skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No way that is possibly true. People realised they didn't have tests. A bunch of people of a liberterian bent or systems thinkers would have picked the FDA as the problem very quickly.

You didn't need a "libertarian bent" or special"systems thinking" to figure that out. The CDC was testing at most 50 people a day IIRC. Can 50 tests across an entire country get you detailed info? No. You need labs to run tests, CDC has limited lab space for testing. South Korea was capable of doing thousands of tests per day. No rational person though 50 was sufficient. They simply sat and waited for the CDC doing nothing.

Who has labs? Universities, sure start there? Who does the testing for the population in general? Quest & LabCorp, have them run the test.

> It wasn't going to work unless the executive happened by amazing luck of have an infectious disease specialist in a key role

It doesn't require having "amazing luck" to see what was happening. Everyone on the internet looking at it did. Like the task force they killed? This is utter incompetence by the executive branch. In January, how do you see 700 million people on some form of lock down in China and not immediately spin up a task force to evaluate risks to the US? It's astounding levels of negligence.

The administration let the country down enormously. And a lot of people are going to suffer because of it.
The problem is that the CDC didn't use the tests WHO had developed, and stonewalled states and private labs from developing their own testing, while they fucked around developing their own tests.

OK, fine, if the CDC wants their own tests, whatever. The WHO tests were not the be-all end-all of testing. There was clearly room for improvement on test speed for example. I have seen this called out as something that specifically needed to be improved with the WHO tests, they are not "10 minute" type tests.

But leaving us with no testing for two months is unacceptable. Preventing anyone else from taking a turn at the brass ring is also unacceptable. That's the problem with the CDC's "testing decision" here. If they wanted to develop their own test, they could work on it in parallel while deploying the tests that we had.

IMO this was likely a top-down decision to try and "keep our numbers low" as it were. The President has been obsessed with not spooking the stock market with scary numbers going up, and the "fix" for that is not to do any testing at all. So he stalled the CDC from deploying testing and sent them off on a wild goose chase.
I think those are great rough criteria through which one could perhaps arrive at a distinction between virusses and other life forms.

But let's consider the original concept of the feature based tree of life, which with the advent of genetic sequencing was eventually shown to contain many errors, and to really be a graph of life with a strongly discernible spanning tree.

So if genomes turn out to be a better navigation instrument than behaviors or features, and given how modern understanding of the evolution of life through natural selection, it would appear a better definition for life forms would be to say: patterns in physical nature that can thrive in specific niches (often relying on the presence of other such patterns) having one or more nontrivial / unbounded chemical information stores (say polymers) the contents of which undergo natural selection or the evolutionary algorithm in the environment according to physics.

So prion would not be life forms since their number of chemical states are trivial or bounded, while viruses would still be lifeforms under my definition since their RNA or DNA sequences are non-trivial and in some sense unbounded (their genome could grow or shrink in size over generations).

Also consider that just like living organisms can die because of say UV-C radiation, so can viruses be inactivated by UV-C radiation...
gensim and spacy have been in that space for a while now as well.
1) The FDA requires the CDC to produce tests. The CDC chose to make their own.

2) The Trump admin lies. A lot.
This article does not mention the WHO offered tests to the US before the CDC decided it should make its own[1]. This alone should have been enough to bring impeachment charges against public officials, for criminal neglect.

If the WHO had proven these in China, and you have no other alternative, it make sense to do both 1. buy tests you know are in active use and 2. make your own tests if needed.

Someone at the CDC must have been asleep or was ignored. China was shut down for weeks, the port of LA didnt have 25% of its normal volume in February and the WHO was shipping tests to over 60 countries _at the end of February_.

EDIT#1: I also emailed Dr Fauci a full week before about the short sightedness of allowing cruise ships to continue operating and while he was claiming "if you are healthy, they are fine". His office returned my mail a few days ago with a blanket "Dr Fauci is busy, and appreciates your comments" email.

