skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can ideas about Covid-19 most efficiently be routed?
Suppose someone comes up with a bright idea to diagnose, treat, or help with Covid-19. This idea doesn't appear in online searches, so it could be an idea that was already dismissed as ineffective, or perhaps nobody else has proposed it yet.

What are the best ways in which such ideas can be proposed and bubble up to the "right" authorities, especially if implementing them would require lots of money, or logistics, or co-operation between companies/governments etc?

In certain situations (e.g. kidnappings), there are hotlines for such feedback (and probably 99% of calls are crank calls, but there's a chance there could be a valuable tip). I'm guessing that such mechanisms have existed in wartimes. Do such hotlines exist (e.g. WHO, CDC)?

A slightly different but related question/example: is anyone (e.g. WHO) co-ordinating the collection of X-Ray and CT scan datasets globally, to make them available as an open data set? I could find some datasets on Kaggle and GitHub (e.g. https://github.com/ieee8023/covid-chestxray-dataset), but these seem to be small relative to what a co-ordinated effort at the "right" level might achieve.
Altwork
FWIW, they're usually called esoteric programming languages/esolangs, but I'm not a fan of that term. That's why I've been using "recretional" instead. :)
Thanks!
I prefer the rickroll, however I can make a special case where if you input a specific code it'll be a "friday-roll". What should the code be?
YouTube should autoplay the video, at least it does on Chrome
Exactly. The author is active on the Code Golf Stack Exchange and wrote this programming language with code golding in mind, which is viewed as relaxing by some.
So rich people, who were traveling around the world, are being provided luxurious isolation facilities by the government, while the poor, who didn't venture out of their country, will have to now practice "social distancing" mostly on their own cost. Off course these are sensible actions to take in the current time, but this just feels weird.
We have them at work as well and I quite like them. It is just annoying if you have to constatntly re-adjust when someone else sat on your desk for a week. But that's not really an issue with the chair itself.
The government keeps repeating the claim that most cases have been acquired overseas, but testing criteria in every state explicitly only include people who have returned from overseas or have had known contact with a confirmed case (up until a few days ago when it was very slightly broadened). The stats reflect the testing criteria, not the true distribution here.
Not sure about possession of something traded from far away, but apparently, neanderthals traveled long distances.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22486912
Love the Steelcase Leap as well, the chair has all the right adjustments for me and feels very sturdy and well built. If shop around you can usually find these available second hand.

I have two and spent 350 each on them.
Pointing out that there are a huge number of other factors that influence the spread of COVID-19 in each country is not cherry-picking, it's highlighting that you can't simply look at said graph and say "it's because they wear masks."
I second this recommendation.

HAG Capisco is not cheap, it is an investment (that will hopefully last for at least 10 years). It fixed my chronic neck pain using regular office chairs.

Before buying it, I suggest you go to a retail shop / showroom to try it.
Show HN: Magicdocs – Turn Documents into Websites
3D Cellular Automata
Yeah, it really is surprisingly similar to sed. "Surprisingly", because when I first designed the language I knew nothing about sed, and I still know very little (but I've seen people convert programs between both languages in a fairly straightforward manner).
There's also the possibility that you won't need all those pensions and health care money if people can stay healthy and productive well past their "natural" prime. The amount of accumulated knowledge and skills lost due to aging is also non-trivial.
Setup Covid-19 Dashboard
Out of the 7 references, most of them are journalistic articles and not actual scientific research.

The question is 'does wearing masks out in the public decrease virus spread, when social distancing measures are already in effect?'.

One linked (not cited...) research examines virus transmission and effects of mask use in a hospital setting - irrelevant for the question.

Another examines filtration properties of homemade masks, and concludes that they have little if any effect if not used with other measures, and doesn't (!!!) recommend their use.

A third one, a SCMP journalistic article refers to a Chinese scientific journal article that has been retracted.

I don't find these as very compelling arguments.
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke.

It helped me understand that all things must end eventually, and that it is okay. I must admit I was pretty depressed for a few days after finishing it though.

The City and the Stars, also by Clarke.

This one encouraged me to explore as much as possible, and also that people sometimes cognitively isolate themselves, and only come out of this isolation if they personally want to. They cannot be externally motivated, e.g. you cannot convince a truly zealous religious person that their religion is flawed, they need to realise it themselves.

There is also a curious anecdote involving this novel - as Clarke had rewritten the story some years after the inital publishing. The anecdote involves two people discussing the novel without realising that each had read a different version of the story [0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars
I use the Variable balans chair from Varier [1]. It is particularly useful to keep your back straight and in a good position. It's also important to place your screen at the correct height to avoid neck pains.

