skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being as apolitical as possible, the fault is 100% Trump's. Our pandemic response team was gutted in Spring 2018. One of my favorite science journalists, Ed Yong, wrote this shortly after; there's a lot of contextual history before he starts spitting fire at the president's egotistic idiocy.

> Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th...

^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier.

Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018:

https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646...

He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain...

It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex.

Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president.

This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership.

People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power.

It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.
Nixiosk - NixOS kiosk
Interesting, I've never come across the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbinate

FYI for others. Thanks for that
Ioannidis continues to push this evidence-based approach, but I have not yet seen an adequate response to critics such as Nassim Taleb or Yaneer Bar-Yam. They argue that one doesn't need raw evidence to act if the statistical evidence shows that the risks are catastrophic. They published a paper on January 26th which lays out arguments for why conventional risk management approaches are inadequate in these situations. [1]

This paper was met with disregard on HN [2], but the persistent reach of Ioannidis shows why Taleb's arguments have value.

Some on Twitter argue that the WHO statement on January 14th shows where Ioannidis' approach fails: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." [3] Authorities were looking for evidence before taking any action.

[1] https://necsi.edu/systemic-risk-of-pandemic-via-novel-pathog...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22154333

[3] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
Perhaps so, but some things are more important to delegate to experts than others. There's little harm in misstating the speed of light; another to suggest that a potentially hazardous drug that can be found OTC can be used to cure a virus when it cannot - and especially without dosage information.
LockDownSA – Ramaphosa shuts down South Africa
It doesn't seem like hospitalization rates are being as consistently tracked. Or if they are, not disseminated. My state's official page tracks changes daily, but doesn't include hospitalizations.
Jitsi meet is not end-to-end encrypted [1]. Rather, it is encrypted with TLS between the client and the server, which doesn’t provide the same security/privacy benefit at all.

The website says it’s “fully encrypted,” which I think is misleading.

[1] https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/README.md#se...

Edit: WebRTC does not support end-to-end encryption for multiple peers. This means it’s impossible for any browser-supported videoconferencing platform to support e2e encryption, including Zoom and Jitsi. This is where Jitsi actually has a unique advantage - it can be self hosted, which offers the same security benefits as e2e encryption.
Does 'panic' mean 'reacting to a problem with a severity of response that is proportionate to how big of a problem it will be in the future, rather than how big of a problem it is now'?

Probably many problems have been solved by this.
Yeah, according to the NBC News coverage they definitely didn't consume a gallon of aquarium cleaner. It was a teaspoon each, mixed with soda. You know, as you do...
>Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.

Where is the option in hangouts to tile equally? I've never found it and I hate the large speaker small others in some situations.
Sound like fake news. Any actual proof?
"No one is making air travel decisions today based on legroom or free snacks."

I'd like to see numbers on that, if you're traveling now (and buying the ticket) then I guess it is because you have to travel. How does having to travel in the time of coronavirus affect your buying decision? I might think, hey let's pay for the best flight possible.
Sadly, my takeaway/tl:dr
Everything you've heard or read is fake news, we know almost nothing. Ironically uses 'gone viral' when he crits a fellow doc (cite 12) on the mask 'issue', and clearly we can't even get these experienced pros on this very topic to agree on much of anything, but will print regardless.
I was waiting for someone to do that for me. ;) Thanks. Agreed. Props to the WW1 poet Wilfred Owen 1893-1918.
hospitalization rates are being shared. IIRC, they are generally around 20% of confirmed cases, but the testing rate is low here so hard to know the true numbers
There was a comment on HN a few days ago basically saying, "what's wrong with panic, maybe we should be panicking" and I just found that comment frightening. We mock all the "idiots" buying up the toilet paper, but panic clouds the clear thinking of even the "intelligent". It can absolutely effect our leaders and medical professionals.
If your boss is thick enough for vague adolescent impressions to be a significant criterion, your job is at risk.
Please keep in mind that you need to localize 'Administrators' to make this work on non english systems.
When deploying this, it would be better to replace the name with the groups sid.
I am on mobile right now but some fellow hacker can surely provide them.
Covid19.nj.gov
Covid18.nj.gov
No, because by the time they get around to testing you, you could be completely devoid of the virus, or it could be only in your lungs, or the test just fails for whatever reason.
If this is exaggerated, then surely there have been other epidemics that have gone through the world and had similar effects numbers wise (with cfr for example), and he would be able to refer to them as par for the course.
What's the CFR when you do deaths/(deaths+recovered).