EDIT#2: There is a more nuanced version of this discussion in the comments below. It is technically not correct to say the "WHO offered the US tests", the more technical distinction would be the "WHO supported leading research from Berlin, and the CDC did not. This decision lead to a delay in tests that did not have a higher number of false positives... (etc). The US generally has resources to produce these tests, and would not rely on the WHO." Either way, a test existed and the US could have chosen to take a more conservative stance by adopting the research and producing its own simulatneously. The Chinese economy was shutdown.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing...
If all your ifs are met, then you are not getting paid for it, which is a criteria from my comment :) Also this whole discussion is about suggest against people from using employer equipment to do personal projects :)
The part where it was made illegal for children to work. Humans had children integrated into the things adults do, too. I don't even get who pushed for this. It just alienates young adults from life, opening paths for them to turn to drugs and other destructive behaviors.
I love Nix but even their core contributors agree the available documentation and broader information in the form of blog posts and tutorials in the ecosystem is subpar. I think the refusal to use Markdown and hence profit from more contributors is a big factor there. Sometimes it’s good to be a purist, and it has gotten Nix where it is today, but hanging on to ‘superior’ documentation formats can hurt growth and a dash of pragmatism would really help.
it dependes. you can invite somebody to our gcloud project and give him only access for a specific bucket, which means he can access the content via oauth. unfortunatly it does not work in all cases i.e. some hyperlinks do not work reliably when you create static pages with relative links, because after authentication it rewrites the uri's.
And where's someone unemployed going to get 3 month's of rent if they only work in 0 or 1 of the next 3 months?
Small correction: It wasn't the CDC preventing other tests from being used -- that's not their job. It was the FDA.
> Redefining the rules if something does not work is how you do mathematics works all the time:

Exploring the consequences of alternative definitions is fantastic, let’s do more of that.

Redefining the terms that somebody else uses in a conversation sucks royally. Everybody hates it when people do that. Don’t be that guy.
The web shouldn't block ads, it should block JS entirely. There should be a 'global' permission system (similar to Android) that allows me to control exactly what information websites are allowed to access from my browser.

For example, I want to disable WebRTC as it can be used to collect my IP address, or disable WebGPU APIs or anything that can be used to finger print me.

JS has far, far, far too much broad access to information that might seem mundane but can be used to profile a user.

Android is the same - you can get the entire list of installed packages on the system and various other pieces of information to build a unique, persistable tracking ID.

There's also a lack of accountability: What information is being sent to what servers? I want a detailed JSON formatted breakdown of EVERY single piece of data that is being sent from my device.

I should be able to block anything that is outside my own determined comfort zone.

But most OS' just make requests to US IP's without much thought now - just turn on Windows 10 in a VM and watch as it sends so many requests with no insight into the data, which many companies (including Google) don't tell you about.

Ask me about a recent GDPR request to Google which I just got a generic response about (and they didn't action my request to delete information, so now I need to complain to the regulator because it was also late).

So yes, blocking ALL tracking by default is sensible.
Resources to Support Your Mental Health During the Covid-19 Outbreak
flush, bidet, air dry
Amino | Fullstack engineer | Full-time | San Francisco (all remote for now)

Amino is a healthcare financial wellness platform that helps companies & their employees navigate the complexities of the US healthcare system & find the highest value care, which has become even more important of late. We're seeing major growth in 2020 and are hiring junior/mid-level fullstack engineers to help us scale & improve our products.

apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/aminohealth/jobs/1573195

https://amino.com/
https://amino.com/careers
I don't know... To me, zig does not look like C at all. IMO, go and zig are as similar to each other as they are dissimilar to C.
Suggesting a resumption of normal work and not calling for more laggardly states to get their acts in order has been immensely irresponsible. Additionally he's reaffirmed the benefits of Plaquenil/Chloroquinine and already one self-medicator has died from improvising a supply[1].

Don't expect the federal government to start acting intelligently anytime soon.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/man-dies-after-in...
It goes both ways, you don’t have to be told to like work from home and be downvoted over it.
They explicitly say 1st party httponly secure cookies are exempt and are their first recommended alternative.
I'm not saying that the throttling is useless, just that I don't think it is due to congestion in international pipes.
This could also be solved by youtube detecting these situations and simply spacing keyframes farther apart or using duplicate frame decimation/vfr encoding. Seeking would still be fast since it could just fetch and skip a huge bunch of empty P-frames.
Equity release may provide that liquidity, if you can find a willing provider.
Anyone with a table top PCR machine could have been running tests. CDC/FDA were actively preventing folks from doing their own tests.
I'm realizing how great it is to not be in the same room. Meetings are more productive. It's easier to get stuff done without being distracted.
You are absolutely correct on the point of the C ABI. It's definitely the systems lingua franca.

