skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The graph is supposed to show mortality vs the 'baseline' (good question how exactly that's calculated, looks like it's probably this one: https://www.euromomo.eu/methods/methods.html).

It shows the impact of prior flu seasons. Winter of 2016 was very bad. 2017 not quite as bad. 2018 about the same. 2019 .... gone. Trend line is below baseline and very significantly so up until the start of COVID-19. There was practically no flu season this year, which means a LOT of people survived the winter who in prior years wouldn't have done.

The problem is Corriere is ignoring that in their analysis. Deaths may be higher than expected now, but how much of that is because it was much lower than expected before?

I suspect in the next week or so you'll start seeing people doing integration on the graphs to try and figure out what the excess 'vulnerable population' was at the start of the epidemic; i.e. people who would in other years have been taken out by flu but survived this year.

The red trend line will shoot up of course. You can see the latest data point all the way at the top right, it's nearly falling off the image.
Friend of mine, a nurse, told me she shouldn't get herself tested so she could keep working and don't get isolated at home.
Ask HN: Skill exchange or will work for free
In terms of lockdown/shelter at home, some of us are free and are working on side projectors. If you are looking for help on any skills, please post here.
If you can offer any skills and time, please post them here.
Opensource projects are best for this purpose.

I am working on a coding interview feedback website.

https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/14742/coding-interview-feedback

Basic idea is that companies do not give feedback on your code, so you should ask 3rd party for unbiased opinion. My CSS/frontend skills are sorely lacking, so I am looking for help on that front. Email in profile.
The Petrucci Music Library
I disagree if you are arguing for the sick pay Amazon workers are walking off demanding. They are asking for unlimited sick pay if they decide they need to self isolate. Let’s say Amazon goes and capitulates to this demand. Why would anyone in their right mind bother coming into work when you get full pay, get to do zero work, less social interaction, all from the comfort of your couch?
The administrators who were doing the firing don't seem to believe in that maxim.

Either the rules of civil society apply to everyone, or they apply to nobody.

When people with power brazenly disregard those rules, but expect everyone else to keep following them, the correct response is to not sit down and shut up.
As YC alumni and founder with experience working remotely — and given it appears likely, per YC, that the YC S20 summer batch will be 100% remote — would it be possible provide any suggestions for working remotely with YC as part of a YC batch?

(Already created a related “Ask HN” [1] - but please feel to reply (if you do) wherever makes sense to you.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750941
If you allow it, then it could also be seen as a tacit acknowledgement that n95 masks are really the proper equipment. Logical, in a terrible way.
I don't use it for streaming but for recording screencasts and it does an excellent job there. I'm sure if I dig in a little, I'd find more features that would my videos better but even the default settings (on mac and Linux) work very well.
It's naive to think the whole world can just "work from home" indefinitely. Everything's interconnected, and the vast majority of jobs are still jobs that can't be done without humans labouring in meatspace. If you want to pretend the US is some magic island that doesn't depend on China, go for it.
Battery and electric vehicle lifetime costs (including electricity) are rapidly approaching the manufacturing and maintenance costs of internal combustion engine vehicles. That means that even if the fuel is free, it will be cheaper to operate an electric vehicle.

Low oil prices can delay that cost intersection, but won't prevent it from eventually happening because internal combustion vehicles are more complex and costly to maintain even without taking into account fuel costs. So as long as EV manufacturing costs continue to decline and electricity continues to get cheaper from low cost renewables, ICE vehicles will eventually become obsolete no matter the oil price.
As a potential customer: nothing but people don't know what they want to buy, so a site that aggregates and rates new offerings is really useful.
So more like trend spending than outright budget? Could be more interesting
> They also risk long term litigation by admitting they can't protect staff.

Actually failing to protect staff seems a worse litigation risk.
Most of these apps are basically just visualizing database data, with some very simple business rules for transforming the database. If you use the right framework, it becomes very easy and building an app is basically like filling out a template. Of course, if you start from the wrong framework, writing such an app can be a real challenge.
howfuckedismyquarantine.com
Show HN: Devblogs.co – a feed of engineering blogs from top tech companies
Are you using this with zoom, by any chance? I had no luck trying to capture my Webcam with ffmpeg, add text to it with ffmpeg, and output everything to a fake Webcam with video4linux. Actually, it works perfectly well, but this particular stream I can't open with zoom, even though zoom will accept it perfectly if instead of my Webcam, I add text to a video file.

I suppose zoom detects that my actual Webcam is in use, and therefore refuses to display... any webcam whatsoever, including the virtual one...? Makes little sense but maybe...
I tried this a while ago and didn't find the option, is midi supported to trigger scene changes, fadings, etc...?
I'm aware of wlroots. But KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, etc. don't use it, so each of those have to implement things separately.

