skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. But my question had less to do with why it was popular generally, and more with why it's on the USMC commandant's reading list specifically.

That said, the USMC Research Library [1] places it in, among other categories, "Regression (Civilization)", which may cast a glimmer of light on why it's where it is.

[1] https://usmc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?d...
https://twitter.com/CVEnew/status/1237857121686802432
The fact that they treat it as something that's to be scheduled and canceled is pretty indicative of this.
The xkcd strip has two datapoints rather than just one. (Though still not enough to make the extrapolation useful.)
But the government agreed to cancel the contract at the big company's request. I don't see how the deliverable being the design instead of the ventilator itself would have changed that.
In PostgreSQL, the hierarchy is: host > cluster > database > schema > object.

By host, I mean a server. A host can have many database clusters. Usually it has just one. To have more than one, you would have to have more than one PostgreSQL instance running, each listening on a separate port. The default port is 5432. I don't recommend more than one cluster per host. I just mention it as possible.

A cluster can have many databases.

A database can have many schemas.

A schema can have many objects. By object, the most familiar is a table, but there are other kinds of objects: views, functions, custom types, sequences. An object cannot exist directly in the database. It must be part of a schema. The default schema is called "public". Traditionally in other databases, there was a schema for each user. So if jdoe logs in, his default schema is also called jdoe. In fact in other databases this is the only schema a user can have. You cannot make more schemas and name them whatever you wish.

The advantage of a schema over a database is that you can make a query that uses objects in different schemas.

select *
from schema1.table1
join schema2.table2 on table1.col = table2.col

If the tables were in different databases, then you could not combine them as easily. I think you would have to resort to Foreign Data Wrappers.

I have gotten a long way, with many applications over many years, with one host, one cluster, one database, and many schemas.
It was already a small private company doing the contract. Another bigger company (that was publicly traded and therefore operating with shareholder profit as the primary if only concern) came along and bought the smaller private company. This happens to start-ups all the time.

What does this have to do with "government's bloated and inefficient bureaucracy"? The only government failure I see in this story is that they allowed the sale of the small company to the big one, or that they allowed the big company to get out of the contract.
You’re correct! Insurance in America is a surprisingly low margin business!
Agreed, I so wish one of the networks or YouTube would give someone like Fauci an hour or two to walk through their methodology in detail instead of just answering topical questions on projections from pundits. We’re not getting a whole lot of context right now that would be useful and engaging.
> Because all the studies I have read flu is a lot more dangerous

Every study I've seen the seasonal flu has a case mortality rate that varies form year to year in the close neighborhood of 0.1%, the low estimate of the case mortality rate I've seen for covid-19 is around 1% in countries with functional healthcare systems. The ratio of cases requiring hospitalization is similarly at least an order of magnitude greater for Covid-19, which is also why it poses a danger (already being realized in several parts of the United States, and very much realized, e.g., in Italy) of overwhelming the healthcare system, driving the car mortality rate higher for all conditions, including itself.

We don't annually overwhelm the healthcare system because of the seasonal flu and exhaust ICU capacity and PPE supplies, which should be a clue that whatever you are seeing claiming the flu is worse is not only bullshit, but bullshit that isn't even trying very hard to convince anyone paying even a little bit of attention.
A best case scenario might be to look at the number of confirmed CV-19 deaths in China as a percent of total China population. This of course assumes competent public health policy, but we’re assuming what the best case could be.
Truly miraculous!
I always criticized the idea that “radical technology could exist but the competition buys it up” as a naive conspiracy theory.

It’s pretty remarkable that the government paid for this but somehow the international medical corporation can swoop in, buy the competitor who is threatening their margins, and void the contract.
Ask HN: Is Covid-19 a OverHyped Scam?
Well, you're not going to be able to make out a house from 100x farther away either.

Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as late as 2013.
The government tried, but then canceled the contract at the request of the big company that had bought out the small company they originally had the contract with.
Thats not exactly a fair characterisation. The Java GCs have been state of the art for a long time. Maybe they used to optimise too much for throughput, not latency, but that has changed.
Guess what happens when everybody has $15k more money to buy stuff and there's no companies left to produce said stuff...
They answer all that in the paper. It's not predicting behavior of people- we can still do stupid things and make this a lot worse.

But if we behave and practice social distancing and don't do stupid things, this is the estimate we have today (or a couple of days ago) of the timeline.

If I were a leader of the United States, I would challenge the population to beat these numbers.
Coronavirus vaccine unlikely to be ready before 18 months
Fantastic! Love the onlyworkswithjavascript pure white (#FFFFFF)
previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991730
That seems like kind of an extreme position. They've delivered the most performant GCs around, many of which are performant enough for a huge number of users.

