skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reports of “business as usual in Sweden” are exaggerated. The end results are pretty similar across Scandinavia despite approaches being officially different. Streets are mostly empty. People do walk outside as there is no lockdown or shelter-in-place, but restaurants are mostly empty or closed, ski resorts are closing, travel is “not recommended” even domestically and so on. The restrictions are based on recommendations and personal responsibility. Trust in authorities is high.

You’ll always be able to find people that won’t follow recommendations (So taking clickbait pictures of people drinking isn’t difficult).

I think the gradual approach might mean we are always “one step behind” since the idea is to introduce measures as they are needed, which you notice two to three weeks after you need them. That’s my fear, at least.

On the other hand I think we’ll se authorities facing the opposite problem in Italy and elsewhere when lockdown needs to continue for longer than people accept (already reports of this). In the end I think we’ll see that differences will be small between countries despite varying policy, and that policy will converge to the successful ones.

I hope authorities will be quick to introduce further restrictions if and when they are needed. More importantly I hope people are doing this before authorities require it, if reports of healthcare overload appear.

Looking at the curves now, I’m pretty satisfied, but again if they start to point north further restrictions need to be introduced two weeks back in time, which is difficult even for our trusted authorities.
I dont understand why amazon does not provide hard billing limits, like reach x usd then shutdown everything, just for emergency.
Ummm, it's more like, saying, I had one wife 8 weeks ago, and 4 7 weeks ago, and 16 6 weeks ago, and 64 5 weeks ago, and 256 4 weeks ago, and 1024 4 weeks ago and 4096 3 weeks ago, and 16384 2 weeks ago, and 65536 1 week ago, and I have 262144 today, so in 4 weeks I will have 16777216 wives.

That is, there is more than a single data point supporting the claims of exponential growth. There are lots of them.

Nice try though.
Here is a link to a description from my CPA (I know their site looks like shit, but they are legit).

https://wcginc.com/blog/paycheck-protection-program/

It is called the “Paycheck Protection Program.”
I wrote a long-winded, somewhat ill-tempered response, and then quickly deleted it. But in brief --

I have thought semi-deeply about teaching online. I do believe it can be done well, but only with a lot of effort, and (at least in my department) I don't think it would save the university money, if done well.

Personally, I'm not terribly eager to invest this effort. I've had a poor experience with our university's training, and also I just like interacting with people in person better. Maybe I'm just being selfish, but there are a lot of other things I can do to benefit my university and my students, which I'd enjoy more, and I'd rather invest my efforts there.

That said, I do think that universities who are willing to hire faculty for remote work could develop fantastic online programs. There are tons of dual-career academic couples that don't get jobs in the same city, and try and make some crazy commuter marriage work. Hire them.
I recall looking at this a while ago, but I couldn't seem to find what kind of RF hardware amazon is using, is there any information on that?
New – Low-Cost HDD Storage Option for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Short fiction is such a thought-provoking and underrated form, and I hope efforts like these help to showcase its creativity and relevance. First interview is with the inimitable Cory Doctorow.
This is the model that NZ (similar size/population as Oregon) followed. We have the network provider, which can be regional. ISPs compete for pricing model and peering etc, and the ISP manages the home installation, but all ISPs use the same network.

It is a country wide rollout, subsidised by the government (maybe loan, but govt takes risk?). They haven’t solved rural access.

Everything in my city is underground - mostly trenchless on the street using underground thrusting. Tech used varies by region and network operator.
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo: an early computer designer from Spain
How might this impact hedge funds and equity trading strategies? They specifically mention parking lots which I interpreted as gaining sales metrics and throughput data on businesses.
This is a "bring-your-own-satellite" service.
We have a weekly on-call position on our team where that person tries to shield everyone else from non-sprint distractions. They would usually be on point for handling requests from other teams, production issues, release problems, helping stuck people, etc. It's generally a nice way to balance the workload across the team and make sure knowledge is spread evenly.

For a team without that, I would either context switch each time a problem comes up (which could be hard if you're pinged a lot) or make a more formal intake process. I've gotten pretty used to context switching so my general flow is to keep a list of the problems I'm working on and break each down into small sub-tasks with check marks for progress. It's sort of like caching your current work and thoughts on the problem but that is still not as good as just working through the issue uninterrupted. I don't think the tool for note taking matters, it could be a journal, org-mode, plain text, outlook, trello, or whatever you're comfortable with.

