skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this case (as with many others) placebo is pretty effective, but also, these folks didn't get sick enough to need it, as with the overwhelming majority of young and healthy people. Another, broader study is required. I'm sure we'll find out more soon -- this reads like a mulligan though.
Not necessarily. Don't work at McKinsey, but don't they have a reputation for flying their workforce to the client sites Monday-Thursday, no matter where the engineer lives?
I have no background in this, but just because it was detected after 17 days doesn't mean it was still viable and able to infect someone. There are so many variables and I've also heard 3 days for most surfaces is reasonable. We're still learning a lot every day, but I doubt recommendations would be this far off after knowing about this for months already.

> Although these data cannot be used to determine whether transmission occurred from contaminated surfaces, further study of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 aboard cruise ships is warranted.

This might make you feel more at ease.
You mean "not worse". If almost everyone got cured there's hardly any leeway to be even better.
Thank goodness that we are actually getting some RCT results. There has been a huge confirmation bias towards any positive results for chloroquine, no matter how specious or flawed the underlying science was. Everybody wants this to work because the drug is well-tested on humans, cheap, and broadly available. It would be a panacea, a miracle drug. My concern is that the desire for this drug to be effective has clouded people's judgment (even seasoned researchers) and led to bad science.
The idea that I might one day vaguely want to move to Dallas had never ever previously occurred to me.
It confuses the virus. If on top of that the office’s location is secret, it’s even harder to figure out for the virus where your employee are hiding and so if it can’t find them it can’t infect them. Don’t worry, people at the top know what they’re doing, just keep doing your job and don’t worry about the specifics.
The alternative is recognizing social distancing isn't working. If browbeating people into it doesn't work, then we, as a free society, are stuck. People are, apparently, not responsible enough, as a whole, to follow best-practices. Those best-practices only seem to work if people are nearly fully complying with them. Half-measures are, seemingly, useless, and impose a significant cost. Maybe establishing a government delivery service and tax credits for vulnerable people to go into long-term quarantine is better? I don't know. Initially I was strongly in favor of social distancing, but it was based on an incorrect assumption of how socially conscious my fellow Americans are.
The difference is not statistically significant is what I mean.
The specificity is high enough, certainly better than for having a cough, to tell everyone with anosmia to self-quarantine. I agree that sensitivity is not great.
The debs don't install on Ubuntu 19.10 BTW (obsolete deps).
Or as I call it, the Placebo Effect Helmet.

> The foundations of his theory have been criticized in the scientific press.

> One attempt at replication published in the scientific literature reported a failure to reproduce Persinger's effects and the authors proposed that the suggestibility of participants, improper blinding of participants or idiosyncratic methodology could explain Persinger's results.

> Other groups have reported no effects at all or have generated similar experiences by using sham helmets, or helmets that are not turned on, and have concluded that personality differences in the participants explain these unusual experiences.
The same glove they wipe their face with when they have an itch
I'm not trying to stir paranoia, but I wonder how diligent the average person is with gloves? We don't ooze the virus out of our fingers, its picked up or wiped from somewhere. Wearing old gloves is worse than freshly washed or sanitized hands, but I would hope the recency and severity of this make people more careful.
I just hope this COVID-19 phase passes out.
Looking up your local Administrator name:

wmic path win32_group where (LocalAccount=true AND SID="S-1-5-32-544") get Name

edit: that's just the name of the local Administrators group, here's how to get the Admin-accountname:

wmic useraccount where (domain='localhostname' and sid like 'S-1-5-21-%%-500') get sid /value

wmic useraccount where (domain='localhostname' and sid='sidfromfirstcommandhere') get name /value
I'm not doing it and tens of millions would balk at the Federal government tracking like this. Sorry, that is way past the slippery slope to tyranny.
HFT should be banned and there should be a 15 minute delay before trade execution.
Like the movie Sucker Punch.
From your comments it sounds like you referring to domestic planes which I have no doubt is true. There is definitely a capacity issue internationally - particularly between China and anywhere near to China and the USA
Didn't think about that, but yes, that makes sense...
Well, why don't we just wait around and sit on our hands until hundreds of thousands are dead and this hidden variable makes its presence known? Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
> Course, that'll only work if the symptoms are being caused by an overactive immune system and it's able to mediate that immune response in time.