Also, 1ms is an eternity on modern hardware

I hate to break it to you but malloc and free aren't instant either. Also ZGC can do less than 1msec pauses, often way less. At some point it just doesn't matter anymore for virtually all users.

That means each GC cycle can latency blip 1000’s of other machines.

Linux kernel timeslice is longer than 1 msec, so good luck if your server runs >1 process of any kind at all.
Full article https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/543058v2
I bounced pretty hard off that trilogy. I couldn't get past the weird motivations and interactions between characters, and usually I don't mind books by authors who focus more on the situation than the people in it. I thought the novels had a dreamlike quality to them, with people behaving in ways that don't make entirely sense, but approximate a semblence of normality that can be accepted if you don't look too closely.
Loads of people work in places where they need code monkeys and there is bunch of non coders as management who solve customer problems. Those are sad places to work for.

I imagine that how it was in the '90s so all business people were there to make UML and "proxy code" that was supposed to be typed in by code monkeys. Code monkeys also would handle all those "not important technical details".

But you have other type of places where one can work. Where you work with sales or business people together on solving problems. In those places it is more like described in the article.

This second type of places in my opinion started winning, because you cut out middlemen who don't code. So in startups you should sell or code there is no place for middle management who rounds up code monkeys. In those places devs get some power because usually it is a company that sells software so they are not cost center but competitive advantage for company.
They would say just launch something, and don't make a big fuss and run-up to some date
I'm really curious how their "deep freeze the whole economy for three month"-experiment will go. Looking forward to the analysis in a year or something when we have more information. I have no clue whether they're doing the right thing. Could very well be they're buying 3 months respite for everyone. 3 months feels like a year or two now when things are moving so quickly.
They pay themselves a salary.
>In the UK contractors are required to form a Ltd, thus all incoming is also outgoing (tax, VAT, salary, dividend, expenses)

I don't think they're required to do this.. certainly it's possible to work via a brolly. Public sector clients have started asking some contractors to do this post-IR35.

Whilst I know agencies have their own policies on this, do you know of any legal reason why companies wouldn't be able to work with contractors who are self-employed for tax purposes (/instead/ of operating via a Ltd company)?

Obviously in most circumstances it's a really dumb idea to operate as self-employed instead of via a Ltd company.
Agree with your point (that raw % of hospitalizations is misleading), but it's 2-4% of total positive cases, not 2-4% of those admitted to hospital.
Good question. Do we have a plentiful supply? Any one know?
Performance in general is non-deterministic in a multi-tasking os because you have multiple processes competing for cpu time. My point is that there is nothing inherent to Javascript VMs that makes them harder to control or analyze. Runtimes for other dynamic languages and database engines shows that proper tooling makes it much easier for developers to optimize for performance.
You'd need a matching property in the southern hemisphere for the dark winters.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Especially great if you enjoy seeing mathematical concepts kind of bent into the background texture of rigorous yet fancicful stories.
How about equipping every Starlink satelite with some optics?
ShardingSphere: Set of distributed database middleware solutionso
I live in Stockholm but I don’t visit the city in evenings now since I live outside the city and obviously reasons to visit the city (concerts, matches, restaurants) are out of the question now. I think one key element of the Swedish approach is this: don’t make restrictions that aren’t proven very effective, because people will adhere less to those that are really effective. As if there is a budget of restriction (same with duration, I guess).

Banning meetings of 5 people outside in a park (who take reasonable precautions and keep distance) might have marginal effect compared to some much more important measure, so don’t ban small park gatherings - instead try to get more adherence to the things that are important. This is my interpretation of the reasoning. If it’s based on self enforcing rather than policing it needs to encourage adherence to the important parts.

I don’t worth much about small groups walking outside or meeting in parks. What does bother me is packed public transport at rush hour. That just isn’t good and we should try to fix it. Same with some gyms still being open. Thought people would realize that they shouldn’t go so they’d close by themselves, but no.
How do you know if you’re living through the death of an empire?
For me, the interesting development right now is the drastic increase of CPU cores. ARM or Intel doesn't matter much except for gaming in Windows.

But of course, Apple does often surprise us all, maybe this could be something cool after all.
Sure. Unskilled labor isn't the only thing "unskilled labourers" do. But the routine work is, well, the routine.
For lack of better terminology I mean how an assembly line worker is not usually expected to "solve" the assembly line in novel ways. They might anyway but its not the expectation.
All these people peddling covid-19 scare scams are complete assholes.

Cuomo and Gavin should resign.

They aren't just killing the economy - they are killing the country.

