skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first book’s the best one but there’s an arc that carries through to its conclusion in God Emperor that kinda completes the whole thing.

I did read 5 and got about a third of the way through 6 before stopping and I still don’t know why either book exists. The previous story was over, and the new stuff’s muddled and not compelling.
The government failed here but they are the only ones that can really prepare. A pandemic is as much as a threat as USSR, Bin Laden was, or China is, so just as they have these billion dollar planes they should prepare for Covid like situations.
But because of all that scrutiny, the government often has to behave suboptimally:

a) Processes can be a matter of law, requiring an extraordinarily heavy bureaucratic lift to adapt to new information or fix bugs.

b) Processes are calibrated to minimize trust. Contracting must be as obtuse as it is, because the alternative is to let civil servants make judgement calls, which the public cannot abide. This probably mitigates some serious downside risk, but it also precludes a lot of potential upside. Other institutions succeed when competent and trustworthy people just do what they think is right. (I daresay this is the only way an organization ever accomplishes anything difficult). Government agencies are only allowed to do that in emergencies, or in tiny edge cases like special forces.

c) Where leaders do have latitude, the fear of embarrassment weighs unusually heavy on their decision-making. It's harder to take good risks. I'm sure there was waste at IBM that would not survive in government. I'm equally sure there was innovation at IBM that could not have happened in government.

In some ways "government can't do anything right" is a self-fulling prophecy. The controls we implement in response to that perception make it come true. More fundamentally, I think any engineer can identify with how having to balance so many stakeholders could be incompatible with doing their best work. Making government less accountable probably isn't the answer either.
Completely agree. As a stylist he is crude and clunky. But his plots and ideas are transcendental and have been mined by others for decades since he developed them.
Here's a Reuters article about the experiment in question: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-study-...
> Government is not congress, or a president. It is civil servants beavering away.

The civil servants work on what Congress and the President set as priorities. They cannot execute plans that span multiple Congresses and Presidential administrations unless every single Congress and Administration over that time period agrees to support the plan.
I always have the feeling of a bit of “randomness” with these kinds of compensations. It makes sense, as it’s difficult to “codify” these types of things, lest they get abused and you might as well just lower your prices at that point.

AWS is a large organization; I believe this type of stuff highly depends upon your “entrance” into the organization, i.e. the account manager. We were probably just unlucky with our Redshift troubles, but it did eventually trigger a move to Google Cloud / Bigquery, as the pay-as-you-go method seemed a bit safer (although it’s still too difficult imho to accurately estimate the costs of queries).
California cases are plateaued due to a lack of testing capacity, I would be hesitant to suggest that the growth has stopped.
Reaching herd immunity level is a possibility but not inevitable
I wonder if this is related to Amazons Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation, would make sense for them to be building out their ground station capabilities.
Yes, more or less.
Restaurants are levered differently.
Nobody knows the asymptomatic infection rate. Without that, differences in mortality numbers between countries are meaningless, because testing rates are all over the place. Explaining the differences by overrun hospitals is jumping the gun I think.
Ok, we've put Gauss in there to beef up the title above.
My personal favorite.
Some tools are overengineer, true.

But more ofteb than not, people underestimate the problem AND the tools that were created to solve them.

Also, most devs aren't simply as smart as they think they are.

I worked with many devs that tried to force their mental model on an framework that worked completely different.
I’ve worked in many early startups and I’ve never seen anyone use such a loan.
Awesome! You might consider using colors from Janelle's famous color names experiment[0].

[0] https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2LxVDcI -- part 2!
This is not going to be the year of the Linux Desktop. What creative software got left behind during either transition? ARM is not an “unproven ISA”. Both Microsoft and Adobe already have ARM versions because of iPads. Besides, unlike the 68K transition, the amount of assembly code in most applications are small
The actually relevant xkcd for this case is:

https://xkcd.com/2278/

"[ The graph is labeled "Things", with "Time" advancing to the right on the x-axis. The level of "Things" has been rising over time to a point labeled "Now". The current level of "Things" is above a level labeled "Good", and about as far below a level labeled "Bad". ]"

"Here's the situation: This line is here. But it's going up toward here."

Published around March 9th. One day later one president was recorded stating:

"It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away... [B]e calm. It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen."

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/it-will-go-away-tru...

The article covering that concludes:

... "he's still acting as if he can bluff his way out of the crisis. He cannot."
About 4 years of medical school, and around 4 more years of residency training.
I tried to use composition but couldn't get it to compile :(
My wife is doing an OU degree, outside the UK, but in Ireland. (So, testing centers are available, but we’re paying the non uk/ni/Scotland rates). At current prices, an undergraduate degree from the OU is on the order of $20k. It’s nominally a 3 year degree, and at a full time class load, it’s supposed to be a full time experience, I.e. 40 hrs a week.

