skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The old story about John Draper calling up Richard Nixon and warning him about a toilet paper crisis in LA is beginning to make a lot more sense, now...

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/11/the-hacker-who-inspire...

>The legendary antics of phone phreaks in the 70s are as numerous as they are unverifiable. There's the story of a couple of phreaks — of which one was allegedly Draper — who called up the White House, dropped President Nixon's secret codename 'Olympus' and were soon put through to the President himself — only to tell him of a 'national emergency' that was occurring because Los Angeles had run out of toilet paper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060226021102/http://webcrunche...

>We had the code word that would summon Nixon to the phone. Almost immediately, another person was starting the process of dialing the number. I stopped them just in time and recommended that they stack at least 4 tandems before looping the call to the White house. Sure enough, the man at the other end said "9337", my other friend said "Olympus please!", the man at the other end said "One moment sir!"... About a minute later, a man that sounded remarkably like Nixon said "What's going on?". My friend said "We have a crisis here in Los Angeles!", Nixon said "What's the nature of the crisis?", My friend said in a serious tone of voice "We're out of toilet paper sir!". Nixon said "WHO IS THIS?" My friend then hung up. Never did learn what happened to that tape, but I think this was one of the funniest pranks, and I don't think that Woz would even come close to this one. I think he was jealous for a long time.

>To the best of my recollection, this was about 4 months before Nixon resigned because of the Watergate crisis.
> That works iff the policy is known ahead of time

Next time this happens, the memory will help deter the hoarders and profiteers.
Why is it that only those at highest risk of dying should be the only not taking risks shopping? It as not as if shopping is any safer than any other activity, it is just necessary. Would it not be better for everyone if shopping was done once a month now (or some other longer period than normal), even for those with lower mortality rates? The word hoarding is thrown around a lot now without any specific numbers. Angela Merkel was seen buying 4 bottles of wine and one roll of toilet paper (which seems a low example to set). How many rolls is too much? Or more generally how much time is too much time to be prepared for without exposure to outside your household? I am not planning for the Apocalypse, but certainly want at least a month's supplies on hand to enable physical distancing to be more effective.
Wait till you folk discover a hand faucet or a bidet like we have over here. It will change your world and leave your butts cleaner.
Mind reading isn't a thing.
I'm curious about 'No exposure to Microsoft code or reverse-engineering of Microsoft software'. Are you able to elaborate here? -Thanks!
> As far as I understand it, changes in a contract require notice, arbitrary or not. I don't believe it's legal for a company to change their contract, in this case stating that something is no longer returnable, after the fact. It still applies after the notice is provided of course.

IIRC, lots of consumer contracts contain language saying the terms are subject to change at any time with little or no notice.
No, income taxes in the US replaced taxes on alcohol after Prohibition. And they stayed after Repeal.

https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/taxes-and-prohib...
The course of treatment is short, while some applications of chloroquine are long-term. The risk is likely considerably reduced.
What Ioannidis is advocating is to do nothing until we have scientific certainty of what the correct decision should be, and only then act. What he's not taking into account is that the situation is unfolding right now, and if "do nothing" turns out not to have been the correct decision then you can't go back and change that. If we overreact and cause 20% unemployment for the next year, then a harm has been caused, but if we underreact and 20 million people die, then another harm would have been caused. In the face of this alternative, with not enough data to know the probability of outcome #2, but with enough to know that it can happen, then I think it is rational to choose the route that most surely avoids it.
Before insulting others, did you consider people might have checked sources other than the article?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/man-dies-wife-in-critical-...

The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched press briefings where Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine — and she recalled the name from the treatment she used on her koi fish.

“I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?,’” she told the outlet on the condition of anonymity.

The couple mixed a small amount of their fish treatment with a liquid and drank it as a way to prevent the coronavirus, she said.
How does this work if one has a bluetooth receiver off?
IMO looking for a new opportunity is a higher priority than moving to a lower COL especially since moving takes time/money and also increases your infection risk.
Nitric oxide ion in cell is not the same as nitrous oxide gas, typically used for sedation, not taking NO itself.

Enhancing NO signaling in cells is hard. The best initial bet there would be using certain class of beta-blockers. (Ones typically used for black patients.) But please do not take unproven drugs with known side effects.