[1] https://varierchairs.com/product/variable-balans-quickship/
UK University admissions could face emergency controls
The Haider Bioswing series is missing in this list.
On the flip side, lead-free solder has gotten my last 3 GPUs on the cheap as 'non-working" when all they needed was 15 minutes in the oven to help reflow the solder.
Homebuild ventilator pressure control with modifiable PEEP control
Yeah, that was the idea. Just a language for fun and specifically for code golf (solving programming problems in as small a program as possible). In the case of Retina, it turned out the language is actually pretty useful for throwaway scripts for string manipulation, so I actually am using the language while working occasionally, but that was definitely not a design goal. :D
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. The point was that it takes more than a 30 day bootcamp to be more of an asset than a liability in a critical care environment.

HN denizens apparently seem to disagree, and believe that if you can learn some JavaScript framework in 30 days you can do anything in 30 days, but the world doesn’t work like that.
I code everyday for about 5 or so hours. I used to code 8 hours plus daily like a year ago.

Will try standing next time I am coding. Thanks
+1 to this. I got an Aeron with all of 3 days worth of use on it for $600 about a year ago. It's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Glass is literally made out of sand and recycling it doesn't even save a lot of energy. It's heavy to transport and you have to clean it and melt it again. Recycling it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Reusing glass bottles might make more sense, since you save the melting step.
The Discovery of Slowness
Its not necesseraly a fictious book, but pleas give it a try. It really helped me understand myself and also other people better.
https://youtu.be/gAk7aX5hksU
This interview was quite helpful.
Huawei says it still hopes to work with Google as P40 switches to HMS
Thank you for the recommendation and the link. I've been lucky to test it once, it is a very good chair.

What is the price?
It is not that WHO is lying, it can be misinformed or just do not know something. Previous global epidemic happened over 100 years ago, so I don't blame them for lack of knowledge.

We all have to learn and try new things, so if WHO says "mask are not helping" while there are evidences (maybe just correlation, but we just don't know for now!) that in some countries masks seems to help we should ask WHO if they are really sure. BTW: the fact that WHO pretends that Taiwan does not exists does not help investigating masks/no masks question.

"Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing" - sure, the problem is that even if someone breaths normally, talks normally can spread the virus. The problem with the coronavirus is that it has long incubation time. Someone might spread virus without having any symptoms.

My masks protects someone else, not me (unless I am wearing some pro stuff), as I am not spreading virus 2 meters around me, but 50 cm - maybe this is not that much, but in case of something that spreads according to power laws it might be a visible factor.
> Neither will C++, as far as I know, or do you mean that the compiler will validate the formatting of the string literal.

With iostreams there are no format strings so there is nothing to validate. Libraries such as https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt are allow to do compile-time parsing of the string though.
Author is offering $1k to find his creation on MicroMuse.

It's a good story.
Simulating a power failure to test and prove the resiliency of the system is precisely what caused the Chernobyl disaster.
Wow, I was going to post some trivial links to common national shops that were full of the stuff last time I looked, but ... nothing.

It seems to be due to a EU regulation that became active March 1 2018 here in Sweden, it's no longer legal to sell metal alloys containing more than 0.3% (!) lead to individuals [1].

I had no idea, thanks!

[1]: https://www.kemi.se/lagar-och-regler/reach-forordningen/begr...
It would be helpful to quantify "plenty dense" here. Paris has a population density of 21498/km2. Turning that around, that's roughly 46 square meters per person. That doesn't leave a whole lot of space for a potato plot if you're supposed to cook and eat those potatoes somewhere, too.
Beginner's Guide to ReactJS 2020 (Now with hooks)
Senior Front end Softwareentwickler (m/w/x)
well, the discord community is quite big. it depends entirely on the kind of folks you want to attract. you are right - if its the office going devs, management folks then slack maybe the right way to do it. although we have a slack at workplace but the gamers in the office we use a Discord server. so far has been easier to pull in folks there since the context is preset - you are joining because you are working full time and like playing games (namely Factorio for now)
Best Remote Working Tools to Use During the Coronavirus Lockdown
Some of things are exempt from those rules. RoHS currently exempts some medical and industrial devices.
On Firefox, if you have the bookmarks toolbar shown, and your window size is short enough, the scrollbar on the right does not allow you to scroll down far enought to see some of the tools on the bottom (Color goes first, then Style, etc, depending on how short the window is).

Other than that, it looks like it could be handy.
That presumes the outdated notion of perfectly rational consumers. Economists have discovered that consumers aren't rational anyway, but in the case of a pandemic the likes of which western consumers have never seen, I can assure you that consumers are anxious. Some consumers are even panic buying, and their purchasing habits are consequently even more irrational than usual. Even assuming you and I both manage to stay rational, other customers hoarding will affect our respective purchasing powers. (Tbh I'm not immune to group psychology which means panic buying.)

