skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sweden is significantly behind Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark at deaths per 1M: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

The epidemic is still growing fast though and since some countries are naturally lagging behind others, the effectiveness of measures will only be seen in the aftermath.
We are https://www.exodusorbitals.com
I haven't been shouting from the rooftops because I'm not an epidemiologist and don't really want to get into an argument, but none of the low/medium/high death estimates that I've seen have seemed plausible to me. The back-of-the-envelope math that I've been doing would put most of them about half an order of magnitude too low.

From what I can tell, the best-case death estimate in the US should be around 1-2 million, and the worst case should be around 5-10 million. Does this seem wildly off?

This is based on the varying death rates in other countries that have had controlled/mild/manageable outbreaks (e.g. South Korea, Singapore) vs. severe outbreaks (e.g. Italy, Iran). The overall death numbers also seem to change depending on how overrun the hospitals are (going from, e.g. 0.9% to ~3%+), national demographics, etc. I'm also assuming an eventual population infection rate of 40% - 70%.

I'd obviously be thrilled to be proven wrong, but I honestly don't understand how people are coming up with numbers that are so much more optimistic.
https://www-sfgate-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.sfgate.com... : this should work?
I got off the street by moving into a 100 year old SRO. I had a nightmare just last night about being evicted.

They've essentially outlawed gig work in California. I left California to get back in housing. I spent three years researching where I could move to make my life work. There isn't any place else I can go. If I get evicted, I'm screwed.

I can't go back to California and wouldn't want to, but no place else has similarly dry, temperate weather. Washington is much colder and wetter.

I have no car and no driver's license. If my life cones unraveled, there isn't another town where I can make it work.

The pandemic is causing a lot of homeless shelters and soup kitchens to close. They've also closed coffee shops and restaurants and libraries. There's no place for a homeless person to go sit and eat, plug in and get on the wifi.

If I got evicted, I would be facing a nightmare situation with no solutions.

I'm trying to chalk the dream up to insomnia and stress, but I grew up with really poisonous ideas that "if you dream it, it absolutely will come true" and I'm completely freaked out today.

We've spent decades tearing down SROs and not building anything that works as a viable solution at that price point for people. Then we claim our homeless problem is just a bunch of junkies and isn't about a lack of affordable housing options.

It's nigh impossible to live without a car in the US. Gig work is one of the few things that worked for me while the entire world was all too comfortable metaphorically stepping over my body in the gutter.

I've spent a lot of years fighting the good fight while getting no real support and being told it's somehow my fault my life is in the toilet. I've spent years trying to educate HN about reality for the masses in this country and being told there is no housing crisis, it's just a personal problem, the homeless are all junkies, get a real job, etc.

When the pandemic first hit, my life was only minorly impacted. I already live like a hermit because of my medical situation and I already do remote work even though I'm dirt poor and not one of the privileged few.

But if I got evicted, I'm not sure I wouldn't just kill myself. It looks so impossible to cope with at this point and the world doesn't want to change. Everyone is in a hurry to get back to "normal" and it's like, hello!, Normal isn't working well for a lot of people and is probably why we have a pandemic.

But no one is going to listen to me. I've tried to promote gig work as a solution for homeless people and lifestyle interventions for health issues for years and been dismissed as a kook. I can't get traction.

I think our problems could be solved. But I'm beginning to think they won't be solved.

The world would literally rather die than take advice from me and I'm not seeing other sources providing better solutions. I'm finally starting to get very concerned.
Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire - captures the beauty and importance of our natural world. Reminds us we can live simply and the idiocracy of trashing our own planet. (often compared Thoreau's Walden - also a must read)
Ask HN: Why did graph databases fail to gain traction?
A few years ago Neo4j seemed to all the hype. Now noone seems to be talking about it anymore. The tech seemed so promising and made so much sense, so why did graph databases fail to gain traction?
All of these tasks are "accelerated" by skimping on quality or using silicon dedicated to a specific program. It doesn't matter in real life unless literally the only thing you do is use a browser and nothing else, and even then only JS, not wasm. In which case, I don't know why you would even have a CPU with more than two cores, and an i3 would be more than enough anyways. JS acceleration really only matters if you want to maximize battery life and the only thing you're doing with your computer is contained in a traditional webview. That is to say, it matters little for laptops, as they already have 7-8 hour battery life, and literally not at all for desktops.

So, for example, my computer can encode 4 4K videos in real time simultaneously. Why don't I use this feature? Because the encode quality is subpar. So unless you give me a benchmark of the iPad Pro on ffmpeg or any other open source, non-hardware accelerated video encode software, comparison is completely moot. And the benchmarks that have been done on ffmpeg on x265 or x264 show that the iPad Pro is multiple times slower than an Intel laptop. Now obviously x265 is optimized for x86, but not on the order of multiple times slower. Unless it is the case, and that means that your benchmarks don't apply either.