Concerning the desktop portal API. It's basically just a wrapper around the native custom API's of the underlying compositor. And it is pretty limited in functionality. For example, the screenshot API just has a way to request a screenshot, it doesn't have a way to specify that you would like to select a window, region, or display/screen/monitor. In the case of wlr-portal, from what I could tell it just always gives you a screenshot of the full desktop.
Isn't this a violation of OSHA safe workplace conditions?

It's a known, lethal, virus, and they're not letting people protect themselves, especially if they aren't providing that protection themselves.

They must "Provide a workplace free of health and safety hazards that can cause death or serious injury;"

https://employment.findlaw.com/workplace-safety/protecting-y...

Perhaps they'd rather get a call from OSHA? Would they perhaps prefer their nurses call OSHA first?

In Florida, there's a law for whistle blower healthcare workers.
https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/whistleblower-protectio...

If the choice is be fired or die (or have a better chance of dying), they should file an OSHA violation and call out.
I'm sad to hear that, they seemed to be working on a couple of cools things(Pharos being one.) Mirantis just feels like a company trying to buy as much Kubernetes stuff as it can in order to not be known as an Openstack company any more.
I think it's pretty sad we passed a $2.2T stimulus bill, with $500Bn in unemployment benefits, so the average person that gets laid off can make about $60k a year (adjusted for taxes) to not work -- and we did hardly nothing to protect people that actually need to work and are at high risk!

Worst of all, most of these jobs are low paying -- much less than you'd get from the current unemployment. We basically created an incentive to quit your job over fear of the virus and make more money collecting unemployment.

I mean, even in hospitals there are A LOT of jobs that pay less than you'd make from this new unemployment bill.

After taxes, the average nurse aid makes about half what they could collect on unemployment right now.

I'm not saying beefing up unemployment was bad. I'm just worried this is going to backfire, and it doesn't seem fair to people working in grocery stores, on farms, and most of all -- in hospitals. It would be nice if these workers got paid AT LEAST as much as if they became unemployed, for example.
Eh, for the longest time their "unlimited data" was a sham.

I was paying something like $50 for 2GB of high speed data, and "unlimited" data.

Except after the 2GB it was literally unusable, no matter the time of day or location. Even plain email would stop working, and webpages would never load.

A lot of unlimited plans will deprioritze you (slowing you down) after a limit, but usually that limit is higher, and even when you are deprioritized, it still remains useful most of the time.

-

You can downvote all you want, they were running this scam well after the era of per MB overage fees.

In fact they’re still running this scam if you don’t manual switch to their more expensive “One” plan.
As an example of non-exceptional condition signaling:

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-24-algebraic-effects-yo...

Progress can be signaled, and then dealt with if needed. In headless mode it won't be handled. In a console it could be a progress bar or statement. In a GUI, update a variable that changes the status display.

And it ends up as little more than a no-op if there are no handlers for it. Nothing exceptional about it, but creates a great deal of flexibility in managing a system.
A smart way to resolve team conflicts
In the USA we have free market oppression, not State-controlled.
Lol, the price of corn, or even oil, coal, and steel are constantly adjusted by gov. You've proven the opposite of your point - market price is political and can be controlled when it is politically favorable.
I can't imagine there's any api-level dependency on the fd field being 8 or 16 bits. The size of the struct is going to change anyway, because it has pointers and those are going to change.

Even new languages frequently rely on libc and the FILE struct, underlying whatever higher-level abstractions they have.
Not even that, but the WHO was forced to give critical information to China and was not allowed to communicate with Taiwan.

Taiwan handled it very well luckily! They never had any information from China and that helped them more than us who had "access" to that information, probably faulty info none the less.

What an absurd situation.

It's becoming more clear that the WHO was misled by the "positive news" from China and based a lot of guidance on that.

While the Western world gets infected, the virus gets real numbers eg. Infection rate, mortality, ...

If it wasn't clear that Taiwan is a seperate country before, it should be now.
I am happy to hear that: maybe I am just too much of a cynic and appreciate more "real praise" (for particular accomplishments) vs "empty praise" — I understand it could be just me, even in establishing what's real or empty, so whatever works for you :)
We who? Administrators are the ones who hire and fire.
I hope they get fired, it'll save their own lives
strongDM | All Roles! Go / Golang | FULL REMOTE (core hours ~US timezones, any latitude) | Full-time | https://www.strongdm.com

--------

April 2020 update: because we build remote access software, we're seeing a surge of teams everywhere go remote -- we could definitely use your help!