The paper is talking about S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine in vitro. This compound is not something anyone wants to actually take.
>It was a shit economy anyway, unless you were one of the lucky ones. Most people had a stressful, shitty time of it.

that's provably false by nearly every economic metric.

Do you mean something like : "Ignore the state of the market, UBI isn't ubiquitous and we still have homeless and poor?" ? I agree with that statement; but no one with any sense and a clear conscious would say that it was "a shit economy".
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Komodo Health is A16z-backed series C startup building data-science and ML-powered products to improve decision making in healthcare. Our mission is to reduce the global burden of disease through big data analytics. Our "healthcare map" is where we process data and stitch together information about patients (over 320M in US), doctors, hospitals, payers, etc.

We are a data-first & eng-driven company and growing fast. We have very significant traction and revenue and are growing fast.

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Stack: Python, React, Scala, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, Flask, Django, Snowflake, Spark, Airflow

* Sr. Data Scientists - multiple roles

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> It’s not an arbitrary rule that needs advance warning

Yes, it is. Until now, absolutely nobody would care if you wanted to buy TP by the pallet, and Costco would be happy to let you return it if you wanted to.

> there will be more instances of hoarding in these communities in the future.

By all means make a new rule and communicate it for the future. I only object to retroactively punishing previously-allowed behavior.
It's a therapeutic dose of gin that people really need right now.
> the system has drawn few [privacy] complaints in Taiwan

Yeah until after the coronavirus craziness is over and the (now tested) system is used by China to round up dissenters
Compile Inc | Bangalore, India | Fulltime | ONSITE | Fullstack/Frontend/ETL

https://www.compile.com/careers/open-positions/
Compile is a completely self-funded company working on data. Our primary focus right now is Healthcare; we process large amounts of publicly available and real-world data to derive meaningful insights. Primarily a Django shop, our frontend is built on Vue.

We're looking for frontend engineers who can also, over time, jump into the backend or help us in communicating the complex nature of our insights. If you're at your happiest working for a product-oriented company, apply from https://www.compile.com/careers/open-positions#full-stack-de... . We're also looking for an ETL Developer to help us handle the large amounts of data that we process, efficiently.

We're looking for full-time devs only at the moment.
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Firstly, there is 10 weeks of evidence on what other countries have done to avoid transmission. Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, China, and Japan all show a variety of strategies and have some successes under their belts. Sure, it’s messy social data, and they have systematic differences from other countries, but it’s real data about what is working.

Ioannidis says: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”

The Diamond Princess data shows deaths with a functioning health system. From WaPo: “a doctor at Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, where he said there are 500 patients in need of intensive care and just 100 ICU beds”. The deaths in Italy are often due to an overloaded health system, which can easily double the number of deaths. Why ignore that? Italy has 6000 deaths already with 1/5th the population of the US:
you need some powerful evidence to assume the US should expect to have a different path to end up with a total of 10k (by say the end of the year).

I think John has good reason to desire evidence based decisions, but sometimes you have to make decisions without enough data and change your game as it develops e.g. look at what effective entrepreneurs do in uncertain times?
what people , where?

I have read a ton of conflict in that number, any citations would be appreciated.
What's this obsession with TP?
Worst case can you not just take a shower or buy a bidet?
We had our chance to get this together years beforehand. We even had a chance to have lower impact interventions be effective 2-3 months ago.

There are no chances for light economic impacts now. Use lighter mitigation methods and productivity and demand will get hit by the illness and death itself, both the first order effects that hit those infected (which would be wider), and the second order effects as people improvise their own rightly fearful responses. The main difference you can count on is that the timing would move closer to the peak. AFAICT nobody has a clear model of whether it would be better or worse.
Maybe to give us hope that now is not the beginning of the end of our country/society, but merely another turning of the cycle, that will ultimately yield more robust institutions and another 'high' that we have to look forward to?
Effective Time Management Tips for Students
It was indeed aquarium cleaner they ingested: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/man-dies-wife-in-critical-...
Amazonian here. I have seen many candidates re-apply for position. It's certainly allowed. Try to figure out where you fell short the first time, and study up or practice to improve it. Best of luck.
You are thinking rationally. People buying years of toilet paper while they have food for the next two weeks are not thinking things through.
Bitcoin has what it takes to save the world during this financial crisis
Yes, they did consume fish tank cleaner: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/man-dies-wife-in-critical-...
There was never a shortage in the first place, I honestly do not understand the pathology of this, except that a totally unrelated and tragic situation in Venezuela got dumbed down in the west as being a toilet roll shortage.