Herein lies the issue, for many many workloads hardware acceleration while faster offers results that are not comparable to the CPU in terms of quality. So the only way to compare is by disabling hardware acceleration, and x86 processors tend to win.

Metal is a trash API that no one uses in the real world. It offers literally nothing better than Vulkan. And the fact that the chip is "customized for the API" is vacuous. All GPUs are optimized for OpenGL, DirectX or Vulkan. Same for a lot of the "Core" APIs. They will not succeed outside of the mobile market.

The T2 chip is simply a glorified security processor. There is absolutely nothing the T2 chip does that a traditional security processor in say a Zen chip can't do. x86 CPUs can already do AES at speeds so high you would need something like 4 RAID-0 NVMe SSDs to have a performance bottleneck, and even then the limitation isn't the CPU but RAM speed. There is no real world scenario where you would need to "accelerate" disk encryption or other kinds of cryptography beyond what an x86 CPU can do. Cryptography isn't some kind of magic you can't implement without some specialized chip, literally everything the T2 chip does can be done using a trusty old x86 processor and TPM. The only use of the T2 chip is for Apple to have more control over your hardware, and literally nothing else.
Monitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc.

(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)

Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.
What does "strong" mean in this case? The health care department issues statements in Norway that politicians were not acting on their recommendations, but rather that they were making "political decisions". I guess they want their population to look at them as strong leaders. We should not confuse that kind of strong, with measures that elicit a strong decline in cases. We only need the latter right now.
I think a better way to look at this is how much money banks make on overdraft fees (Even very small overdrafts). It’s just such a easy way to make money.
Basically implemented a CRDT set, even though they don't mention the term.
Chinese Company That Makes Thermometers ‘Jokes’ About Faulty Product
Have you considered that maybe broken inefficiency is not necessarily a property of governments in general? The local optimum might be to avoid having the government do things, but the global optimum is to fix your government.
Not sure, I'm not really a literary critic. I guess Banks does a good job of setting up the bad guys to be real arseholes, then knocks them down. The pacing had me reading this book in just two days, which is unusual for me.

This sprinkled with cool ideas like the giant brush fire, the whole empire being based on a game, the ship names. I also like board games which probably doesn't hurt the book.

I like most of the Culture books. My other favorite is Use of Weapons which is very different from Player of Games, much slower.
> USPS delivers packages much faster, more efficiently (fewer stops), significantly more cheaply, and with better employee pay and benefits.

USPS is fast because its mail is hauled by Fedex. Fedex is also significantly cheaper than USPS at delivering packages if you have a large contract with them. USPS is sometimes cheaper for retail customers, though, and it's also cheaper for standard mail.
what is so complicated about ventilators? Serious question as I don’t know enough about this. I see a lot of DIY posts that are probably not 100% the same thing but are they even close?

This opens up a bigger question too, is there such a thing as a path for open source medical devices to be built and certified and deployed? Is there a company that supports something like this? I follow Scott hanselman, a Microsoft employee who’s diabetic, and there is a big movement within that community to build open source artificial pancrea, using insulin pumps and software and such. Is there a play like that for ventilators? And other critical medical devices?
It’s ironic that Covidien was the name of the company that screwed up the ventilator supply.
The deadlier a virus is, the earlier it will trip alarm systems/panic. And as we've all learned in the past few weeks, in outbreaks days matter.

The perfect virus is balanced: just deadly enough.

It's possible SARS-CoV-2 hits the sweet spot.
I suppose that is true, if the crisis is impeccably managed from this point onward, we might only see 100k to 200k deaths. On the other hand, if it is not, it wouldn't surprise me to see this level of deaths just in NY state.
Why Canada Turned to Plastic Money
The difference is that businesses can acquire loans. That was why 2008 was so dire -- the musical chairs game of toxic subprime mortgage made it difficult for banks to lend money. For whatever reason, it's just far simpler for a certain class of small business to piggyback on the repo market, and when that seizes, so do they.

This time around the fed has been swatting anything that looks like a credit freeze, and there's no expected deficiencies in the banks themselves.
Very cool. On your homepage can you sync the code scroll to the timestamps?
Is there any way to model a supply chain as a control system? Like what you're describing is why PID controllers exist and they do a pretty good job of preventing failure conditions.
And Sweden is not testing people either.

The way it’s being communicated to me is that by testing people they will bring more people together and thus spread the virus.
Can it run Minecraft?
There is a narrow range of pressure where you're not damaging the alveoli from underpressure, but not bursting the lungs from overpressure. You need a mechanical scalpel, not a butcher's knife.
The Bible (Old and New Testaments), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, The Constitution of the United States of America and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
Transactions Per Second.