When a hoarder has a 5 years stockpile of TP and others have none, that's obviously inefficiently allocated in a time of need. Given that we've seen that the is market unable to handle panic buying and hoarding in (perceived) emergencies, strict allocation of certain necessities during an emergency really does seem like the easiest way to equitably handle the situation. More creative solutions may exist, like volume purchase surcharges, as seen in a Danish store [1], but by and large, "limit 1 per customer" seems entirely reasonable. (For whatever value of 1 is appropriate for a particular product.)

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/03/21/danish-store-instills-pricing-...
definitely try physical therapy
also possibly dietary changes, taking frequent breaks, might need to take a temporary vacation, then when you come back make sure to keep up with the physical therapy.
This is a temporary measure for travelers returning from the US and UK only. The Singapore government has been very clear that any future travellers who venture outside Singapore and contract COVID will be fully responsible for their costs.

Also, the largest group of people "enjoying" their isolation is uni students returning from overseas. Likely not the poorest folks in Singapore, but more ramen than caviar in terms of the personal wealth spectrum.
> forum/discussion for a non-technical audience

How interesting — what would your community be about? (if I may ask)

Non-tech people is a long term goal with Talkyard.

As of now, though, I'm thinking none of Talkyard or Discourse or Flarum (did you know about Flarum? https://flarum.org) or Nodebb are particularly easy to use, for non-tech people? E.g. Markdown for formatting text, and navigating between topics and categories, feel confusing to me.

> Discourse [...] the plug-ins they support, and the wiki topic element, the ability to theme it, and the ability to limit or lock categories based on karma and groups

Some of those things, but not all, work with Talkyard: 1) Wiki topics / categories — yes, by configuring category permissions (see this reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704726 ). 2) Locking categories based on groups and trust levels — yes (see the same link). 3) Plugins: No, unfortunately not. I think there'll will be a WebAssembly based plugin system in the distant future. 4) Theming: Can be done but not so easy — one needs to write CSS code. A theme & colors editor is planned.

> liked some of the plug-ins they support

I'm curious about which plugins :- )
Something that isn't too costly, is comfy (thick cushion), designed to last (one of the product design objectives) and blends into a more classic mid century modern environment (Apple style) is the Alefjäll chair from Ikea.
I like stories about how Singaporeans are doing well because unlike with Scandinavian countries the woodwork-crawlers can't use the muddy and dark-implications heavy "homogenous population" argument.
This is nonsense.

A malicious Linux application can exfiltrate all the data in your home directory. Taking over the OS is not hard either, just run a keystroke logger or put a rogue sudo in the user's path.

Of course, this does not apply if the application is properly sandboxed, which is sadly not the default on Linux yet.
The problem is the impossible standard. Every government was caught off-guard. South Korea handled it the best, but they have the preparation from the worry about chemical warfare from the North.

There is no precedent for stopping the economy for a virus, we didn't do that for Swine Flu or any other pandemic.

I'm glad this is the new standard, but lets not pretend it's always been.
I totally agree and it's likely that the public will be much better equipped after this pandemic ends. So all of us will have a box of disposable masks at home, and will be educated about when and how to wear them properly.

Right now, the average person probably only has 1 or at most a few masks, they don't dispose of them after use and probably wear (put on/off) them in a wrong way.
None!

I use a very uncomfy IKEA wooden step to sit on. I've got a standing desk for years and had a treadmill for a while. But those are loud and take up too much space.

You don't WANT to be comfortable. You need to move your body and be forced to stand up as much as you can. Otherwise your body will wither. Every artificial "support" will tell you body it doesn't need to support that part on it's own.

That's true for all walks of life really. Don't be too comfy. Nature will find a way to fuck you over.
Yes, because you can start manufacturing without a plan
Probably not the answer you want to hear but the best office chair is no chair. I only have a standing desk at home and my back/legs are so much better after 3 weeks of WFH than they have ever been.
It probably also helps that all the hotel rooms are currently empty.
This!

The fact is that in "the wild", so many different factors are at play that it's very hard to establish the impact of one particular factor on the numbers.

In a sense, establishing the exact impact of wearing or not wearing masks is as difficult as establishing the exact impact of the population pyramid on how things evolve. Combine both and things become even more obtuse.

Worst case is that one ends up confounding correlation with causation which leads to harmful conclusions. Such as over reliance.

What you are saying is the rational sensible middle ground in this discussion. Most domain experts are very careful in the type of recommendations they make.

I'm not a domain expert, and so I put my trust in domain experts. I haven't heard any micro biologist or health care expert urge wearing masks as a basic necessity. I do hear them urge to vigorously wash hands, practice physical distancing and generally stay at home as much as possible...
Saying the difference is due to other factors but “not due to mask wearing” is cherry-picking everything else other than mask wearing.
Is it just me or does this kinda sound like an advertisement for the tourist industry? Call me cynical.