I'm almost grateful for it; we're hitting peak America, peak capitalism, peak Westernism...
California Governor Says Elon Musk Delivered 1k Ventilators
Any of the founding team here for Jitsi? I am helping a friend build a virtual community and this solution is perfect but we need a bit of help getting started. Would love to connect jiwanix@gmail.com!
the worst is yet to come : living with all the authoritarian legislation that's attempted to be shoe-horned in with any emergency efforts.
Is this a case of Frequentist vs Bayesian?
Wouldn't random colours average to greys to the HVS, pretty quickly, anyway?
Every circumstance you mentioned was not "solved" with panic, but was solved with thoughtful and persitant action.

If you are proposing the only way to "thoughtful and persistent action" is by being induced by panic. Then I would appreciate your evidence of this.

For example the 2038 problem is more serious that Y2k. My actions today (as soon as I found out about it) was to alter all current and future systems and plan to alter all current systems in place in the near future.

No panic needed to take this action.

Do you believe the only way to motivate people is to panic them? Do you not see a long term down side to this approach?
Knowledge discovery used to be a big part of ML, and the KDD conference included papers on association rules, clustering, rule learning, interpretable classifiers, etc. In my experience, even with predictive analytics the knowledge discovered along the way was often as valuable as the final application --- although it's easier to sell a predictive capability than "we're going to find something interesting in your data."
A cold resume going into a black hole is unfortunately fairly common. Not hearing anything after an on-site is definitely not normal. Whoever was the Amazon recruiter you were working with definitely dropped the ball.
We're smack on the frontpage of https://cloud.google.com/customers/

Google is more important to our parent org than Amazon; Google is a strategic partner, Amazon is simply another tech vendor. We might be part of a 11-12 figure megacorp now, but Amazon hasn't treated us too differently from since we were a tiny startup with not much spend, and neither has Google.
Researchers Step Up Efforts to Develop a 'Universal' Flu Vaccine
Hi; original author here.

That article goes into more background but it's based on a much earlier version of the firmware; as of last week I've gotten it to be feature-complete and stable, and I've been using it as my daily driver.

I have been meaning to follow up the article with a part 3 that covers the rest of the features, but in the mean time I have added copious comments to the source link above such that it covers almost everything you need to know. (This is probably the most heavily-commented piece of code I've ever written with a 1:1 code:comments ratio.)

I have also been working on a GUI configuration tool in Racket that emits Microscheme source files you can compile and upload to your keyboard: https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/menelaus/tree/master/gui.rkt https://p.hagelb.org/menelaus.png

If you've looked at building an Atreus before but gotten intimidated by the soldering, we have a kickstarter for a non-DIY version that's significantly cheaper than the kit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyboardio/atreus
That's what I've been reading about those a lot. I think they took the feedback seriously and packed this thing with a real whopper of a battery. I'm pretty excited by this development.
> if we under-react and 20 million people die, then another harm would have been caused

And it's worth noting if anything on the order of millions of people die, then there going to be economic impacts -- that's a hell of a demand crater and productivity shock.
On the other hand, there's the Costco store brand, "Kirkland Signature". On the other, other hand, Kirkland Signature is a fairly premium store brand, if that makes any sense--there are some products where I trust Kirkland Signature as much if not more than many name brands, similarly to Trader Joe's.

Also,

> This is particularly clear for products like soda where it's not that certain that the name brand is actually any better.

This hasn't been true in my experience. A lot of soda drinkers have very strong preferences not just between brand to brand (Coke vs. Pepsi) but even within the same brand (Mexican vs. US Coke). About the only time I'd buy any store brand soda would be if (a) I was serving it to people and didn't particularly care how much they enjoyed it or (b) if I was buying it for some non-drinking purpose.
I'm curious were you traveling around Asia anyway and decided to visit Taiwan due to the Coronavirus being very contained there? Are you seeing lots of other travelers? Is your plan to wait it out there if so? It doesn't seem like a bad place to be right now.
Same here. The best case for community broadband I've ever heard.
Anecdata from Australia here - my main supermarket has only once had toilet paper in the last two weeks, and the one time I saw it there were security guards to ensure the elderly were able to get them as priority. It's meant to be coming back online according to TV, but I've not actually seen it at my local supermarkets.