Always looking to optimize on cost for AWS. But it's a tradeoff of something or the other. Light Sail sounds like a great solution for some use-cases though.

We run this for a Global/North American airline and easily hit 1k TPS just on API and event processing traffic. The spikes can show up anywhere in the multitude of processes due to various business events (high reservation traffic to irregular operations due to weather, pandemics etc.) Performance and reliability wise, serverless has been a very predictable consistent experience. Costs are another story.
This story, if accurate, is simply an illustration of how low-regulation capitalism works. "Working as intended." Profit is the only motive, and thus as long as the company/investors profit, then it is a success.

The fact that national or global human well-being suffered is irrelevant (so long as we accept that capitalism (as currently implemented) is the right way).

Now, there's a strong likelihood that the government officials with the power to prevent the sale of the company, or alternately the power to prevent the cancelation of the contract, were lobbied (and financially supported in various ways counter to the benefit of the people those officials represent). Otherwise, it's hard to imagine the government just casually agreeing to abandon a project that was already demonstrated to be near success (and the outcome of which was already demonstrated to be important).
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. One reviewer wrote there are two types of books: those you read before reading Ishmael, and those you read after.
The site was suspended
Wait... isn't that exactly what the article says they tried to do?
Covid-19 seems to hit a population by first of all killing all the people who are pretty ill even without covid-19. Lots of people die from covid-19, but those people would probably have died later that year anyway, so there's not much excess mortality.

Then, like all winter time respiratory illness it kills people who have comorbidities that probably wouldn't have killed them without covid-19. The people with moderate but well controlled asthma or diabetes -- the chronic conditions that we don't think of as life-ending.

Then the ICUs start feeling pretty overwhelmed, and the ages of the people dying gets lower, and they have fewer and less severe comorbidities. Maybe only a small percentage of these people die, but covid-19 infects so many people that this small percentage of a very large number ends up being pretty large.

This is the point healthcare systems start building field hospitals in sports halls or convention centres. It's when they requisition ice rinks to act as temporary morgues. They start locking down movement just to try to reduce this very large number of people getting infected.

ICU doctors and nurses are now overwhelmed, and they're improvising PPE out of binbags. They're reusing PPE using weird new sterilisation techniques. Other HCPs have less access to PPE, because it's all been used up. Where they would have had FPP3 and eye-shields they now have a plastic apron and a loop surgical mask.

And they're faced with something they feel like they should be familiar with (pneumonia is pretty common) but which doesn't act like other types of pneumonia. Here's one example, but there are loads more: https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048

> When I was in med school you didn't die because of the flu.

The real situation is a bit more complicated than that, isn't it? Plenty of people die from flu, and it's the flu that kills them, and we have medical statisticians who can tell us what the excess mortality is each year.
Sam doesn't explain why this is scary. Why is ambition more important than happiness? I think if you were taking the happiness drug you wouldn't care that you weren't ambitious. It sounds like Sam is just afraid of letting go of his current value systems.
Well, yes...
> Governments are so utterly broken and inefficient that they can’t do it.

Mostly when your entire platform is that governments are broken so you do your utmost to make them broken to prove your point. All governments have issues, but there are many that aren't "broken" like the US, and more and more so the UK.
On the issue of campaign finance, there is the matter of the McCain-Feingold Act, as it was informally known. Senator John McCain tried for years to advocate for something of its like but was energetically blocked by his own party, such as in the 105th Congress when McCain gathered the support of <all> 45 Democratic senators and a few GOP allies, but still not enough to break a GOP filibuster on the bill, thus killing it.

It was around 2002 that there was sufficient political atmosphere for McCain to gather the support of nearly all Democrats and 11 GOP allies for the bare minimum of 60 votes to beat a GOP filibuster.

The bill had restrictions on: (1) soft money, or money meant to promote issues or parties, (2) hard money, or money meant for specific campaigns or candidates, (3) advertising in proximity to an election, and (4) foreign contributions.

President George Bush declined to take a stance and signed the bill into law without comment.

It was challenged by Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, challenging whether they could be restricted from airing political ads near the election date, and it was overturned 5-4 by the US Supreme Court conservative majority along known party lines.