Accumulating evidence suggests that a subgroup of patients with severe COVID-19 might have a cytokine storm syndrome [1]. HCQ is known to moderate this reaction.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I just want that this COVID-19 phase pass out and all the people to be cured.
Doctors from all over the world are working for the cure and hope they find it!
In normal times Italy has a death rate of 10 deaths/1000 people. Which translates to ~1500 daily for a population of 60 millions. What were they doing previously with the dead?
My guess is that TP is low margin for the volume it takes on the truck. Better to ship over canned goods or cleaning wipes.
I am surprised to learn most toilet paper come from recycled paper. The whole bleaching it white seems rather unnecessary. Do consumers really demand their TP be white?
If you're concerned about an extra dozen eggs you shouldn't be shopping wholesale.

Eggs don't go bad or spoil after a certain date. They dry up over time, but not in a few weeks.

I can't imagine anyone being in a situation where they need 4 dozen eggs for a few weeks, but none after that.
What proves me that you understand them better than I do?
Somebody mentioned their surprise in seeing the metric system here in a since deleted comment. I wanted to mention it’s not that unusual given the How It’s Made show is produced out of Quebec. https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13055620/the-maki...

The show listed all of the filming locations on its website. Via Internet Archive I discovered this was filmed at Cascades paper in Canada (likely a Montreal, QC production location)
All this wouldn't be necessary if git supported traversing through parent directories for a configuration lookup to have "per directory structure" configurations.
Any idea, why this relatively simple and inexpensive approach isn't implemented? Simply because no one bothered to do it so far?
> This Doctor in NY seems to have had great results so far https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/stunning-ny-doctor-....

Let's stick with legitimate news sources.

Either way no data is provided there, but the case fatality rate for folks under 10 is 0% and under 29 is between 0.1% and 0%. If this hypothetical doctor even exists, it wouldn't be hard to pick 350 people, give them some HCQ and Azithromycin and have 100% of them recover -- as they would have even if they hadn't received anything. That's more or less what this study shows.

In fact, as the fatality rate for under-29s is 0.1%, you have a 70% ((1-0.001)^12) chance that any randomly selected 350 of them will recover.
I was with you until toilet.
I saw that too.

Interested to see the use of metric system (75 km long roll, 165 cm wide inner tube). I presume that the narrator is just reading a script which is based on the actual units the toilet paper company uses. I used to travel to Europe often and always been the butt of the metric system jokes (I am American) but I think people do not understand is that metric system is used more widely than they think in the US. It is the official system of the USA (Pub. L. 94-168, §2, Metric Conversion Act 1975 § 205b 1.). Furthermore, entire industires such as semiconductor, electronics, pharmaceuticals, medicine and dentistry, sports (100 meter runs) and the U.S. Military uses metric system extensively if not exclusively in many areas. There are still areas in our life where we do not have nice divisibility by decimal numbering system (which is one of the advantages of the metric system of units) - time (0-24 hours), angle (0-360 degrees), font sizes (Swiss points), aviation / navy, Space industry, etc around the world including nations in Europe. IMO if we had to rewind history and start over again, we should have chosen a base-12 duodecimal system instead of decimal. Imagine how the world would be like if we had 12 fingers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

One example that always sticks out to me is hearing about German cars being limited to 155mph when of course it's really 250kph.

Often you'll find a metric value being quoted as authoritative that's the conversion of an imperial measure though. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that 165cm wide tube was originally set there because something was 65 inches.
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That's not exactly a ridiculous hypothesis. A ventilator is life support; you're put on it when you're in the process of dying in hopes that something will happen before you finish.
Europe was not sitting at home for months. Few weeks basically, including most of Itally.
If everyone in Italy gets Coronavirus, what do you expect the death rate to be?

And remember, 7% of confirmed cases there have already died, and that’s over 1 in 3 of all deaths reported so far.
Obviously we should not do that.

Ultimately you can find scenarios to show how any precaution is useless if you want to...
Constitutions are for many things.

A well written constitution allows for provisions to be suspended and outweighed in a state of emergency. Ideally it has a mechanism for doing so where possible, and for limiting the effect and scrutinising it, treating such a state as a serious exception to the normal state of things.

Constitutions are a tool and an inspiration for better society. They are not able to anticipate or codify every situation, though. Ideally they themselves codify recognition of that, and govern how exceptions are to be handled with care.
I went to a Toronto Wal-Mart last Friday, and they were out of just about every pain-reliever. Like, that's not going to save you your life from anything!
The imperial college had it estimated 2.1 - 3.3 before "stay at home" measures. Obligatory influenza is 1.5.
Because the only reason for why they built it is "let's build something that kinda looks like a brain!". Two problems with that though:

1. It's nothing like a real brain, because we don't really know how a brain works (if we knew, we would have simulated it in software long time ago). Human Brain Project has failed spectacularly with far more money and brain power pumped into it, but at least it advanced neuroscience in some ways (hopefully). This project advances nothing.