Some teams which I've worked with have built out intake systems to keep random fire drills under control. The system they have is to keep a triage channel open in slack and a triage board in Jira. If you have a small question or need a bit of help, it's usually fine to ping the on-call for their team in the slack channel. If their on-call is swamped or the issue is bigger, they'll usually request that you file an intake ticket with Jira. This probably seems like overkill (especially if the company is a small startup) but if you're spending a significant amount of time helping people and solving production problems, this should be tracked so people can see the extra work you're putting in. It's important that people don't burn out or become the sole person who know how everything works. Newer management may not understand why you're struggling unless you give them tools to see your actual workload.
Someone told me old people in Scandinavia not going to the doctor when they are sick (unless it's very bad). It's a cultural thing. I guess it helps when there's a pandemic like this.
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Covid-19: US vs. Japanese response
> Many companies allow employees to stay home for minor flu symptoms of the employee or their children. You will be fired in countries like Spain if you remained home so often. (update: I mean that you can do this always, not just now because the new virus)

That doesn't explain the difference

In Italy as employee I can't stay home as long as 18 continuous months if I'm I'll and I can't be fired after that, they just start cutting my salary

We have now a third of deaths in the world

It isn't explained by intensive care either

Probably in Sweden people live already far from each other and population density is low, while also being a bit younger on the average
Basically yes, in some places: https://web.archive.org/web/20200324214448/https://www.teleg...

“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.”
You would need an insane amount of LEO satellites in order to get a feed which was continuous. I don't even know how to start doing the maths on this one.
You have it backwards. Database is named "foo" and the default schema in PG is called "public". PG uses a schema search path. When you select from table you're really selecting from public.table. Cross schema queries like SELECT public.client.id, billing.ledger.amount FROM public.client JOIN billing.leger ON ....
US has three months of data from Europe & Asia. Not to mention any other models of contagion. You're comparing it to a comic about extrapolating based on one data point. So no, the comic isn't relevant

& yes, people have talked about inflection points
Economic downturn intensifying: white-collar workers are being laid off now
No it does not. There is no one in Russia able to execute such a decision. There were some people in 2008 maybe, but that was almost 12 years ago.

Arguably there isn't anyone like this in the rest of the world either, but I digress.
Once I got something like a year of EC2 charges retroactively reimbursed for a few instances I hadn't used.
CDC estimates that 24k - 62k die every year from the flu.

Fauci estimated 100k - 200k will die from covid-19.

So that would be 2-8x on the extremes. But 2x would be the low end estimate assuming a bad flu season and a low end number for the death rate on covid-19.

Hospitals are optimized for typical illness, not for pandemics. And the death rate has been calculated based upon cases that get adequate health care -- an assumption that goes away when the hospitals have to choose who lives and who dies.
This almost feels like banking fees. A dollar here, a dollar there. In this case it’s a couple of thousand here and there until you can’t afford it anymore lol.
Silly question but I think a valid one. Do small businesses include contractors? In the UK contractors are required to form a Ltd, thus all incoming is also outgoing (tax, VAT, salary, dividend, expenses)

If that is the case, the $7 make sense. I only leave a small capital in my company £5-7k for expenses/surprises by HMRC (aka IRS).
Does anyone have a rough figure for what fraction of the power load on a macbook is going to the CPU? In other words, what's the limit in battery life for a laptop whose CPU consumes no power at all, but still has to power the display, refresh RAM, etc?
Launch a satellite, obviously. But you can look up existing ones at http://celestrak.com
This is conservative, but also, this is happening in a very short time frame, AND is taking into account all of the social distancing AND is happening at the same time as flu.

Without the distancing measures we have in place we would be looking at millions of deaths.

Once this is over, it will be very tempting to say, "Look it was only as bad as flu, we shouldn't have trashed the economy just for that..." but that of course is not fair reasoning. We only will have 200k deaths because of the distancing.
This is rather a "man bites dog" title ;)

Edit: It's also hardly worth reporting, or at least, with the sense of outrage that I get from it. I mean, anyone who cared would realize that the Saudis would track and snoop on cellphone users, no matter where they were. And so nobody who cared about that would use their Saudi phone. They'd just buy a phone at Walmart or wherever.
I'm not sure I understand you statement re: "100,000 deaths is only 1,000,000 cases". That seems an awfully high percentage compared to the recorded numbers so far.
Honestly it is the same form of reporting similar to how all the "trading experts" go on MSNBC and tell everyone the market is going to be fine to prevent panic selling. In this case they do advise it to prevent people from hoarding all the masks so there will be some left for the medical professionals who need them more.
Half of America is hiding inside taking extra precautions. He’s probably giving us one of the better outcomes. He also said 100,000 to 200,000

If we took more precautions with the flu, the number would be less too. And if people got the flu shot
Here to help! Sign up a contract with us, and we'll give you a satellite to rent.
The exponential growth curves have a couple dozen data points by now. We know they can't be extrapolated forever, but we also have no reason to expect the curve to top out before it hits nearly the entire population.
I don't think AWS are involved in the satellites themselves, they are simply making access to ground station equipment available over the net.
Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books are not nearly as well known as his Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy", but they are better books.