If you are upvoting covid scare articles here please stop. You are contributing to the problem.
Love the clean UX. Obligatory reminder/request to add wide-color support for colors-focused apps/services (where it makes sense):

https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/
Cool. The ending to Cixin's trilogy was a little disappointing, compared to the rest of the story. (I thought the best book was the second one.)
> Why should hospital X buy 100 ventilators...just in case

Well, of course. That's what we're talking about, right? Somebody has to do the long-term planning for emergencies like this one.

I understand that most of us thought it was the government's job to do this long-term planning so individual facilities wouldn't have to, but this article shows that the government failed at that job. Unless we have some reason to think the government wouldn't fail next time, it seems like the only alternative is for private entities to do it.
Your comment changed my life!
http://resiliencemaps.org is a bunch of pandemic flu resources from the H5N1 days - planning specifically for a highly contagious mutation.

Gets into food security etc. It was intended as a toolkit for scenario planners and public health officials. See also guptaoption.com/6.SPRS.php and mattereum.com/CSR (coronavirus work.)
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting things, but it sounds like this perfect happiness drug would mean the end of the human race and of possibly the only technological civilization in the universe.
Hi, HN. I made Crono. I've been working on it on and off for 2 years and I just open sourced it today.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, some tasks are missing (email and message), and I have to write more unit tests but it's a start and a foundation to build upon.

I was hoping to get some early feedback. Thanks.
Use it with this?
https://agi.com/satellite-ar
Honest question: is the pressure range actually that narrow?

People can survive at high altitudes, which will see pressure of 70% sea level (or less, especially when considering mountain climbing). Additionally, when SCUBA diving, something like 30 feet of depth = 1 atmosphere.

I feel like I'm missing something here. Any ideas?
Almost everyone have a smartphone. Bank app is much more secure than SMS, because HTTPS allows to encrypt information all the way from bank server to the end device. It's possible to create a much more pleasant UI with single touch rather than typing that OTP. And it's even possible to create more secure solution by requiring fingerprint.

And if Apple and Google would implement some kind of universal solution, every website could utilize this technology making 2FA more secure and usable.

It's kind of strange that we're still using SMS so widely.

Also SMS is not that cheap, while push is free.

Sure, SMS is fine as a fallback option, just like voice call is fine as a fallback option for SMS, but that's about it.
You can embed the JVM into an app using the JNI APIs without triggering the GPL.

I agree the GPL+CE is a confusing license, however. But you're arguing that you should avoid Java because of the license. Think about all the companies that use it, when was the last time they had any issues because of the GPL?
> somehow the international medical corporation can swoop in, buy the competitor who is threatening their margins

Perfectly normal and common in the US low-regulation economic system.

> and void the contract

Most likely the government officials with the ability to allow this cancelation were bribed, or rather lobbied, to allow it.
Your worst case is correct but % population infected drops dramatically with lock down. The countries with better infrastructure (richer, Western) will likely see ~1-2% of their population infected and a death rate under 1%
Nobody knows what is coming, but I'm in the 1M+ camp as well. US is so ill-equipped plus administration is very aware, how devastating the economic consequences are even now (2T stimulus and infinite FED liquidity are already in effect today). Let this spread for two more weeks and the administration might loose their countenance and will declare: "we cannot save both the infected and our country, so we will save our country".
Here is an interesting read on the subject: https://hackaday.com/2020/03/25/ventilators-101-what-they-do...
TBH, the real problem is AWS bills cannot be capped in any way (you can setup an alarm, though). It's unreasonable to expect a programmer won't make mistakes.
I completely disagree.

If the government had done it in house they could have succeeded.

The problem here was the profit motive. Cheep ventilators endanger profits.

It is a side effect of free markets (I like free markets) that big firms get bigger, get more market power, kill off competition then price gouge. Health is a bad bad place to have free markets as the incentives are almost all wrong (exceptions: E.g. running clinics as a service for state run health systems turns out to work well here in Aotearoa - but even that is under pressure from consolidation)

Nationalise the whole ball of wax. Use waiting lists not wealth to ration access. FFS the richest country in the world is heading to a health catastrophe. What a bunch of idiots!
At what point would a VPS no longer meet your needs? Let’s say a standard startup, not something that will reach TikTok traffic, or something like Slack.
They overdosed is my guess. The woman reported they each took "a spoonful" in soda. A teaspoon is 4 grams. An overdose is 2 grams. I don't know why this isn't reported anywhere.

It was probably the right chemical, as far as I can tell there isn't an aquarium specific formulation, Chloroquine Phosphate is Chloroquine Phosphate. You could just as easily overdose on the prescription if you downed a handful of pills.

