiring me to log in or create an account (I guess this is a slight improvement from making me pay). Is this the same for everyone else? Why do other sites that show a dismissable overlay get raked over the coals as if they are criminals?

What value is there in posting a link on HN if it's behind a pay (or temporarily free) wall? This goes double for the WSJ. Let's not debate business models here, but asking what's the intent/requirements, and why the double standard?
It really just reads like someone whose roles have been more focused on a series of time-critical tasks rather than deep work which requires uninterrupted focus. A bit of a lack of experience, or imagination.
Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you missed those?
Labor force participation rate does not include children, so the 215M number is actually much lower
Wow, that's unfortunate. I've only seen mysterious crashes.
If you were up for running an A/B test (diverted per-user, since cache state is sticky) and writing up the results publicly I'd love to see it!
Get Us PPE
Unfortunately yes. Even if one wants to keep the quarantine at all costs, it should be a political decision, not only medical, after weighing everything.

In Italy, where I'm in my third week being shut in, experts and doctors are being quoted tiredlessly by the news: the problem is that they're doing their job (which is good!) however they do not realize the impact of their suggested measures. Not their fault by any means, but:

a. They're effectively scaring the population (an WHO advisor here suggested 6-9 months lockdown, which is likely impractical and will have devastating consequences on the social fabric, even without thinking about the economy)

b. The politicians are so scared of the virus that they're completely abdicating their functions (in Italy the Parliament was closed for two weeks, and the judicial system has been completely shut down as well) and doing whatever they're being told.
And I'd imagine sun.misc.Unsafe is used quite often too.
My team of 200 people's sole form of communication is in slack. The only emails we get are calendar invites to meetings.

I genuinely don't understand the problem with that. Slack is great- it's synchronous when you want it to be, and it's asynchronous when somebody is busy. It's easy to search through stuff, and since all of the other teams in my company use it, I can reach out to anybody in the company at any time.
I almost started a new retrocomputing-related project in pascal recently because FreePascal seems to be the only stable maintained toolchain that still can target 8086
To get Microsoft Teams to run in Chromium there used to be a user-agent hack to make it pretend to be Chrome. This was superseded by someone packaging up using Electron. And finally this has been superseded by Micrsoft themselves supporting Linux using something that looks and feels like Electron again.

So, basically, Microsoft using user-agent to detect Chrome....
For this not to bankrupt the nation and retard our growth for the next twenty-five years, we need to all go back to work, today. Even if coronavirus kills a million people, the rest will probably be fine in the long term. If we shut down the economy, three hundred million will be affected. This "flattening the curve" business is clearly not worth it.

You cannot shut the economy. There is only so much we can borrow. The fed is buying debt right and left, and the government surely doesn't want to borrow money and remove that liquidity. So, the fed will buy t-bills instead and probably have to inflate the currency to pay for it all. We could end up spending orders of magnitude than 2 trillion on more hand-outs, so we could end up with another period of stagflation. Unless we want to retard our growth and prosperity for the next 25 years, we all have to go back, consequences aside. Vulnerable people need to stay home for months until this blows over; it's not the responsibility of the rest of us to lose our jobs for the sake of a few others. Doctors say we have to stay home, but as doctors, they naturally want to prioritize health. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Like many other problems, there are diminishing returns as we approach either extreme of opening the economy or shutting it down. This extreme clearly isn't working. The at-risk million stay home; everyone else goes to work.
The surprising element is that kids have adjusted to this fact of "Staying at home" without access to parks and outdoors.

I have made sure from start that they wont get more than 3 episodes or 1 movie a day.

Mostly they are busy with
- Lego (Ask them to build some new thing..like park one day, mall another, water play area, etc)
- Then there is pic painting event of the day. (Topic is assigned)
- Few rounds of cycling / skipping
- 500 piece puzzle is out down
- took out lots of games which ever dumped in attic
- worksheets on math & english
- most importantly get them involved in house old chores

At times I take a break and hand over the assignments, check their paintings, show some patterns to copy, introduce a new game.

Hope you find some of it useful in your situation.

Let me know your tips.
From my experience, status pages usually are out of date unless they are internal. If you want the real info and are seeing issues on your end, check Twitter or open a ticket. Usually Twitter is faster.
I think I saw a news recently that they've been dismissed for gateway to heaven
The accuracy of 5% is also worse than other faster sequencers of 3%

Is that false positives or false negatives or both so to speak? I.e. what is the confusion matrix of these techniques?
That is the saddest thing I've ever read on this site. I know there's people who believe that but it's still shocking to me.
I saw that Google Doc the other day, and have already forwarded the link to several people looking for work. Good resource!
It would seem simpler and more effective, to me, to then tweet a link to the information.
Delivery Hero urges users to go cashless, no contact for food deliveries
You're forgetting the difference between bandwidth and latency.
>Business are being told to do takeout only which is a huge difference.