The Lord of the Rings is spectacular. The movies were remarkable feats, but they missed the trilogy's heart (and ruined some great characters). It's dense reading, but the prequel The Silmarillion is perhaps the only successful epic mythology written in modern times.

C. S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" is a remarkable adaptation of the Cupid and Psyche myth, from the perspective of Psyche's sister.

I loved Spider Robinson's Variable Star, based on an unfinished outline by Robert Heinlein.
as already explained, xkcd is extrapolating from a single data point. covid infections are being extrapolated from many data points.
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CVE-2020-1747: PyYAML library in versions before 5.3.1, where it is susceptible
What kind of med school was that?

Flu kills millions people every year
I'm about to try the same thing, but with crystal + postgres + nginx + cloudflare + serverless, so we'll see.
Mmm, I'm curious about what transmitter/receiver/antenna, they're using on the ground.
> All the Nordic countries underestimated the pandemic.

All countries underestimated the pandemic. From China to the United Kingdom, USA or Italy, every country underestimated it. The main difference is the attitude once lock downs are needed.

Maybe South Korea was the exception. But, South Korea is a high-income country in a permanent war with its north brother. The country is probably prepared for a biological attack similar to a pandemic. And, even South Korea seems to have lowered its standards and cases are growing up.

> I fear Sweden is still basing their approach on those optimistic models

Yes. It is surprising how everybody is blinded by exponential growth. "It is just 10 cases, it is just 50 cases, it is just 125 cases, it is just ... oh shit!"
Well, both are true:

https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Looking-for-new-LuaJIT...

It's more of an emeritus situation than anything, he's still active on the list as well.

I'd be ecstatic if hyperblock scheduling, or the quad-color garbage collector, were to drop onto the 2.1 trunk, but I'm not counting on it.
Battery life
How about they start treating these people with Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin? It seems to work. Has to be better than letting people die or suffer permanent lung damage.
> All said covid is >7x as deadly as seasonal flu and you have more deaths with no comorbidities.

You have some studies proving this? Because all the studies I have read flu is a lot more dangerous. For all ages.
Something I often explain to customers (shadow.cat is a consultancy so we usually don't arrive until several years into a company's life) is that, yes, they've accumulated a shitload of technical debt, and yes, I get they're embarassed about it, but if you don't cut some corners in the early days your competitors who do will drive you out of business before it ever matters.

Then I politely point out to them that they're still in business, and their codebase is doing something sufficiently useful to customers that it's making enough money to be able to support a budget for us to help, so clearly they did something right and I'm not going to hold against them the choices without which they'd've never become a customer anyway.

(anybody doing similar work please feel free to steal my spiel, it's so nice to get the in-house developers to realise they're not going to be judged because it makes it much easier to get on with the part where you work with them to unfuck the codebase :)
Deep Q-learning for playing Tetris
It’s not relevant; yes, it is wrong. Firstly, we have a lot more than the one datapoint. Secondly, we can look at what’s happened in other countries (like China). But, most importantly, the models don’t work like this, they’re more like a simulation. Take a look at the “Methods” section of this report, for example. It’s quite easily readable.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

This is the report credited in the media for changing the government response in a number of countries
What makes you think anyone is upset?
Snakeyaml: Allow configuration for preventing billion laughs attack
The Wizardry of CSS Animations (and Why It's Easier Than You Think)
Damn. I know a lot of people hate on April Fools jokes every year, but I was really looking forward to this.

Fortunately, this is _exactly_ what someone who is planning a great April Fools joke would say...
>At some point oil will become economically and technologically infeasible and alternatives will win out

And it will, but I fail to see how this defeats my statement.

Oil will become obsolete not because its price will rise, but only because the alternatives will finally become cheaper.

Which is not the case as of now.
Don't look at case growth. That is limited by testing capacity/policy. Look at deaths.
I think you have to have an upper bound set with AWS that kills stuff when you have reached the amount of money you want to spend. But of course, people would whine about that. "How AWS killed my business on the busiest day of the year," would probably be the article title.
> In Finland the whole capital area has been isolated from last Friday.

People can still cross the province border for a variety of reasons, for example for their daily commute.

> People over 60 are not allowed to go out.

The government told vulnerable people to stay home, but nobody is monitoring or enforcing this. If a certain 60 year old wants to go out and hang out at the mall for the whole day, they can without anyone stopping them.
I wonder how that project would have gone had the design been the deliverable instead of ventilators.