I'm upset they didn't report this correctly because now people can still die from an overdose and people who might have had access to the aquarium chemical might have saved themselves with proper dosage.
Exactly. The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government by corporations that have been allowed to become to big and to powerful, to the extent that the US Government itself has been deliberately defunded. (Sure, I know Government spending grows every year, but so does the money supply and corporate profits. Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking.)
Thank you everyone for scaring the shit out of the country into this mess.

All of you making covid into a mountain out of a molehill - why don't you hire these people?

Do you see the damage you have caused by spreading misinformation on the severity of this disease?
It sounds like your boss is making these decisions on his own without soliciting additional perspectives and feedback in advance as part of the hiring process. If so, that is a common pattern that, in my experience, leads exactly to these kinds of hires.

But with a fire-fast approach, it sounds like your company can move fast on hires and be ready to contain the damage.
The article didn't mention cloth masks. Not the protection of medical grade masks to be sure, but they do lessen the probability that the wearer will infect others. Which will slow the spread.
Nothing of any relevance to the mostly male audience here, but, sure, I'll bite.

I was breastfeeding my newborn and one breast was hurting like a bitch. A nurse checked me, which involved looking at my breast, announced I didn't have an infection and shrugged and walked off.

I was in my twenties and had a lot of baggage from being molested as a child. I felt humiliated showing her my tits and then got zero help.

But Heinlein had written something about blocked milk ducts and opening them with a needle. The book description sounds pretty dreadful, but that's not what I did. I sterilized a needle and used it to gently brush dead skin from my nipple, clearing away the blockage from the milk duct.

Problem solved. In like five minutes.

My sister also had some breastfeeding challenges. I don't think I was actually helpful in terms of telling her how to fix it, but I told her my story and encouraged her to keep looking for a solution because the medical establishment not knowing fuck all about supporting breastfeeding moms isn't evidence that it can't be solved. She did find solutions and successfully breastfed instead of throwing in the towel and bottle feeding.

The US completely sucks at supporting breastfeeding. It's awful.
By far my favourite one was Google Smell (or whatever was its "official" name). I had people in the office asking me if their computer/screen was broken or incompatible because they couldn't smell anything.
I'm trying to imagine all the useful things you could do with code generated videos.

I'm imagining a daily routine of airplaying the video to your TV with an annotated dashboard of quantified self metrics, weather forecast, plotted local Covid-19 cases, health advisories, etc.
We believe many things to be true, that are not true. And not only do we believe them, we passionately defend them!

I don't think many of us would recommend writing software on top of such uncertainty, yet we seem to think it's possible to do so with a society and economic system. Then we're surprised when it blows up in our faces every decade or so.

The surprised Pikachu meme seems fitting.

EDIT: To those who disagree, I'm rather curious to know the specifics of why you disagree. Do you actually believe that humanity, and each individual in it, has evolved to the point of something resembling omniscience? Perhaps we don't know everything, but that the subset of everything that we do "know", is absolutely perfect, not the slightest imperfection, however small?

Have our various societies and financial systems evolved to the point of near perfection?

And if it isn't that, then is it something else I'm off on? Just trying to get a better understanding of what the situation is here.
Happy to find a fellow Aubreyite (and also agree on the LeGuin). Just wanted to put in a mention for the superlative reading of Patrick Tull of the Aubrey series for the audiobooks). He is head and shoulders above most other narrators.
Natural selection is a physical process that is continually exploring the search space for exactly that sweet spot.

The fact that it has been over a hundred years (equivalent to hundreds of millions of “lifetimes” for viruses/bacteriae) since the last pandemic of this proportion that affects humans is a clear indication that humans as hosts must not be all that valuable in terms of natural selection.
I don't think they are useless. We cannot stop breathing for 10 minutes, but we can not eat or drink for days, but no one would say that eating is useless.

The same is happening with our society. We are sick so we suspended the equivalent of eating, while we keep the equivalent of breathing going on.
The USA has the worst government that money can buy
Aren't such shots form orbit already available from various commercial satellites? Likely they are already used.
I find it strange that all we hear about these days is the shortage of ventilators (okay, PPE too), as if it’s the only bottleneck. The reality is ventilators are useless without intensivists to operate them, and you need anesthesiologists and probably other skilled personnel too.

I learned through a personal connection who was actually on the ground in Hubei (but not Wuhan) caring for serious but non-ICU patients that doctors and nurses in their ward outnumbered patients, and they were at capacity. The staff-to-patient ratio should be higher in the ICU. With an overwhelming number of patients you simply can’t care for them, whether you have the machines or not.

It’s relatively easy to ramp up production of machines. It’s much harder to ramp up production of medical professionals.