Yeah I've been doing a fair amount of takeout and places where you had dozens of people ... operating with two or three people now.
The unreasonable importance of data preparation
This. It makes you wonder how much long the confinement can really last.
This, please. Why on earth EVERYONE is expected to be "on the ready" all the time? I understand it may be the case for some people but...not being on the ready means you're on your leisure time?

Somewhere along the road we failed to grasp the idea that some jobs require extreme doses of concentration, and being highly available is a counter to those jobs. Don't pretend that customer support and chess players have the same needs to excel at their jobs.
I think it's a fair discussion to take, but how are you going to run an economy with the health service in permanent overload?

That is what would happen if you just let the thing pass. Those charts of "squashing the sombrero" have the number of beds at a very low place compared to the expected hump of cases. On some of them you can barely even see the gap between the red line and the zero line, due to the scale of the hump.

Death rates would shoot up way above what is normal for the disease, people would die of all sorts of other preventable things too.
Is that because of circular dependencies of glibc on the kernel, or something else?
It seems to include past events only but not upcoming announcements. To me an important announcement is one that may impact the stock market.
Apps for Remote Work Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic (Сoronavirus)
Clear your cookies
I doubt anyone actually thinks that.

It's understandable to be surprised, it's not every day everyone needs resources at once at the same time, although some foresight a month before couldn't have hurt
My wife and many of her coworkers quite their jobs in the last two weeks as working from home wasn't an option. My understanding is they won't be eligible for unemployment?
I imagine those less at risk will eventually give up on confinement and continue on with their lives, forcing those at risk (risk factors, 60+, immunocompromised) to remain confined voluntarily or risk a greater chance of death by venturing out. Those not at risk (younger and healthier) will be prioritized for triage and ventilator access if they do get sick.

You can't expect people to shelter in place indefinitely, and they won't.
what browser, etc are you using? I'm on FF with uBlock in Canada and always get the NYT's own login/subscribe overlay that while not an ad is essentially a redirect to a login or register page.

I guess it works though; I'm not about to sign up to the NYT or WSJ and I don't even bother clicking their links, so mission accomplished!
One thing I don't understand about this line of thinking is how do you expect sick people from working? Sure, not everyone will die but a significant portion of the population will get infected and need at the very least to stay home for a week or two. How is that situation better than where we're at now?
There are indicators from past problems, though. One example I've seen is that it took 17 years for airlines to recover after 9/11[0].

--

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/airline-stocks-recover-septe...
[Off topic]

I recently picked up 1984 again and finally managed to complete it this time. I read the last line with a mixture of relief and a tinge of disappointment. Until the very end, I was hoping for a Hollywood-style turnaround in the political situation.
As you look at this story, please keep some basic numbers in mind:

1. US Population: 329,433,166 (as of 3/25/2020)

2. Employed: 158,130,000 (approx. 48% of population)

3. Unemployed: 8,787,000 (approx. 5.6% of employed)

Note:

Take these numbers with a grain of salt as US Population is only as good as the Census Reporting itself. The Employed # is an estimate based on 155.76 million factually employed in 2018 and does not include self-employed, contractors, gig workers etc.

Sources:

1. https://www.census.gov/popclock/

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

3. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/us/
Zenily (part of Snapchat) | iOS and Android Developers, 3D Environmental Artist, Tech Recruiter
| Paris, France |ONSITE (remote while the quarantine lasts) | https://zen.ly/jobs

Zenly began because we wanted an easy way to know what our friends were doing. Naturally, we created an app - a map that lets you see your friends and what they’re up to. Millions of people around the world have since made us realize that Zenly goes beyond letting you know what your friends are doing. It actually brings you to spend more time with the people who matter most and moves you a little closer to them even when you can’t. We’re a small team of 50 passionate people determined to offer an alternative to products that were meant to connect us but only alienated us. An alternative that represents a true reflection of your world and those you care most about.
Yeah, that doesn't work either. As a system admin, I have found folks expect e-mails to show up immediately and judge their response as such. There are certain departments of the US government who expect an e-mail response immediately when they send out one of their queries. You need to jump.

Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) is a very smart and healthy thing to do. If you control your own mail server, then paying attention to the logs and having some alerts that deal with it might be very wise.
Over what time span?