2. There are no useful applications these spiking networks implemented in hardware can do better than regular GPUs running regular deep learning models, and no reasons to believe this will change any time soon.

Someone at Intel is trying to make a career out of it, and a bunch of second grade researchers are trying to get grant money while the 'neuromorphic' buzzword is still hot.
Enough competitors will eventually realise that the only way to sell any units at all is to advertise, and so will start to ramp up their own efforts.

Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand.

This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc.

Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.
> The happy dream is maybe hydroxychloroquine has prophylactic tendencies since it is something people can take long term to be at a substantially lower risk vs catching COVID.

It's an immune system inhibitor, so this seems like a bad plan.
Socialism, Popular Education, and the Fight Against Racism in the Soviet Union
Not exactly. HCQ has anti-inflammatory action as well as immune moderating action [1] the latter of which may help protect against cytokine storm which occurs in some serious COVID-19 infections. It also has antiviral action in some situations but it's not clear that that's actually relevant to COVID-19 yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine
Some TP does come from recycling (Cascades, shown here, appears to also have a recycling division) but some doesn’t — https://www.nrdc.org/media/2019/190220 for example.
Zoom requires a quad core processor for the virtual backgrounds, so I’m not sure it is any worse?
Yeah... Yeah! ...Yeah!

Take this (take that!) from someone interested in etiology... who then goes on to "proclaim":

"...they _may_ no longer be able to grow inside cells, _even if_..."

...maybe if...

As useless as maybe hands-down almost literally everything ev-aar-ruh said like literally possibly maybe before since and may be after even if (say it with me!) "they may".
Americans are free spirits, unlike people from more structured or rigidly governed countries. They're not used to giving up their personal freedom when someone tells them its for the good of all.

So unlike the Chinese, who shutter themselves obediently and trustingly at the whim of their government.
Black Swan Effect: 9 Worst to Best Affected Tech Businesses Due to Coronavirus
>I can't imagine anyone was actually worried about being too effective in containment.

It could have been when we had just a few cases, but you're right.

The more effective the quarantine is, the longer it will take, creating more stress on the economy.
Mitigation is not "panicking". The earlier you do it, the less costly.
Not drawing any conclusions. Just watching the CDC's number approach the DP's number as a point of comparison.

The DP provides an accurate percentage of asymptomatic positives based upon real testing.
>The main devs have given up trying to debug it.

Well, now you have my interest! Is this a talent gap or fatigue in the organization? Sounds like a meaty challenge.
The article is very nice, thanks a lot for it. Especially since I hear the word concurrency and parallelism often thrown around without any distinction.

Very off topic, but I have read several times the argument that the rise of functional programming is due to it's easy concurrency (since functions don't have side effects) and that concurrency becomes more and more important due to moores law being dead (i.e. we can't scale the hardware up, we have to add cores to our processors).

Could someone with more experience comment on that? Is concurrency really easier in functional languages and is the rising importance of concurrency a valid reason to look into functional programming?
Windows 10x is exactly that.
Wuhan denying virus tests to keep numbers down
Atheism is not a scientific fact; it's a faith. Rupert Sheldrake says of Dawkins that his purpose in life is to convince everyone else that life has no purpose. I don't claim that Dawkins would lie to defend his faith but there is absolutely no reason why he shouldn't.
According to the WaPo, it's likely that far more people are infected in Italy than we know about, and therefore the true mortality rate is much lower. Apparently the government is only testing people with "severe symptoms":

> The actual Italian death rate, they say, is probably far lower than what the government numbers suggest. The unofficial estimates assume the actual number of people infected with the virus — people who have not yet been tested — is massive. In other words, several hundred thousand people in Italy may be carrying the virus.

> “It’s a huge iceberg,” said Fabrizio Pregliasco, a virologist at the University of Milan. “We are only looking at those who are sick.”

> Though Italian leaders touted widespread testing at the beginning of the outbreak, the government has applied tight guidelines for who can be given swabs. Health officials have been testing those who have severe symptoms and are in need of obvious medical care.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/why-is-coronavir...
> Why are stats like that not shared?

They are being shared daily.
> The sched_yield() puts the calling thread to sleep and at the back of the scheduler’s run queue.

Not necessarily, but it is fine for this purpose I suppose. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21959692

Glad to see lock hierarchies mentioned. Barriers are new to me so that was nice.

IMO, it would be nice to at least have a mention of lock-free techniques and their advantages and disadvantages.
With more data and info flowing its getting more and more obvious how bad we are at handling complexity. That evidence is going to keep accumulating.