--------

strongDM is an identity-aware proxy for managing and auditing access to databases, k8s, and other servers. We build secure, high-throughput networking systems in Go.

We're a fully remote (UTC -4 to -7), building software to help people work remotely. We have high standards and high levels of respect for each other and our customers.

Current roles:

* Senior Software Engineer (Golang, distributed systems)

* Lead Engineer / Engineering Manager

* Product Manager

* Technical Writer

* Front End Developer

If this sounds like the type of work and the type of environment that would suit you, send me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) a note at justin@strongdm.com
> I've thought about calling local news stations on their behalf, but is there a better way to persuade them

Sadly, public embarrassment is likely the fastest way to get a change in attitude out of the admins at any individual hospital. So yeah, try to get the local news stations to carry the story (and to call those admins and ask pointed questions).

The slower, but more reliable way that helps everyone everywhere, would be to convince their regulatory bodies (CDC? or whomever) to issue a decree that all medical personnel should be wearing masks at all times. Then, because it is a requirement from "on high" the local admins will likely relent.
I'm very open to networking opportunities. I am based immediately north of San Francisco where I've lived for 27 years and have held senior management positions in large companies (Sony PlayStation, HPE) and more importantly been a consultant on digital evolution for multiple large enterprises globally. Looking for fresh business relationships.

Location:San Francisco CA
Remote: Yes, I work from home and travel/telecommute to clients
Willing to relocate: N/a
Technologies: I'm more on strategy, project management and execution side but have good understanding of coding world
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivermarks/
I have various project that were on tight nda I only discuss privately, ie not on linkedin
Email: use linkedin
Using State Machines to Simplify User Interface Development (2017)
Interesting...

I try very hard to avoid everything below the neck and our tech was pretty dismissive when I wanted to use it as an impromptu X-ray (but we scan almost exclusively heads).

Is it really better than CT? I can see how anything 3D would beat out a planar X-ray.
Seems like people took "greatest country in the world" a little more seriously than was intended...
Well, I'll be damned. Thanks.
Oh, that's why they need to unwind the stack!?
These things are what some take for granted and others don't even know how to ask.
Thanks.
I'll be fine. I'm master of my domain.
What an empty threat. A hospital is not going to fire staff at the moment of greatest demand, and a doctor with an intact credential can get hired anywhere they want in a split second. Maybe the hospitals can bully the nurses assistants and support staff, so the doctors need to step up and speak on their behalf too.
I made a jobboard for this - its free for everyone, http://jittoc.com
> One thing that we're really big on is, wherever we can, we'll engage in a paid trial, or a paid test of some kind. For engineers, this is rather straightforward. We'll basically just ask what their desired hourly or day rate is, and we'll put them on a modular project for them to work on. That kind of doesn't require being highly integrated with the rest of the team.

This is great for the company. But for the candidate, I'm not convinced.

If I'm a W2 employee, I don't have any interest in complicating my tax return for a couple of days trial contract. Realistically, how much more are you going to learn about me in that time frame over a 1-2 hour technical interview.

Some plan on a longer trial contract - I see alot of 3-6 month contract-to-hire situations. This still isn't good enough because in startups the candidate will miss out on stock vesting. In large companies the candidate will be 'other'... there is a clear divide between FTE's and contractors at most large corps/there is a risk that the project might change/role availability will change.

If a company is serious about hiring employees. I'm convinced w2 from the start is the best.

It sends the message - we trust you, you belong, you're a part of our team. There can definitely be a probationary period, and there should be a more stringent hiring process. To me this is about signaling. If a company isn't willing to hire full time I think one of the following: 1. You don't have enough funding to do this right. 2. You don't know how to properly interview people. or 3. You think this is being generous but in reality don't fully understand the implications.

Remote work is about trust. If you don't trust someone - you don't have any business hiring them. Even in the current covid situation I'm seeing people hesitant to hire remotely. It's crazy. It's so much easier to slack off in an office than in a properly setup remote team.

Contractors are great for remote as well. But set clear expectations - straddling between contractor and employee is counter productive.
comma.ai | engineers | San Diego | onsite | full-time

We have an open source driving agent: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

Unlike most other companies in the self driving car space, we are profitable and have 1000s of daily active users. Search "openpilot" on YouTube to see some of them.

We're looking for a software engineer to develop openpilot, an ML Engineer / Data Scientist, a Safety Engineer, an Infrastructure Engineer, and a Navigation Designer. Head to https://comma.ai/jobs for more information on the positions and requirements.

Reach out with a GitHub/LinkedIn to viv@comma.ai and we'll get back to you within 24 hours.
The case fatality rate changes quite dramatically when hospitals are overloaded. Additionally, the fatality rate of _other_ causes increases when hospitals are overloaded.