Calculating deaths/cases is very misleading, as there are many people still in the "pipeline"
Applications with features for user stories.

AWS CLI is a very useful tool, because it can do simple things with AWS. In order to do more complex things, usually you have to "script" multiple commands together or write a Boto script in Python. But if the tool just came with those complex things already pre-designed as a feature, we wouldn't have to script it, it would be more reliable, easier, simpler, and nobody would need to bang their head against a DSL to get the functionality.

Nearly everyone on AWS who has wanted to try Fargate could use the following function: "Build me an ECS cluster, create everything I need for it (a VPC, security groups, etc), create an ECR registry, upload this Docker container to the registry, create me a Fargate service with tasks for the thing I uploaded to ECR, create one ALB for the cluster, add target group forwarding rules for each Fargate service in the cluster, and manage everything in Route53, including domain and certs".

Now, you could spend hours/days trying to set up Terraform or Ansible to do all of that, or script it with Bash or Python in a few hours. Or you could run something like "aws ecs user-story fargate-apps --cluster-name foo --service-container docker-image:latest --service-name some-img-name:latest --service-url https://my.custom.domain/some-img-name/ ". No DSL. No plugins. No cobbling together 100 lego pieces and reading 200 pages of documentation. No scripting. It's a very common user story, and the AWS CLI already has literally all of the functionality you would need.

But that won't happen, because the IT industry is purposely designed to be unnecessarily inefficient, complex, and expensive. If a tool like AWS CLI or Terraform just bundled this user story natively without you having to "compose" it like a DSL, the companies that produce them wouldn't make as much money, and could potentially incur more cost through the maintenance of it. An open-source community could support it, but it'd mostly be written by engineers of private companies, and companies are pathologically terrified of releasing any intellectual property without lawyers and contracts and CLAs and so on.

Literally half of the reason my job exists at all is that nobody has yet bothered to release the cobbled-together lego components of an enterprise organization under the public domain.
China quarantined 700 million of its citizens for fun and it still killed thousands. I'm sure that they regret the policies they implemented right now as they've finally gotten a hold of the outbreak.

Edit: I was being sarcastic here. China messed up the initial response but their draconian tactics worked well.
Notion?
Thanks for posting! Applied on the website
I liked Parse.
I am worried there is a fine line between 'realism' and a backlash against care for the elderly and chronically ill.

When people realise that their earnings have been slashed, they have been burdened with years of increased taxes, the economy has plunged, and swathes of businesses have gone bust, for the sake of people who were going to die soon anyway...

Realism is good. But it is easy to 'evidence' biased anti-vulnerable feeling with 'realism'. I'm not convinced that if most people understood the realistic risk to themselves, they would do what's necessary to protect the people at much greater risk. The last week of the 'let's be realistic' zeitgeist on the news comment thread I visit.

As usual with such pessimism, I really hope I'm wrong.
This line of thinking is backwards. Usually the problems that we don't solve are the ones where we should have taken stronger measures (i.e, "panicked") earlier instead of waiting for evidence of a threat.

We did listen to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") over Y2K bug and a lot of money was spent on it before January 1st, 2000, so that got solved swiftly. On the other hand:

- Had we listened to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") over the excess of the dot-com era, we wouldn't have pets.com and WebVan.

- Had we listened to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") about the mortgage crisis, we wouldn't have gone through the 2008 recession.

- Had we listened to the ones warning about the need of controlling flights to China in January (i.e, "panicking"), half of Europe wouldn't be in lockdown.
Unfortunately, if we had panicked 3 months ago and prevented all of this, we'd never know it. People would just look and say, "see it was no big deal, we panicked for nothing".
Nuclear weapons have long (since the late 50s at least) had a peculiar calculus that amounts to the prisoner's dilemma: whether or not your adversary has nuclear weapons, there is more value for you to have them, so you end up in a situation where everyone feels justified to have them, even if it's the worst situation overall.

