skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on Diamond Princess data, where almost everyone was tested, the lower bound of COVID19's IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) should be > 0.5% for many/most countries.

This uses a data source independent from what the paper uses. Here's the calculation...

Current Diamond Princess' CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is at 11 deaths / 712 infected = ~1.54%. Ten more are in serious/critical conditions, so it could increase.

Since testing in DP was almost universal, IFR ~= CFR.

DP's demographics is representative of > 30% of population of many/most countries. (See figure 1 here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-myst...)

Assuming no one in other age groups/health conditions in a country of interest dies (unrealistic) and everyone from Diamond Princess who is in severe/critical condition recovers (optimistic), population's IFR would be = 1.54%/0.3 = ~0.51%.

Also, cases from Diamond Princess have received good care. If the healthcare system gets overwhelmed as has happened in many places, population's IFR would shoot up to multiple times as high.

Thus, 0.5% is a lower bound for COVID19's IFR, unless a better treatment protocol/medication is invented. Alternatively, if there are successful measures to shield the elderly from getting infected, a region's overall IFR could be lowered.
The Beauty of Single Action Controllers
Wow. This problem exists in my country's gov entities too. Only as a result of public pressure they finally enacted the "faxes law" demanding public entities to allow digital means of contact. Now they struggle to enforce the law and faxes are still bottle-necking administrative processes.
"The estimates, calculated by researchers in the UK, used aggregate data on cases and deaths in mainland China."

The problem with this is that China lies about everything. The state dictates what "facts" should be released. So this research is based on junk. To get an accurate analysis, you need to use data from a more trustworthy country like the USA, Italy, or Spain. Don't truth anything that comes out of the autocracy of China.
Is this what he was referring to on the last JRE?
You can say that about literally everything you don't do yourself.
> The idea is that any treatment that slows the progress of the infection will also buy the patient's immune system more time to fight the infection.

Is there any serious trial that shows that Hydroxychloroquine has any effect at all?
> Before anyone goes collecting sewage samples, consider deriving your scaling factors from discrepencies in ICD-10 diagnostic encoding practices.

Did I understand correctly that there was two diagnostic codes for cause of death related to the coronavirus? One for "potentially related" to COVID-19, and one for "definitively caused by" COVID-19?

If so, how would this skew actual numbers reported by the WHO or CDC for cause of death?
I've done multiple POS data integration products with retail sales and inventory data and have thought about the backend of this sort of app before. #2 is doable, the main problem is that every retailer has different systems. But it can be done with enough capital.
So, this still allows your valuable zoned-in session to continue and also reminds you that it is time for a break. Taking breaks increases your productivity, in overall, across time. Mainly because you save yourself from the huge dips of exhaustion caused by pushing your organism over its limit. Your body will strike back, believe me.
Aspiring to unpainted log cabin, surrounded by un-maintained forest or field, water filtered from steam or lake.
I think this idea is a bit paradoxical - how then, do we ever change our views? I think people simply reject isolated facts that are inconsistent with the paradigm that explains the greater body of facts. Which is reasonable. Einstein refused to accept that god plays dice, for instance.
Analysts can benefit tremendously from better knowledge of research, synthesis or process work, and vice versa.

But great professionalism can also be developed without as much cross-functionality between subdisciplines.

Like many things, detailed efforts unique to the subprofession can be the most essential.
The Danish Serum Institute runs a “sentinel” testing programme for the common flu, and they note in their report about covid-19 last week (available in Danish) that the common flu has mostly been eliminated since the social distancing and lockdown measure were implemented. They interpret this a leading indicator for the reduction in covid-19 since it has a similar transmission mechanism.
Help your user rate and review your iOS app
Ultrasound to Kill Virus?
As a minimalist, if you’re stressing out about whether you own too many things, you’re missing the point entirely. Does that bring you right to the same place as a maximalist- do I have enough?/do I have too much?
A bird doesn’t trust the branch, she trusts her wings.