However: a smaller independent market has almost always had some toilet paper, and according to our newspapers that's because their chain introduced a rule of checking ID at purchase to confirm you live in the same suburb, if they didn't already recognise you as a regular customer. I assume you've tried all options, but wanted to mention that if you've not considered smaller local indie retailers. Good luck!
Actually, he did: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/man-dies-wife-in-critical-...
Doom Eternal Music Quarantine and Chill
I think it started in china/Japan, hit Australia a month later and now has become almost global.
Here's the original article with more information:
https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/202...
I’m trying to understand the alternative - let contagion continue unchecked and overwhelm medical services?
There's an interesting article somewhere that I really wish I could find right now - the gist is that someone working at I think a dictionary publisher was confused to find a filing cabinet that contained an index of every word reversed in alphabetical order. It took some thinking to realize that this was a useful index to find all of the words that ended in a given suffix - e.g. go to "gni" to find the gerunds.

It's interesting to think though that maintaining a dictionary once meant having a large set of filing cabinets containing sheets of words sliced and diced in every way you might need.
Confirming that it isn’t a gimmick. I have been working on distributed WFH Teams for the past 5 years now (long before COVID19) and this has been a consistent point of embarrassment and/or trouble with video conferencing. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we have had people that need extra time to prepare for a meeting because of the background. As a manager, I have had lots of personal conversations with employees who legitimately stress out about getting the computer into a place with a good background.

Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.

The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.

Here is what the Microsoft Teams one looks like: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/blur-your-backgroun...

(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
I mentioned in your other post that I made bread earlier today. It's cooling off now. https://imgur.com/gallery/E0xaCys

I think if I got the camera angle and lighting right, I could totally make an Instagram shot of it. Funny how there's always that ONE part that wants to stick out.
Nearly all grocery stores (at least in Seattle) have a seniors-only hour right now, usually first thing in the morning. QFC, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Albertson's, Whole Foods, PCC, Costco, Metropolitan Market, Uwajimaya.
Pusher is shutting down their Chatkit service
The definition of panic is: "A sudden, overpowering feeling of fear, often affecting many people at once. synonym: fear."

The reason we don't panic about the number 1 killer of Americans is because we are rational about it. We've researched and considered the cause and results carefully.

The solution to something that causes fear is not more fear is it?
He’s not sickly...

The forces are just a lot for a normal person.

And they compare his speeds to pro speeds, what you’re missing is the average person would kill themselves entering corners at 100 mph.
> Add to this the fact that basically no sea freight was shipped since January, and the backlog is huge.

Wait...this can't be true. Do you have a citation for that, that would blow my mind!
Or maybe even find a new solution you like better https://www.amazon.com/Medline-MEDDYND70125-Cleansing-Bottle...
he seems to advocate individual hygiene and avoiding the public when sick, which also btw seems to be the response that countries like Japan, Taiwan and Singapore have taken, where complete lockdowns or closures have largely been avoided. Together with tracing they seem to have handled the situation just fine.
Whereas, if you compare fatality rates reported by Germany, SK, HK, Singapore and other high testers vs China, Italy and Spain, it's pretty clear the latter are under-diagnosing mild/asymptomatic cases, which increase their fatality rate by a factor of 10 or more.

South Korea has 1% fatality rate at the end of their epidemic, they showed .5% in the middle of this. Germany has .2% rate but it has crept up to .4% and I suspect it will continue to creep to 1%, and if they get overwhelmed it could go higher. China has a less than 1% rate outside of Wuhan, since outside that area, the health care system wasn't overwhelmed [1]. The extra deaths in Wuhan could be attributed to the health care system getting overwhelmed rather than under counting - 20 or 10% of those infected require intensive care. You quote 10% of the infected on the Diamond Princess as requiring hospitalization. With an overwhelmed health care system, that might be the death rate.

Which is to say that we have more evidence but that evidence seems to point to a desperate need for containment.

[1] You can compare all the statistics at: https://covid19info.live