This has created a few paradoxical situations. One of them is that their strategic value lies primarily not in their use (which will not achieve any result) but rather the threat of use, which may be sufficient to dissuade leaders from committing to a war (arguably, this happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis--both Kennedy and Khrushchev blanched at the prospect of starting a nuclear war). Another interesting side effect is that this means that the development of counter technologies produces staunch opposition: nuclear war has to be seen as unwinnable for its deterrent value to be effective.

Part of the motivation for nuclear weapons as a strategic (rather than deterrent) option comes from the lineage of people who see strategic bombing as an fast, cheap, easy way to win a war. For a century now, adherents have predicted that once you started bombing a few cities indiscriminately, you'd easily win a war. And people continue to argue this despite the rather thin evidence for this proposition, and mountains of evidence in opposition.
Whether something is a chemical weapon depends also on use, not only on content.

https://www.opcw.org/our-work/what-chemical-weapon

So yes, any of the above chemicals if they were to be used to cause harm via their toxic properties, would be chemical weapons according to OPCW.
What does spending on military $600B/y get you? Capability of winning wars? America has not won a war since WW2. National security? Think about 9/11. Geopolitical influence? See the middle east mess. Economic wealth? Well if you invested a trillion per year in any sector of the economy you would have spurred economic activity of similar magnitude with the defense sector, that could actually have some benefits for the society, e.g. proper healthcare.
Using Bluetooth to detect potential contact + plus GPS seem like a good way to cover a lot of ground. Anyways I feel like the bigger issue is the huge honeypot problem. I think it's easier to assume data like this is bound to leak -- so what can we do to make it useless besides for its intended purpose? I mean it doesn't have to protect against like a state backed program to track an individual -- but it should protect against the usual bullshit companies like insurance or scammers.... hmmm
Wonderful news
> Malaria that is chloroquine sensitive, not people

Yep there's some chloroquine phosphate resistant malaria (Plasmodium) that hydroxychloroquine still works for. It also works for the other non-resistant ones making it a good first option, more here:

https://www.drugs.com/monograph/hydroxychloroquine-sulfate.h...

There's no current patent on either drugs. But as I said, data was showing HCQ was 3x more effective, which was why the new studies are focusing on that...
Modern digital TV has variable latency depending on the area and the method of transmission (cable, internet, DVB-T, etc), so you might be off by tens of seconds. Not sure whether it's a dealbreaker in this case.
I'm looking for new opportunities, only remote (preferably part time, but not a must).

I have many years of experience with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD system administration.

I enjoy programming in Go and PHP (+20 years of experience in PHP+SQL).

Location: Europe/Copenhagen
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies:
* PHP, Go, Python, C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, SQL, Shell scripting.
* Debian/Devuan/Ubuntu, Arch, Void, Alpine, OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
* Apache, NGINX, MySQL/MariaDB, Galera, Sphinx, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis,
SQLite, OpenSSH, Git, Mercurial, DHCP, DNSMasq, Bind, Unbound, NTP, PF,
iptables, ZFS, Btrfs, GlusterFS, NFS, Samba, OpenSMTPD, Postfix,
SpamAssassin, Dovecot, GnuPG, rsync, ProFTPD, PureFTPd.
Website: https://unixsheikh.com
Resume/CV: Request via email
Email: [job] at [unixsheikh dot com]
> it's my understanding that hollow point is not very effective against targets wearing armor

While that's true, the hollow point doesn't make a difference. Essentially all pistol ammo is bad at penetrating armor. What does make a (small) difference is velocity; you can see this by looking at ratings for NIJ level IIa and IIIa armor.