1. Build skills

2. Have cash

3. Network
Mastering Mahjong with Deep Reinforcement Learning
> So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.

Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? It seems far more likely that someone was looking for an excuse and found one. (At the very least, the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology speaks to the general motivation not to invest money here, if not to any specific sneakiness around this case.)
Adalaj Stepwell
Except that I never payed any attention to bluetooth range, it's the opposite experience here.

I have the QC35-II and never had problems, neither with battery life nor with bluetooth. In fact, given that it seems like no device ever gets bluetooth protocol right, it surprised me that the headphones do exactly what I want: connect to two devices at once (laptop and phone). So I can play music on the laptop and when someone calls, the headphones seamlessly switch to the phone, and when I hang up, they switch back to the music from the laptop. Also reconnecting works without anything to complain about. I am also switching back and forth between two locations, meaning two laptops and two phones, and the only thing that is mildly annoying is that when switching the desk, it takes a little longer to reconnect to the other set of devices again. But it does work.

What would be cool is three devices served at once (laptop, land line phone, mobile phone).

I am not using the Bose app at all.

But what is annoying is that they don't charge and work at the same time. Frankly, I was pissed when I found that out. WTF, there are integrated USB charger/voltage regulator circuits readily available that do that for you. Probably it's due to heat dissipation problems as always so they might have artifically disabled this to avoid at all cost headphones bursting into flames on people's heads.
I still often see "worked at google" or variations as a credential.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of novel multi-domain projects?
A month ago, I read this article about the science behind crispy food (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22458358).

From organic chemistry to refine food texture, psychology and marketing to highlight appealing qualities, and audio engineering to perfect the sound of the “crunch,” I found this to be a fascinating example of several diverse fields culminating in a unique and functional application.

We regularly encounter specialization crossover in our professions; what situations or projects stand out to you the most?
Writing advanced table driven tests in Go with subtests and testify
How to Navigate Job Hunting During a Period of Layoffs and Extreme Unemployment
You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I have no idea what happens in general, but I can share that several experiences I've had is that the attitude is "we buy it and the vendor comes and makes it work" which, by necessity, is hands-off. Do that for enough years and you lose whatever skills you might have had to start with.

I would hope that my small experience does not represent the overall situation. I don't know. Just wanted to point out that there are side effects of the build/buy decision if you stick to it over a number of years that might not be noticed by folks outside looking in.
The reasons for it being so serious is not the death rate, but the rate of spread, due to lack of immunity, if you do nothing then hospital system gets overloaded and you will start seeing much higher death rates (see Italy, Spain) and not only from covid but across the board, heart disease, accidents people not receiving planned care and their chronic conditions worsening etc.
Well, for all it's ills this virus didn't arise due to and likely would never have arisen if the zoonotic reservoir was farmed instead of captured.
That's a nice saying, hadn't heard it before. And I absolutely agree
The amazing programmer at xyz company on abc project may have a lot of infrastructure and support teams boosting their stats. Start ups can't afford the overhead that makes a programmer amazing. Visa versa, a start up programmer may languish in xyz company.
I think these points are all true, importance from bottom to top.
Federal Government IT workers are paid significantly less than private sector. It’s easier for federal workers to buy into private sector products because they can blame these products/companies if they fail. They would not be able to do the same with open source “building”. Investment needs to be in a digital team. Disclosure: I’m a federal IT worker. I have argued for building as opposed to buying and people think I’m crazy.
> "The crowd loves a batter who can hit sixes."

Batsman.

sigh.
This topic reminds me of the story in Hawaii when they sent out a broadcast false alarm SMS alert to everyone about North Korean missiles

If I remember correctly it was due to a poorly designed drop down menu & missing confirmation challenge box. "Test Send" and "Send Send" were right on top of each other in a 10point font lol.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...
I find his statement that there were no pandemics before domestication of animals and therefore domesticated animals must be the source of pandemics quite bold and it seems to me that it is more backed by wishful thinking or political agenda than by actual science.