It wouldn't necessarily have been trivial for another company to pick the design up and produce it, but it would have been possible.
> an assumption that goes away when the hospitals have to choose who lives and who dies.

I feel this sort of statement misrepresents the true problem and portrays deaths from lack of medical care as just a capricious choice made by cruel doctors and nurses. This portrsial is neither fair or truthful.

If you have 10 patients requiring a respirator and only a single respirator to spare, figuring out who is a priority or has a better chance of making it alive is not the same as deciding someone should die.
Honestly, this is simply sci-fi to me. The fact that we have companies providing satellite communication infrastructure, just extremely futuristic. Am I just too slow with the catching up?
Yes, my point is the equilibrium gets lowered further if people are willing to accept lower profits or losses due to intangible reasons and/or commitment to sunk costs, self-image, etc. This is more characteristic of small businesses than large ones, of whom people always slam "bean counters".

Saying "the competitive market forces" is not a proof or an argument that competition has to produce the outcomes we see. If people were different, less willing to take risks, then there would be less pain in a crisis.
They're getting flack from other epidemiologists for doing just that. Curve-fitting the AIDS epidemic suggested it would peter out in 1995.

We only have the same curves if we put in the same restrictions as Wuhan, or get R down as much. Yet we still have megachurches holding services.

And politicians are using these as worst-case scenarios already, which will make them complacent about the urgent need for more ventilators, masks and PPE supplies.
I guess this hugely depends on where you live. I live in central Malmö and restaurants don’t seem any less empty in the evenings. Large groups of people hang around in the parks in the middle of the day and small groups (5-10 people) saunter passed each other on the high street as usual.

Not much has changed at all, maybe a few less people out at lunch, but it’s definitely alarming to me.
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The guy who died from self medicating did so by consuming chloroquine phosphate in a mixture designed for aquarium cleaning. The fact that the media put it on full blast was nothing but a smear campaign. For once Trump was not acting foolishly for tweeting about a medicine which is literally poised to save millions of people during a crisis. There were already at least two papers with positive results at the time of the tweet, and we have a mechanism by which the drug may function.

Chloroquine is generally safe and well tolerated. And it is not hard to properly dose. People take it prophylactically when traveling to certain countries with non resistent malaria. The fact that some idiot killed himself should not be enough to limit our own rights to knowledge and potentially self treatment during a crisis where the government has unquestionably failed.
But this isn't a small business loan: it's a debt to Amazon.
How is propping up the “top” of the economy not a trickle down approach? It’s the definition. The opposite approach would be “bottoms up” aka propping up the workers.

It will be bad for society if the companies at the top all go bankrupt.

It will likely be worse for society if the results are even remotely similar to the previous crisis: further concentration of assets/wealth resulting in increased income disparity and loss of workers rights.
Well, has there been any epidemiologists that have at least somewhat successfully predicted things, so far?
How so? Say can there be a strain of rabies that can be transmitted through air?
We also can offer you an actual satellite for rent, starting 2021. Have a look at https://www.exodusorbitals.com
I wish that was true but my data says it isn't:

- A verbose SIMD copy loop is often faster even on modern Intel CPUs that have the more modern rep implementation.

- A simple byte copy loop will beat both SIMD and rep when you're copying smaller amounts at a time.
This. The money needs to go to individuals/families so they can survive and stimulate demand. Corporations are nothing more than fictitious entities that organize people for particular tasks and goals. If equity goes to zero, that is simply creative destruction and new corporations can be organized to fulfill the needed roles.
> Governments are so utterly broken and inefficient that they can’t do it.

Exactly. Which means we should not be depending on governments to do it. This is exactly the sort of thing that private startup companies should be doing, without trying to involve the government's bloated and inefficient bureaucracy.

> even if they produced a design now we have supply chain problems globally

For this particular crisis, yes. But not for the next one, if we start now.
This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools.

Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhkK6jURljs
> So tell me, is this relevant/wrong?

The xkcd is not really relevant. The xkcd is about naive extrapolation from an assumed growth model and two datapoints (which is insufficient to even validate that the growth model has the right general shape, much less to have much confidence about the parameters.)

The covid-19 projections are epidemiological projections which incorporate many data points to estimate parameters and validY the shape of the curve, and even more general knowledge from the field about the likely shape of the curve of an outbreak.
> I wonder how that project would have gone had the design been the deliverable instead of ventilators.

The big company that bought the small one would simply have claimed that the design was their intellectual property and nobody else could build it.
i mean we have been getting porn from space since like the 80's right?