This is why pistol ammo that's designed to penetrate soft armor like 5.7mm is so small and light weight - it needs to be really fast. I'm sure the pointed shape helps a bit, but it's the speed that really does the job. That's also why it's garbage compared to normal ammo against unarmored targets.
Some guy in accounting, "I forgot we bought all these masks last year, someone tell our leader". Timing seems a little odd with the media clearly talking about the shortage of masks for weeks and this comes out today.
The Great Depression: A Diary
Americans Unfit to Fight a Pandemic
Printing money in itself doesn't - it is how the supply meets the demand. Devaluation requires a relative increase vs the economy. Distribution of money also affects how much inflation would take place.

Driving inflation up from low is a nominal goal of QE but the magnitude varies.
I'm glad this is happening. But I could see how a consumer would be upset with this. Were these rules listed when I purchased the product? Why didn't you limit me if you had intentions of limiting what I can return?

Costco is very open about their return policy and it's part of the reason people shop there. They can buy things and know they can return them if they don't need them. It may be the wrong reason to buy things, but if that's the case Costco should alter their return policy.
Reading that comment charitably, I guess they meant something about fear sometimes being a productive motivating emotion. In my view, panic is fear strong enough to override rationality. Cool-headed fear might be a good thing, but panic usually isn't.
I feel bad for you. None of my friends use Apple products.

But I imagine if your friends aren't nerds this is a real problem. My wife has to deal with it.
> Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information. Hospitalization rates should be one of the main stats being shared, imo.

Because it’s in the neighborhood of 15% worst case needing hospitalization. You’ve already got enough people blowing off quarantine measures, so no one is terribly eager to share that of the people who DO get the virus, 85% don’t require hospitalization. I get the reasoning from a public policy perspective, but I agree that information should be made a bit more easily accessible.
New Kubernetes Security Issues Found, Lead of Denial of Services
> Which is still not good but not as bad as it could be.

Not great, not terrible.

...sorry
My first thought was - who returns toilet paper!?!

But I suppose if you're a hoarder or reseller then you'd probably return whatever you don't need/sell. So good move.
The title is funny, since Ioannidis is actually the one proposing measures ("do nothing") based on no evidence and exaggeration. Basically every number in the paper is tainted by him cherry-picking the most optimistic number possible, and then trying to twist it further into something even better.

Like his argument for the R0 being near 1.3 is just that it's "probably" the case.

At some point we need to be able to call the data we have good enough for making decisions.
For what it's worth, the US CDC has said this about (H1N1)pdm09. I'm not sure if H1N1 is a coronavirus though and I don't know if there's any published research supporting this. But the author's statement seems reasonable enough given it was qualified with "probably".

> From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...
I wouldn't call that censoring either. They just rejected to provide any services for them.
The number of coronavirus deaths is already over 10,000:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_pneumonia
Interesting. I thought the extended cleanup was because the agent was derived from more stable precursors (binary agent), plus the normal overreaction to 'OMFG NERVE GAS'. But the (not conclusive) Wikipedia says the resultant agent is potent for 'years'. I doubt that kind of chemistry stays potent for that long in the wild, but it's by no means my area to judge. I don't think it changes the strategic or tactical view, but yeah...the thought of a year persistent toxic dead zone is unpleasant.
Why would they regret it? I don’t follow your reasoning. They got a hold of the outbreak precisely because they ramped up quarantining
Right, panic is pure emotion, fight or flight, hard be rational in that state. Covid19 is "sobering". 100 years since the 1918 flu and we still aren't ready. Even with the billions we spend on health care.
>I am worried there is a fine line between 'realism' and a backlash against care for the elderly and chronically ill.

I guarantee you that if we don't target our lockdowns on the at-risk population (elderly being the most numerous in that group), whatever backlash there is will be worse when the general population realizes they aren't at any significant personal risk.
New Coronavirus Stimulus Bill in Congress Creates U.S. Digital Dollar
I published a paper on outbreaks in a hospital setting and the problem is there is not a single RCT on methods to stop outbreaks. The problem is no organization is willing to approve a trial where you don't follow your protocols and commonly accepted methods to control the spread (ex. closing common areas, isolating patients, cohorting staff, enhanced cleaning). There is a good blog post about 'Riding the Wave' that basically says that perhaps the outbreak would have ended itself and we simply just take credit saying "what we did worked" but in reality we'll never know.