Of that, there are probably 4x 30 credit classes in first year, 2x60 in each of second and third year. For a degree in a specific subject, these are all going to be “in major”.

My read of it is that it’s a more focused, less all around degree than what I remember of an undergrad degree, where I had 4-5 classes 2x per year for 4 years. I can’t speak to the technical level, as she’s doing languages, which are all Greek to me.
Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus! Trilogy". I read it as an arrogantly close-minded teenager, and it shocked my brain open, planting seeds of heretical ideas and omni-directional agnosticism that blossomed over the course of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
Yeah, it had a big impact on my adolescence, too, and not really in a good way.
> I don't recommend more than one cluster per host. I just mention it as possible.

I actually use this as a cheap data backup mechanism. I have a primary database cluster on SSD, and two replicas on two separate harddrives. All running as three postgresql clusters on the same machine.

The harddrives run intentionally on different filesystems, so that filesystem bug will not eat all my DB data. (in case someone wants to suggest raid ;))
I hope that governments make some adjustments to tax policy to incentivize some industry-wide de-risking.
Because the government figured that contact tracing wouldn't contain the spread, it was already too far gone. Based on that it was better to reserve the tests available to those who actually need them.
The thinking behind that is that short of having a vaccine (18 mo off at best, probably) we are simply not capable of containing it, just slowing it down. Once you you somewhere in that 40-70% range, it self contains due to lack of available hosts.

Talking to people who study this stuff for a living, it's not an unreasonable assumption at this point.

Plateauing during stringent isolation (if that is the case) isn't' evidence against this, I think.

The big problem is that there still are not anything like good population estimates in the US, and unlikely to be since serious testing isn't done. Death and hospitalization statistics are better (but can get inaccurate if systems are overwhelmed) so the best the modelers can do is try and project from countries with better data ... inherently this is not as good as having good local data.
Blaine County, Idaho has the highest rate of Covid-19 in the Nation
For all those stuff, video is useless and prevents having benefits regular dashboard would.

Only naration is useful form of presentation but you don't need this tech to do so.
i am not super good at explaining this point. if components get complex (think about a buffered grid, the helix, the DatePicker with complex animations) you can end up with a huge amount of templates. you do not want to create massive amounts of child components (possible memory leaks), so you might end up with templates of several 100 lines and tons of if else.

there is a trade off point where it is less and cleaner code to manually deal with the json structures. sure, you can also manually change the generated jsx output, but i would argue that you need to do it in a different way (not consistent), while you can do this the same way in neo throughout the cmp lifecylcle.

now think about charts, like amCharts (just created the wrapper code):
https://github.com/neomjs/neo/blob/dev/examples/charts/MainC...

putting the json config of a chart into the json component tree has its beauty. the same goes for mixing the json based cmp and vdom tree. (the chart lib runs inside the main thread while you define you chart inside the app worker).

if many devs really want to use jsx with neo and accept a build process as the price, i would not mind if someone starts to work on making it happen. as long as it is optional.
Just show a metric/screenshot, it isn't hard to prove what you are saying.
Probably a hunting camp. Would explain the fact that the bone circles were often occupied but not a permanent shelter, and the large amount of mammoth bones.

Their permanent settlement would have likely been in a more sheltered spot, while the camp would serve as base for expeditions to hunt mammoths, then they'd be broken down and taken back to their permanent settlement.
Need for a Third Place
How do you update an interactive graph in Lisp?
There is no big or small company, just a government registered design and companies who can produce it if requested.
I loved Anathem, too, though I've only read it once (several books of his I've read many times.)
I learned to type at about 7 or 8 on what I believe was a surplus IBM model B electric typewriter, from before the selectric ball was invented. It didn't have a "one" key, you had to use a lowercase "ell". It was battleship gray, and it had a metal shell about as heavyweight as the bodywork on a 50s car, not to mention it had a steel chassis, innards that looked like a sewing machine if you unlatched the hinged cover, belt drive that ran constantly and idled with a noise reminiscent of the V8s of the era, and hurt about as much if you dropped it on your foot. The keys were very light, unlike what I've heard about the portable typewriters journalists used to carry. Barely touch them and it would go "snap, snap, snap" and then the carriage return would delicately release a spring with a click and send the massive carriage with the sheet of paper back "hrmmmmmmmmm..kaCHUNK" and you'd better not get a finger pinched in there. And if you pressed the "shift" key, several pounds of metal would actually be shifted instantly with a loud clunk you could feel to align the capital letters on the hammers.

I'm pretty sure it was the non-executive model at this link:
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro...