All parties have their failings, but it would be a mistake to think that a vote for either party is equally meaningless with regards to campaign finance. In the GOP, it's only McCain and a scant few allies who paid for this issue. The Democrats as a whole spent severe political energy and opportunity on campaign reform, while McCain spent his own political currency against the energetic opposition of his own party.
Show HN: Crono, an open-source programmatic time-based job scheduler
We changed the URL from https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/29/the-u-s-tried-to-build-a-new-fl... to that of the article that it fully ripped off (and banned that site).
N.N. Taleb repeated many times already that COVID-19 is not a Black Swan event. Author of the article is just a con artist. This should be flagged.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Academy of Achievement
I think no sufficiently intelligent person thinks that hospitals deciding who lives/dies will be done capriciously or by cruel doctors. But on the other hand there were large numbers of fools in the U.S. who thought the ACA would create death panels. So maybe for the U.S. your point is valid.
Even in a world of non-zero interest rates, there's little reason to store money in corporate accounts instead of shareholder's.
"Companies submitted bids for the Project Aura job. The research agency ... chose Newport Medical Instruments, a small outfit in Costa Mesa, Calif"

This is the problem. Instead of allowing several companies to compete for a large order of new ventilators, the $ were given to one company to be spend on design not on the product.
It's reasonable to assume bb88 understands the nature of triage and was referring to that in a non-judgmental way.
Why should hospital X buy 100 ventilators...just in case, unless the gov made them do it?
Yes, that's one thing contracts are used for, to specify what you get in exchange for payments, in a durable way.
> Sure, but most large companies (the kind which AWS gets a lot more revenue from and cares about a lot more) want the exact opposite.

It does not have to be all or nothing. You could for example setup separate account per department and/or purpose and impose hard cap on spending for experimentation, but not on production.
> Looking at the curves now, I’m pretty satisfied

even though the numbers are very different absolutely (for many obvious reasons), the curve doesn't look very satisfying to me comprared to others

left Italy, right Sweden

https://imgur.com/a/FcGPMNq

Also: population density is much different

https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/gpw-v3/gpw-...

https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/gpw-v3/gpw-...
No paywall: http://archive.is/Iu89A
it's a fantastic book, philosophical and silly, beautiful and funny and sad, & arguably made more moving by the fact that bulgakov left it in a drawer when he died, broke and obscure. it's one of my all time favorite books and perfect for rn. sidenote, here's a pretty (non-spoiler-y) animation that someone made about it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BrA-XHXZ07E
It's a hard pill for people to swallow that they deserved to be laid off because their employer was non-essential. In an advanced economy, an enormous number (maybe even the majority) of jobs are non-essential. If they all disappear overnight, we'd have to rebuild the majority of the economy, and we'd extend the economic crisis by years.

"Non-essential" businesses that are in trouble under major social distancing include: most retail, gyms, yoga studios, massage therapy, most things related to office supplies/maintenance/provisioning, hotels, auto mechanics (they'll have some business but a lot less), airlines, coffee shops, restaurants, probably some manufacturing...there's really no way I can give a complete list.

Some large corporations will go out of business, though lots will be fine. The real hit will be small businesses, which typically have less than 2 months of cash reserves.

Note that I'm not advocating that more should be given to businesses than individuals, just that keeping businesses from closing is an important part of having an economy to recover. Giving money to individuals is the most important thing--it has an immediate impact, and targets the most vulnerable people now. But avoiding business closures is also important, and is important to ensuring we don't have 25% unemployment 12 months from now.

I do see how my original post wasn't strong enough in saying helping individuals is the most important thing. But please don't confuse the claims "the current stimulus is a poorly targeted shitshow full of bailouts for wealthy corporations" (true) with "nothing needs to be done for businesses" (false).
Why wouldn’t they be able to provide on-chip x86 emulation, exposed via hypervisor Framework?
They can use that for backward compatibility for non-recompiled apps while supporting parallels/VMware

Also, the move to Catalina helps to check how fast app developers and users switch to new hardware.
That’s something I’m working on at the moment - which is to build a tool that models individual as agents and how a banking system actually operates.
The “variables” then arise as an emergent property naturally.
And it’s a good opportunity to play with Elm.
https://github.com/newwayland
in JP Morgans case, bailout/Tax Payers cash is king.
https://archive.md/ZmW5l
Lucky Jim is wonderful: "the strangely neglected topic"
Another thing it’s got me thinking a lot about is how much of the economy’s straight up useless (results of messed up incentives leading to escalating red queen races, as in advertising, or simple organizational waste) or chasing the last few percent of life-satisfaction or convenience. Between the two it seems to be, IDK, like half, conservatively. Which is kind of alarming.

[edit] alarming that so much of our economy is spending that must be done to keep things working (to keep money circulating) but which provides between negative and marginal improvements in the world or our lives, I mean.
Paper mentions SKA has specific requirements but doesn't really go into details.

If you put radiotelescope in the middle of nowhere and you need to build your own powerplant and deal with logistics of transporting then you care about power efficiency and robustness.
And then get sued into oblivion by frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit from the big names, who have the budget to wear yours out.
maybe add it to you profile. thank you.