Flatting the curve saves lives even if the total number of infected people remains the same.
It only lies with them in collective action. Any one individual has to look after their family and doesn't have much power. Now, if they all stop working, at the same time, then they have the power and the ability to protect their families at the same time.
Tip: zoom doesn't list pulseaudio monitors in the available sources, and trying to set zoom's input to anything manually from pavucontrol fails silently (even if zoom is set to "use system default" or whatever it's called).

The only way I found to stream audio to zoom is to use a pulseaudio module that lets you use a named pipe as a source. You can then output your sound to said named pipe, and set it as the microphone in zoom. The sound is pretty bad of course.
Oracle makes some certifications and cloudy content free
14.230
A lot of doctors move across country borders for their careers.

Ethics/practices vary a lot between countries, and it only takes a small percentage of professionals moving away from one country to a better one to motivate change.
Bluebeam Inc. | Design Engineer | Dallas, Tx | Full-time | Remote OR Onsite*

At Bluebeam, we empower people to advance the way the world is built. We create smart software solutions that make construction sites more efficient, connected and safe and improve the lives of design and construction professionals everywhere.

Do you have a passion for CSS and JS? Do you enjoy thinking about the intricacies of building interactive UI with smooth transitions, responsiveness, loading states, error states, and touch gestures? Join the Bluebeam Atlas UXE team!

Our Atlas UXE team is a cross-functional group of imaginative and technical individuals that work together to bridge the gap between design and development. As the dedicated Software Engineer for Design, you’ll weave together strong design aesthetics created by our Sr. Designer with your technical expertise.

Our Design Engineer's main job responsibility will be taking hi-fidelity prototypes and converting them into reusable React and React Native components (web and mobile app).

Apply here:
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/design-engineer-at-bluebe...

*Under normal circumstances, this position would be on-site ONLY. However, due to current events, we are now accepting applications for remote engineers that meet and exceed our requirements.
Don't really know but my guess is that it is a combination of:

1. Regulations against using non-approved medical equipment of unknown provenance.
2. A worry about health care workers who don't have stuff they can bring from home. It's not as if you can go about and buy an N95 mask right now. If some of the healthcare workers have respirators that they have lying around at home and some don't then it could cause friction on the unit.
>If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?

Enlightened employers realize this. It's not super common in the industry yet, but if you can find an employer who doesn't track your productivity by seeing how many meetings you attend and how often you're sitting at your desk alt-tabbing between VS Code and Github to look productive, you've hit the jackpot.

Success should (ideally) be measured by value-add to the company, and dependability of the employee. Not many employers/managers know how to track value-add though. For a non-tech-savvy manager to measure the success of an engineer is difficult. They might look at your code commit and see that you removed 400 lines of code and added 20 and think of this as a "negative" impact because the numbers don't look nice. It's a frustrating aspect of the industry, but possible to work around if you work with decent people.
How come European Union countries, South Korea and Taiwan weren't hiding the issue then? They were unaware of the scale for a while, but even Italy did not try for a minute to hide it. Hiding or denying an epidemic is really something that only dictatorships do.
You're proving my point. If one of the most powerful labor groups in the economy is being subjected to ruthless firing for speaking out on critical health issues during a national crisis, then what does that say about the state of labor in the US in general?
Lol, the price of corn, or even oil, coal, and steel are constantly adjusted by gov policies. You've proven the opposite of your point - market price is political and can be controlled when it is politically favorable.
No one is claiming that you have to make your infant understand. This isn't even a reasonable misunderstanding, the problem lies entirely with you.
Remember, the stimulus bill just passed by Congress provides for arguably robust unemployment benefits for those who lose employment because of COVID, including having to quarantine to protect one’s self.

I agree collective action is the path to long term success, but these workers should not feel a gun is being held to their head by health system administration.
The article referenced a closure of beaches. New York recently closed "parks." This is counterproductive. People need spaces in order to be socially distant. If you close all the spaces, they will not be distant.
We have a unionist running for president but the electorate doesn't seem to want that at the moment. I think we're witnessing another symptom of growing inequality. Several billionaires such as Ray Dalio have rightly remarked that this is a dangerous and potentially destabilizing development in our society. What is most troubling to me is that it appears we would rather blame others instead of trying to solve the underlying issues.
Who’s going to teach us what to cook in our slow cookers now on the weekends?
Location: Lancaster, PA

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Full stack development across broad ranges of technologies. Spent years doing mobile html5 (tools got acquired by Intel) and the past 4 years in banking/fintech. Experience as an architect, team lead and special project support.

Resume: available on request

email: ian.maffett at gmail.com
US considers cloth face masks for the public