Just finished reading the Zig cc article and I must say I'm also quite impressed. I'll be keeping an eye on the next Zig release--being able to eventually use it as a `cc` or `mvsc` replacement would be a big game changer. Having recently run the study of trying to cross compile a few C++ and GTK apps, I can really see the appeal.
Note that on linux hosts at least, for most target platforms, being able to cross compile with clang is only one single install of the right packages away.
I hope this goes over better than the Sign in with Apple deadline that was attempted. That seemed like a pretty big flop.
“Save a Life to Save a Life” Brainchyld
I had to look up if Tynadol was the name of another drug. Sounds like it could be, heh.
To clarify. The WHO did not offer the US tests. The Politico article just says that the US was not on the list of countries it offered tests. It never offers the US tests, because it has national labs that can make their own tests. The WHO only gives tests to countries who do not have a national infrastructure of their own to build tests.

But the WHO did recommend the Berlin tests, as it had no false positives, and was quickly able to isolate the virus from other coronaviruses, something the initial CDC test was not able to.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/16/joe-biden/...
Windows moved basic graphics driver functionality to user space many, many years ago. (Windows Vista)

>Badly written device drivers can cause severe damage to a system (e.g., BSoD and data corruption) since all standard drivers have high privileges when accessing the kernel directly. The User-Mode Driver Framework insulates the kernel from the problems of direct driver access, instead providing a new class of driver with a dedicated application programming interface at the user level of interrupts and memory management.

If an error occurs, the new framework allows for an immediate driver restart without impacting the system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Mode_Driver_Framework

Has Windows suffered from this change or has the added stability of having a graphics stack capable of restarting itself on error instead of blue screening the entire machine been a good thing?
The point of third party cookies is cross-site tracking, which doesn't work with a first party domain.
Note to other readers - Windows' speech to text, while function, has inferior voice recognition to The Goog.
I know nothing but sometimes `!important` works.
The English translation of "Dogmatix" is the most perfect translation ever. It kept the original meaning and even introduced a new pun.
Once the hospitals run out of ventilators and supplies and once the doctors are all sick themselves. Then sick-with-serious-viral-pneumonia = dead, for a large portion of the sick. Infected != sick, no doubt but we know the ratio of infected to sick over time, despite Ioannidis' disgraceful efforts to cast doubt here.
As far as I know, asymptotic people aren't even being tested for covid-19, because of the test kits shortage.
It’s more or less the same catalog.
Kenny Rogers has died
I mean, is this C-like?

fn add(a: i32, b: i32) i32 {
return a + b;
}
If we could avoid junk mail, that would definitely be ideal case scenario. I find a little comfort in believing that what I throw in the recycle bin (which is all the junk mail) gets recycled into new paper.
Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.
The good is that next week when same issue will be about to happen, people able to push back will be in better position to push back and there will be more pressure on them to push back.

What happened once will happen again.
As a project, I like the idea of having the nodes be separate, because endless layers of virtual things makes it harder to grop what's truly going on, IMO.

Also, gotta factor in electricity hosts.
I think a problem comes when you want to distribute your compiler potentially independent from your OS and/or linker and/or C library.

But it's also fair to say that if we had always considered those things as inseparable parts of the "compiler suite" that might have made everyone better off.
At the company I work at they send phishing training emails every now and then. Luckily, the email headers have special fields, so that the IT firewall lets the "spam" through. I managed to set up a rule in my outlook to catch these headers and move all the emails to a special "Phish" folder.
Rolling away: a novel context-dependent escape behavior discovered in ants
I trust that you're typing your comment from OpenBSD? After all, it's the only modern OS that doesn't compromise against security.
> The only remaining question is whether the current situation will cause any of Trump's supporters to question the wisdom of valuing loyalty above all else (and particularly above competence). If not, then this is just the beginning of our pain.

Trump supporters aren't great at critical thinking - that's why we're in this mess. I'm pretty sure a large majority of them will buy the con that it was the previous administration's fault, or it was china's fault, or it was those pesky Democrat's fault, or it's only like the flu so why panic? Or all of the above. That and he'll convince'em that the checks that are coming are from him personally and isn't he just great for sending'em out?

Yeah, we could still be in for trouble in November.
That's why you're supposed to have savings, but it seems these days people prefer to spend frivolously
Every law and regulation Cuomo had suspended during coronavirus crisis
Ask HN: Best lectures about plant science?
I've been binging on plant biology, and would love to find outstanding lectures or research presentations with clear and compelling explanations and thought-provoking results. Any plant biologists reading today?
Tuesday 24 March comparison of coronavirus testing in USA vs. South Korea
What exactly is wrong with going for a walk? So long as you're keeping some distance from others, I'd think walks would be encouraged.
Several countries are in similar situations. For example Iceland‘s recent order for more tests got scaled back to 2,000 from 5,000. But unlike the US their acting like the situation is worse than it appears to be to try and limit spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...
I think your going to find countries that have prioritised connection speeds over the core network are going to have a rude awakening.
Yes, for example I am doing that with my college classes.
> uses a sophisticated caching system to avoid needlessly rebuilding artifacts

Reminded me of the Stanford Builder gg[1], which does highly parallel gcc compilation on aws lambda. make -j2000.