I mean yeah people are being put up in hotels because it makes sense.
Interesting story, but probably a false memory as Commodore 64 did not auto run programs loaded from tape or disk by default.

Sinclair Spectrum did, but that was also easily be circumventable by using the MERGE command instead of LOAD.
this looks neat! trying to think of something to build with this :)
Wacko's World but he counts confirmed corona cases.:D
Senior Java Softwareentwickler (m/w/x)
The point is that downloading a key from a website does not prove that the key belongs to that organization. If the server is compromised, the attacker could replace the public key and TLS would not barf at it.

Your reactions perfectly underline my point: most users do not understand trust or if they understand trust at some level, they do not know how to verify trust.
Yup, because it's cheaper (more words per line / fewer pages).

You could argue it is easier to read (and better for the environment too) but it wasn't that long ago when fixed width was the norm (typewriters, dot-matrix printers, early micro-computers / mainframes, etc) and people read just fine.
I know for many of us a chair is a worthwhile long-term investment, but for those of us on a budget, I can recommend the IKEA Markus. It's sturdy, costs less than $200, looks nice, and I routinely sit in it for hours without getting uncomfortable.

I also hear you can get Aerons and other similar chairs for around $300 on Craigslist/FB marketplace when companies are trying to offload them en masse.
There are bad tools, and then there are tools that just aren't fit for purpose. If you are trying to melt metal with a machine and that machine cannot translate energy into the required amount of heat fast enough, it might just be the wrong machine to begin with.

Soldering with a bad iron is the equivalent of trying to chisel wood with a flat screwdriver: sure you can do something to the wood – it just might not be the thing you want.
Find the source of pressure on your median nerve, and mitigate it. Numbness and tingling are not good.
Switching between standing and sitting is better yes, standing the entire day is not the best option IIRC.
All nytimes articles related to covid19 are free, but you do have to sign in
I think if resources had an option of "At cap: Do nothing, Shut down, shutdown and erase data" that would cover most of the use cases.
Weirdest Bug Bounty – Getting PII from Office365
Conformal coating is not related to whiskers, it's to prevent condensation damage in certain applications. Used where it is called for regardless of solder type.
Per student in attendance (daily) for state base funds, and the same per school in locality. Most school funding is from local property taxes.

That’s the super rough answer - and no funding doesn’t scale, they don’t have the money. Schools will do almost anything to keep kids in attendance because that’s what their budget is determined on.
Thanks. I guess the chairs recommended by AGR are all of interest:

https://www.agr-ev.de/de/ratgeber-produkte/produkte/2837-akt...
Bought a WorkPro 9000 Quantum from OfficeMax a year ago and it has been my favorite chair (and I used to have an Aeron when I worked in an office).
> Why not implement similar things in Go?

Yes that's what I would have done, if I were to start this project now. Well, not Go, but Rust.
I am not arguing against wearing masks but your masks/no-masks graphic at the top does not show the full story.

I don't know why you consider China to be a non-mask wearing culture. There is plenty of evidence China is a mask wearing culture. Below [1] are articles from before 2015 about mask wearing in China. Anecdotally I have plenty of Chinese national friends and colleagues who wear masks.

As far as your mask wearing group goes, South Korea's trajectory is much like Western countries, which will also level off eventually. Hong Kong and Singapore are city states and are not comparable with large countries.

Evidence China is a mask wearing culture before 2015 (an arbitrary date to ensure no COVID-19 related articles):

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/10/pollutio...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/world/asia/in-china-sun-p...

https://qz.com/299003/a-quick-history-of-why-asians-wear-sur...

https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20090916/best-swine-...
And the Beaglebone runs what OS? Linux?

The PRUs are just the replacement for the FPGA resp. microcontroller. You have your relatively relaxed control loop running at e.g. 1kHz on the main ARM and the tightly constrained stuff on the PRUs, not much difference to running it on something external connected via SPI. Some kind of external hardware is needed anyways, doesn't make much difference including a STM32.

The problem with beaglebone is lacking GPU afaik.
Maybe. You may also just be leading the way as a cargo cultist. Maybe there's something else happening that mask wearing is a signal of. But at the moment your site is a poster child for "correlation implies causation".

I'm rather shocked at how much thoughtless agreement there is in this comment thread given the website makes only one incomplete argument in the case for masks.

Consider that in absence of real science, your site might do harm with such a bold claim.
Paired with a task chair was nice some days, mostly before I leveled up my fitness. Any cheapie with no arms is fine since it’s for short periods. Task mat, very firm, is necessary. Worth $90 or whatever, esp. post-chair. Now I work mostly service jobs, 100% standing, feels great. 2013 was the first attempt at a standing desk, seldom stopped.
They have a 90 day return policy and, if you live near a store (they have one in SF), you can return it to the store easily.

If you do try to return the chair, note that it's a PITA to disassemble.