How people deal with that fact (or dont) is important.

The current response/reaction to that, is to blame/replace leaders/find false messiahs/feel good narratives/distractions etc but all that doesn't reduce complexity.

It doesn't require everyone to agree on what our collective and individual limitations are but just to focus on limitations of those we don't like.

Its a trap and what the theory says is it wont matter what people do in response to crisis when they are stuck in that trap.

Orgs do a bunch of things to create conditions where groups/factions don't get carried away by blindness to their own limitations. If you are interested in the subject start with Herbert Simon's books.
Zoom's tech stack – WebRTC and proprietary
One can predict the future with bounded error bars though. Weeks of observation yielded some numbers including R0 around 2 and CFR around one digit percent (yes, we still don't know if it's around 1% or 2%, but it is certainly not 0.1% [1] or 10%), so 0.1---5% of the total population will die somehow due to COVID-19 if absolutely nothing is done. For the reference, less than 1% of the total population dies each year in developed countries. Enough reason to be alerted.

[1] CFR is a function of age (notably among others) and more careful analysis would involve demographics. Still, the rough order of magnitude doesn't change.
I'm currently re-reading For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's important to strip away the legend surrounding the author and appreciate the writing itself, and it's clear Hemmingway is a great writer.
My 2 cents for beginners working remotely
We've heard that before...

It may sound attractive but the snag is that they always add that they also want "to make sure that the hospitals have enough capacity to help sick patients"... Which becomes impossible if the virus is left to spread uncontrolled... At which point draconian measures are still enacted.

So the question is in fact: How controlled is the spread of the virus in the Netherlands?
There's a really important distinction to be made here though. "No better than placebo, and half the control group died" would mean it probably doesn't work. "No better than placebo, but no one needed to be hospitalized" presumably means that no medical care was required in the first place. If no medical care was required, then it will be impossible to demonstrate a positive drug effect by definition.
Your lungs are filling up with fluid and your blood oxygen level is going below livable. Drain it and and ventilate which usually works much better than not doing so with pneumonia in general, or just who knows, no good empirical studies in ventilating with pneumonia related to this specific respiratory virus?
In the UK you can now indeed do that.
The mind of a successful startup Founder
Epidemiologists were producing numbers, papers, estimates from the december and continue to produce them. But somehow these don't count?
> As the article notes, the 1995 sarin attack in Japan injured over 1,000 people.

Sure, but an equivalent conventional high explosive would have likely killed all those 1,000 people, wouldn't it have?

> In a sense, chemical weapons are a kind of 'poor man's nuke'. Russia and America are standing down their chemical weapons because they have actual nukes, and don't need to also have 2nd rate knock offs.

The article explicitly notes this as well, that chemical weapons are only really used by weaker, less-monied, static-system militaries. And even then, they're only effective against similar adversaries, not against more modern enemies.

But "poor man's nuke" isn't even really a great characterization from the perspective of the US or Russia: with a modern military, chemical weapons do less damage than a cheaper, lighter, easier-to-deploy explosive. They're not a "poor man's nuke", they're just a poor man's weapon, period.
Can't waste a good crisis. Just like those senators today.
> There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality.

Which might be amusing as a thought experiment. But as soon as you need antibiotics or want your shit to magically disappear down a hole in your house, you want to go back.

Needless to say, chances are one gets nastily bludgeoned with rebar over a packet of pasta. Nothing romantic there.
You should watch NVidias webminar about picking up Ada for their critical software systems, that was part of their reasoning.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure-auto...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZSSyWlsb28
A local restaurant has been offering a roll of TP per take out order. I thought it was a nice gesture but hadn’t considered that it reflects this shift in demand from businesses to homes.
Treasury Prime has been amazing to work with - a truly great team!
The numbers are growing exponentially until they don't. You can argue that they would have, had extreme measures not been put in place, and there are reasonable arguments for that. But you have to keep track of the fact that it is an argument you're making and not an observation directly from the data. Otherwise you won't update properly on new information.

For example, one thing I've seen people worry about is that there could be huge numbers of undetected infections; one guy quoted me 1.5 million for the US's 40k known cases. This would be wonderful news if true - death rates and hospitalization rates are 37 times smaller than believed, and the theoretical peak is nearer than we'd thought? But I've universally seen people present these scenarios as bad news, because they've internalized "numbers going to grow exponentially" as an observed fact rather than a contingent conclusion.
People are price-optimizing, not distance-optimizing, so the most hit are the large markets, which are usually the cheapest.