If what you say is true we should have seen trust in the media go up and down a lot over time. In fact it's really only gone down, with one exception - in the USA after Trump got elected trust in the media went up amongst Democrats only. Presumably because they realised the media was completely partisan and in their "tribe". Trust amongst Republicans, which like Democrats had been falling for a long time, completely collapsed at that point.

In most parts of the world it's just been one downward slide.

In these events I don't think the media deserve the blame though. They're not helping but they're not pushing a pre-determined agenda, I think. The evidence that we're in the grip of mass hysteria and not a deadly pandemic is growing enormously every day, and much of that evidence actually is being surfaced in newspaper reports. It's just not affecting the overall narrative yet.
> I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US.

Sure, just like the Depression did.

And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated until the next similar event.
Yes, it's a never ending race.
3.28 million people are already out of work, likely a good deal more than that. One million are most at risk. There won't be zero impact, but that's less than a third, right out of the gate. Long-term we'll see significant increases in unemployment on the "shut-it-down" path.

To clarify based on your reply to this comment, my point was that we've already seen more people out of work than the estimated worst-case 1.2 million death toll. This is the first data point, and we'll see more huge increases as we gather more. You mentioned that sick people won't work, but we're already seeing what is possibly more unemployment than we'd have with people sick. 1.2 million < 3.28 million.

While some people may not work in the short term, this "flattening the curve" business prolongs that time greatly. We'd all be back much sooner if we just ripped off the band-aid and got it over with.

EDIT: Replying to circumvent123 here, as HN is rate-limiting.

Yes, death is worse than unemployment, but for how many? Death for one vs unemployment for everyone, which would you pick? If so, is this simply a question of the ratio of the two? Regardless, that's not the choice of bureaucrats to make. At-risk populations are responsible for staying home and keeping themselves safe.
Plasma on TV: Presenting Plasma Bigscreen
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said it had lost $124B this year
I saw this idea floated around on Reddit a few days ago. Basically the crux is that unemployment has a death toll, too.

So if you close all non-essential businesses, unemployment rises, which increases the likelihood of people losing health insurance, losing homes, not paying electrical bills, communication (internet / phone) bills, etc. If some people lose all those things and don't have access to them again for 2+ months, and have no other safety net, they might die. Doubly so considering the hospitals may be at capacity with COVID-19 cases.

So, what would be better - keep people at home and unemployed, where people die by lack of resources, or keep people going out where people die by spreading COVID-19?

The third options is to keep people at their residences but either pay them or reduce their bills / mortgages etc to 0 while COVID-19 blows over. But that could take 2-18 months. It was hard enough getting $1200 once for every American household - I doubt it will continue for another 18 months until a vaccine is developed.
A while back, I was playing around with the cable modem / router the ISP gave me because I was curious and an idiot. After screwing around a bit, I managed to find a vulnerability that exposed technician credentials plaintext and they actually worked. Had no idea where to report it though, because the manufacturers contact page could be summed up as fuck you we don't talk directly to consumers. I dont think the vulnerability was that bad, as you had to be logged in to the web interface already with another account, but still.

I don't really trust ISP provided hardware / software now though.
We Can Help Kids Keep Learning
So am I the only one that's happy and amazed it's working at all? Unprecedented demand and it's still running, just a bit slower than normal. Imagine if it all fell apart.
Well, the antibody tests are coming in a matter of weeks - multiple approaches have already been developed and they are currently being validated, that is, checked if they trigger reliably on the Coronavirus antibodies and ONLY on those and not similar ones (source: Charité Berlin - the virology lab there is on the forefront of developing Coronavirus tests and assists in validating new antibody tests).

They will allow us to make large randomized studies in the population and finally determine the "real" percentage of people who can be considered immune, which is the key element currently missing in all projection models. Having that data, more realistic projections can be made as to how fast the virus will resume to spread if we lift specific restrictions. At the moment, we can only hope for this number to be far larger than expected.

But doing such studies takes time, and without their results, lifting any of the restrictions is going to be a dangerous gamble with public health. So I would also suspect for most restrictions to stay in place for about 2 months, and then maybe a slow and gradual opening. First schools, then essential day-to-day businesses, and travel/leisure stuff last.

However, antibody tests are not a substitute for a vaccine. Only a broadly available vaccine will give people enough confidence of not contracting the disease for them to start living a normal life again. We can't expect any kind of normality in the economy until this happens, regardless of whether "America (or any other country) is opened for business" again or not - because an open business is worth nothing if the customers stay away.