Anyway, I remember using both whiteout and the tape that you typed over to erase letters.
Validation and quality assurance in my opinion.
They acknowledge the New York Times at the end of the article. Perhaps they licensed the content. I don't think that anybody aside from legal staff at the New York Times can determine if anybody was fully ripped off. If you have concerns about copyright and want to do something about it, you could report the issue. I assume that the New York Times is fully capable of hunting down violations without any help.

The site is much nicer than the New York Times. I'd prefer that the New York Times be banned, both for the paywall and for severe political bias.
They flew to the moon.

They built a horrifying arsenal.

I really do not see why they cannot build a health system. They have done so here.
>It's possible SARS-CoV-2 hits the sweet spot.

Honestly, all sorts of things are possible at the moment. The truth is we don't have enough good data to really know much of anything. And in the absence of info everyone is free to arbitrarily prognosticate. For a forum that's generally pro-data it's somewhat disappointing to see it here.
I found all 3 books to be vastly overrated and mediocre at best. I would bet money that in 10 years, few will even remember them.

The translation doesn't help, but the issues with the books go beyond it. It's obvious that Cixin Liu is not a good writer. The characters in TBP are cardboard cutouts and his pacing and framing of ideas awful. I feel that there is merit in his imagination but it'd be better presented in a different format than science fiction.

To truly see how bad he is as a writer, compare him to the greats:

Stanislaw Lem, Gene Wolfe, Iain Banks (Culture Series), Strugatsky brothers, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson ...

Since Dune was mentioned in this thread, I find the first two books to be absolutely in a different league than TBP as they're complex socio-political SciFi masterpieces that have stood the test of time. I've read Dune more than 9-10 times already (as I've read and re-read most of the books by the greats I previously mentioned). Can you imagine doing that with any of the TBP books?
Government patents and the heavily regulated medical cartels = capitalism?

Not to be a Communist when I say "not real capitalism", but it seems there's no pro capitalism political party in the US.
Update March 6, 2020: There's a difficult balance to be had between trying to get it right and shipping a usable product. The repository continues to see rapid development and we have yet to make substantial progress on the major missing feature: dev tool support. Therefore we are bumping the release date yet again. However instead of blindly estimating several weeks out, we've discussed it at length and decided 2 months would be enough time. This coincidentally is around the 2 year anniversary since the first commit. Therefore we are setting the date of May 13, 2020 as the 1.0 release date. Contributors are encouraged to get any major API changes in before April 20 - after that date we will be polishing and bug fixing. Of course the API will continue to evolve and improve after 1.0, but we will be making explicit stability guarantees for some interfaces.

By Ryan Dahl
The loan can only be used on qualified expenses, roughly rent, payroll, and utilities. And there is a $100k cap on qualifying salaries. So in the hypothetical scenario where revenue goes to 0, the owner can only use the money to pay their own salary up to $100k.

Of course, in the real world, I assume revenue for most companies won't go to 0. So there are probably cases where they could offset payroll costs with the loan while pocketing the revenue that would have been used for payroll. In the grand scheme of things though, the loan is only ~2.5 months of payroll, and the businesses that won't feel the impact of this coming recession will be few and far between.
It's natural selection all the way up.

Anything that's not in that "sweet spot" is naturally selected away and quickly extinguished (MERS, SARS, Ebola, etc). We're basically breeding a bioweapon.

Not that there is any other choice though. Food for thought.
Party politics is a separate shit show. It should be an elected council with no single representation. That would allow smaller, manageable policy changes rather than burn the entire universe every few years.
How to Make Money During This Coronavirus Outbreak
I love this plan. Unfortunately it helps the poor so has no chance of being funded.
Yes tons and tons. It's fairly easy to just imagine it as a sort of DFA/NFA. I personally like an SIR(D) model where from the "I" state you can either progress to recovered or dead. You can kinda take care of that in the regular "R" case with the SIR model, but the "D" state makes the fatality of the virus all the more visible. Additionally, you can add "Vital dynamics" to the model by basically adding a birth rate dependent on the total size of the reproducing population that feeds into the "S" state. You can also add a general baseline death rate (\mu) that takes away some population from each state in SIR. Lastly, like the sibling commenter mentioned, you can add an "E" state where there is a state between susceptible and infected where an individual is infected but not yet infectious. All that is added are more letters and computational time :)
Reported new cases will be flat at the capacity they can perform tests. You need to look at death rate (change) to get better idea.
Virulence tends to be associated with a short incubation period. If it goes too long, then the immune system has time to respond. Rabies is a weird case in that it has low virulence but high lethality.
Commodore CDTV
>The jobs that a low population density supports generally don't have a lot of workers touching the same thing