So with a zig cc drop-in, you might get highly-parallel cross-compilation?

Though the two caching systems might be a bit redundant.

[1] https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg
That's funny, I am German and that comic book was always one of my favourites. I never made the connection that it was supposed to be demeaning or that there was a controversy around it. I always took it as being cheeky like Asterix in Britain.
A Scientific Reserve Corps could help us in a pandemic
I used to read them in Spanish in Mexico, and I'm sad to say the early Spanish translations were pretty awful. A lot of them were done by Spaniards that apparently did not understand the puns, so they would just repeat the French names without offering any kind of translation. A lot of other jokes were translated without being apparently understood to the point where it was completely nonsensical in Spanish. It wasn't until I later learned French that I could appreciate the jokes in the names.

There was also a problem that the Spanish translations were very inconsistent and between one book to another characters would have different names.

For a while I envied the superior English translation. I wish we had gotten something as good in Spanish.
They also take security very very seriously.
I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated.

Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.

For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.

That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
It makes sense. Version numbers should be intuitive. Constantly changing software should update by whole numbers, so that the more it has changed, the more the number is different. Whereas "3.11" seems almost identical to "3.86" because they're both based on 3.

Although I would argue that it should change by 0.5 per feature or something like that, so that if it has 10 new features the version number will be 5 higher, but only 2 new features will be 1 higher. Because Java has changed very little from 8 to 12, whereas Firefox's last 4 changes were altogether bigger.
I mean, by definition, landlords own more homes than they need. Worst case scenario, the asset doesn't disappear, it just gets put to auction for someone that can afford it to buy it.

Possibly the government could restrict that auction to non-property owners to help sort out the first-sentence problem.
Leafly: 50% (~150) staff reduction

Compass: 400 heads cut

Vacasa: Staff reduction (unknown count)

TripActions: 350 heads cut
Homenauts – Resources for explorers who stay at home during Covid-19
"Dark pattern" is just a nice way of saying "how can we trick people while staying just barely on the right side of the law."

Why is tricking people legally ok?
I'll go with what my doctor tells me but thanks for the links.
SARS was much more contained, and only infected ~8K people. It infected ~3K people outside of China, most whom were in east Asia. The case counts outside east Asia were in descending order:

- Canada: 250

- US: 27

- Germany: 9

Areas affected by SARS instituted targeted quarantines after detection and were able to contain the virus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea...

H1N1 was much less deadly than Covid-19 and spread less quickly. There were only ~18K confirmed deaths worldwide. (The estimated number of deaths was much higher at 150-600K. Basically, we confirmed it was less deadly than the seasonal flu so we didn't test everyone for it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

People are freaking out about Covid-19 because it spreads faster and is already stressing hospitals. Deaths and cases double every 2-3 days absent control measures. It can take 2 weeks to cause symptoms, so even if everything gets shut down now, we could have 25x as many hospitalizations/deaths than today. If smaller control measures aren't as effective, it'd take time to confirm and the peak would be multiples higher. H1N1 spread much slower so we could have responded much more leisurely if things started to go out of control.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
Really incredible work and it's been very fun to follow along. The streams where Andrew did the last part of this work can be seen here: [1], [2].

I am really happy that someone is making the effort to steadily simplify systems programming rather than make it more complicated. Linux goes to such incredible lengths to be bug-for-bug backwards compatible, but then the complexities of all of our layers of libcs, shared libraries, libsystemd, dbus, etc cause unnecessary pain and breakage at every level. Furthermore, cross-compiling C code across different architectures on Linux is far harder than it needs to be. I have a feeling that there wouldn't be as much interest in the steady stream of sandboxes and virtual machines (JVM, NaCl, PNaCl, flatpak, docker, WebAssembly) if we could just simplify the layers and layers of cruft and abstractions in compiler toolchains, libc implementations, and shared libraries. Practically every laptop and server processor use the exact same amd64 architecture, but we have squandered this opportunity by adding leaky abstractions at so many levels. I can't wait until installing a program on linux is as simple as downloading a static executable and just running it and I hope zig brings this future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u2lEJv7Ukw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S2YArCx6vU