They have a separate bathroom for every employee? People on worksites never share tools?
Most Covid patients die on respirators anyway, can a nurse do 90% of the job ("good enough") and ask a doc if the rest is needed? The other option is worse and I doubt USA can afford to have docs sitting for decades waiting for another Covid like scenario. Remember these ventilators will be produced and go in storage to wait...
Agree it's not inevitable, but seems plausibly to be the highest probability path at this point.
Well the first thing you do is ban professional politicians and lobbying.
Well, consider the population difference too — NY State has 20M residents to Washington’s 7.5M, which is less than the population of NYC alone. Be wary of comparing raw counts when the underlying population sizes are so different!
Steve Blank: A 5-Day Plan to Keep Your Company Afloat
Wasn't this announced last year?
Partly this is a problem with jargon. When healthcare professionals talk about "beds" or "ventilators" they mean "the bed and all the staff needed for the patient in that bed", or "the ventilator and all the staff needed to put a patient on, and take a patient off, the ventilator".

Ventilators turn out the be pretty complicated.

Here's a useful thread: https://twitter.com/aroradrn/status/1243091107149418496

And another simplified cheat sheet for people who use machines in one setting which are now being used in other settings, but it has replies from doctors asking questions that give some hints at the complexity: https://twitter.com/aroradrn/status/1244134454001635329?s=20

Then you have all the "human factors" stuff caused by machines having different layouts.
Curious how long this condition will persist with a grand total of zero celebrity deaths worldwide and a relatively modest amount of deaths made up primarily of people either elderly or suffering from comorbidities?

Meanwhile in just a few months (Oct 1, 2019 - Mar 21, 2020) the common flu has quietly killed between 24,000-64,000 Americans.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
Yeah, this had a huge impact on me in my twenties/early thirties.
Or even simpler, we could have a one person, one vote system. It would have worked in 2016 and 2000. When you have a system where the less popular candidate wins regularly, is it any wonder people are disillusioned by it?

Let's not even talk about the Senate where 500k people get the same amount of votes as 50 million. Yes, the founding fathers goal to not let rural areas be unrepresented was achieved at the expense of making the most populous areas underrepresented. So now instead of majority rule dominating minorities, minority rule dominates the majority. Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong? /s
> "You just don't get this with online or remote learning."

I have learned literally more than 99% of my knowledgefrom strangers on the internet and ad hoc conversations on irc and reddit.
Doubtful about the human species, but it could bring about the end of civilization.
Agreement to cancel could be made conditional upon publishing the design and releasing it into the public domain.

If the big company detests that idea, well, they don't get out of the original contract.
yep, i do this on my edge OPNSense appliance, except with

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
Berkshire Hathaway Energy knows that Renewables both solar and wind are much cheaper than their existing coal plants. They are closing coal plants as quickly as they are allowed.

Many PUCs are reluctant to allow too many coal plants to close due to local politics and fears about grid reliability.
What’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too?

What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
I love that clip
Show HN: An open source document search engine written in Go
Norway's death and infected numbers have almost linear growth. Norway is comparably testing alot so that's why infected numbers are high. The underlying model is still exponential. Current measures from the point in time they were installed seems to work as intended, for now.

Measures might be eased up after Easter, based on interim scientific findings and recommendations from several ministries.

Communication, timing, updates have been timely, though people and businesses worry about how to deal with the new economic reality.
With the current tools we have, it seems inevitable to me. Look at china or hong kong... lockdown led to getting local infections under control, which leads to an easing of restrictions, which lead to new infections from outside of the region. So by that logic, life doesn't get to go back to "normal" until either herd immunity is reached, or new tools come online.
Infectiousness and incubation period tend to be in tension with each other, many routes for virus shedding are symptoms (runny nose, cough, etc).

An extremely high death rate also does a better job of motivating responses, which while it isn't directly biological, has a significant impact on transmission.

I'm not so sure we really understand the full possibility space of infectious diseases though.
Or in this case, selectively breeding.
No, not stupid. It's one scenario, but the time span is absent: do we reach 0.7 in three years or three months? At the current rate probably the latter, which might increase the 0.01 as well, because of a certain overwhelming of the health care system in the US (e.g. a young boy in California has not been treated because he could not pay, so he died).
Sigh, a lot of these posts just feel like someone who's regurgitating their studies in order to overcomplicate simple concepts.
Was truly hoping for some deep thoughts once he/she entered poly-order derivatives, alas yet another mental masturbation.
Covid-19: Cases and deaths per capita
That and Deadeye Dick are the two outside his big, famous works (Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle being the big two, followed probably by Breakfast of Champions) that I like best. Bluebeard in particular manages to cover most of the themes and ideas from the rest of his books all in one, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than the rest but does make it interesting.
The lack of self awareness in that comment is amazing. Do you ever read what you write?