Anyways, it seems that this time the source was bats, and I am not aware of any domesticated bats.
Revisiting Naive Bayes: Theory and Implementation
The correct definition of the legal action is "whatever it took to keep Muralitharan bowling".
Really. A ten-year-old story. Hacker "news"?
In a cynical moment it has struck me that recent lifestyle trends seem almost designed to market poverty to the middle classes.

#vanlife as a lifestyle rather than simply 'living in your car'. A 'tiny house village' for people who don't want to say 'trailer park' etc.
Is there any data on real-world performance improvement from beamforming with consumer gear? I know anecdotally 802.11ac is way better than 802.11n (much less .11g) but there's so many related improvements in it that I don't understand how helpful the beamforming part is.
Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt sues Atari for failure to pay for VCS console design
Yeah, that seems foolish at this point.

Italy is doing a reasonable amount of testing and has more like 10% death rate. Could there be 15X more infected in Italy than detected? Or is it that they have mostly old people catching it? Seems like a large discrepancy either way.
Arrivo Loop from CDOT [video]
The founder, professor Bose, had quite an interesting career and background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

> His father was an Indian freedom revolutionary[4] who, having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled Bengal in the 1920s in order to avoid further persecution by the British colonial police.

> In 2011, Bose donated a majority of the company's non-voting shares to MIT on the condition that the shares never be sold.
Chemistry uses a very large set of "primitive steps" (from reactants and catalyzers to reactors and reaction conditions), so any such machine will have a narrow set of reactions it can produce. Unless of course, your automation machine has the capacity of assembling and dissembling equipment.

Besides, cleaning everything is very machine unfriendly.
Is it paradoxical for a “stable and static workforce” to be risk averse? Maybe the stability has something to do with outsourcing risk?
>DP's demographics is representative of > 30% of population of most countries.

However no one under 70 died from what I've read. So we can only get an upper bound on CFR for people under 70.
Ask HN: How are you folks dealing with PushKit being (essentially) deprecated?
Hi HN- I've been scratching my head on this for a while, so I wanted to reach out to the community to see how others are managing this issue.

For a little background, Apple is essentially disabling the use of PushKit for non voip calls with iOS SDK 13. A lot of people agree with this move, yet others are concerned that the restrictions with standard APNS data notifications will break essential functionality with their app.

These are not abstract restrictions, two specific issues are that standard push notifications aren't delivered/processed if the phone was reset and user didn't manually start the app afterwards, or if the user swipes out of the app from the app drawer. In the second case, most users are just trying to clean up the app drawer, not disable functionality of the app.

For more information on my specific case, I have a medication management app which sends reminders when users are supposed to take their medications. We're using local notifications to set these reminders and PushKit data notifications to schedule these (local notification) reminders if the app was swiped out or phone was reset. We are also scheduling 64 local notifications (the limit) at once, but this only covers about a day of reminders if there are multiple profiles on a phone. In addition, we are using Background Fetch to schedule notifications if the user never clicks into the app while the 64 notifications are scheduled, but this is extremely unreliable and doesn't persist through a reset or after a user swipes out. I'm hopeful that the new BackgroundTasks fix some of these issues, but that doesn't seem to be the case in my experience (at least not yet in iOS SDK 13).

Has anyone dealt with this too? How did you manage this, and what would you recommend for my use case? I know that you can still submit apps built with iOS 12 SDK through this month, but I'm concerned about how to handle after that. Thanks for your insight!
Yeah Cuomo's been cutting back the IT work force and outsourcing to H1B's for years. Stopped paying maintenance and upgrades. It's crazy.
Why do the newer versions of these have to have freaking Alexa bundled with them. It's like a giant skid mark on an otherwise premium product. Bose does have the best noise cancelling functionality, but I'm simply never going to buy anything with Alexa, Cortana, or whatever Google's version of a voice assistant is paired to it. I deal with Siri crapware because Apple's incentives are slightly better aligned than these other advertising companies, but even that I hate and would get rid of in an instant if possible.
The problem is it's legal to create totally unreasonable processes and expect people to just sort of deal with them.
Can I ask what the project is? Have worked in the space for a bit and would love to connect to learn more.
> 2020-04-05 Application status is Abandoned
A point is a classical typographic unit [1]:

In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout the history of printing. Since the 18th century, the point's size has varied from 0.18 to 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the DTP point (DeskTop Publishing point) as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an international inch (about 0.353 mm)

So if you have a 72 dpi monitor, then as it happens, a point is a pixel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)
Finding a remote job as a developer has been next to impossible. Hopefully that will change after this. I also hope that we will see less centralization in general.
While I agree that pieces are missing for a full conversation, I disagree with the simplification that minimalism is mainly about wanting to be less reliant on things or just having less for the sake of having less.

Minimalism is about having what is essential to a fulfill a certain need or goal. What is essential varies from person to person and of course is vastly different whatever we are talking about a software engineer living in a city apartment vs. a farmer.

So I see minimalism being about prioritization. During "normal" circumstances it is pretty much purely voluntary, but the more self reliant you want to be, the more it becomes a necessity. With limited resources you have to prioritize what tools, skills and materials you acquire in what order, quality and quantity. You end up with good enough, minimal solutions for a lot of the problems.

My farmer grand parents where 10x the minimalists I ever was in my view. But for them, it was just how they grew up, not a lifestyle choice about aesthetics.
The REAL mistakes that kill startups:

1. Not solving a real problem - Product / market fit

2. Raising Too much money - Growing beyond ability for the market to support

3. Hiring the wrong people

4. Too much founder ego

5. Too much founder inexperience combined with a lack of a
desire to learn

6. Focusing too much on investor needs vs. customer needs

7. Spending too much money

8. Perfect is the enemy of good - Start small, think big, iterate often.

I think single founder issues, so-called "bad location" issues, derivative ideas are not really issues at all. The top 7 will kill you even if you have great locations. And there are many examples of great business started by sole founders outside the high expense "prime" locations.
Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret
Hey folks, I’m the creator of virtualmuseums.io

I built it after seeing a bunch of articles listing virtual museums around the world. I felt like part of the point of touring these virtual museums was to capture just a tiny bit of the fun of travelling, but that this is lost when you just scroll through articles.

I thought that it’d be more fun to put all the museums on a map, and let you track your progress as you visit them, as this helps to recreate a tiny part of what’s fun about travelling.

Would love to hear your thoughts/suggestions :)
That wouldn't work too well with complex RFCs like X509, should is used for some backwards compatibility to earlier RFC
revisions and many optional elements that would fragment the standard into dozens of extensions.

IMHO implementors must implement a "should", not in the same sense of the binding requirement that "must" presents, but as a boolean possibility; the element may not be present, but it should never be ignored in a way that would break implementations making use of it.
That's a good story. Does it actually happen? Nothing in the tweet thread talked about this scenario, and I'm not aware offhand of examples of this, and I rather suspect it wouldn't work in practice.

You say "not a lot of covenants", but change in control covenants are pretty standard, and would be triggered in the simple form of your example. As you note, there's often a way around these things but without examples, this feels awfully tenuous.
I’ve been on a tour of the Bose Mountain facilities in the last 5 years (knew somebody who worked there in the experimental electronics space), and I can confirm that, on the inside, they are absolutely meticulous with their acoustic engineering and testing, more than anything I’ve seen before. They really treat it like rocket science.

There were sound rooms built to simulate a variety of real world environments, complete with realistic RF interference. They could test other equipment alongside their own, to be confident that they were producing real value for their customers. They’re pretty secretive so I won’t go into more details out of respect, but it was very cool and definitely made me a loyal customer.

All that aside, like you said the psychoacoustics thing is very real, and knowing them, they’re probably working on it.
I would love to see the numbers for people with pre-existing conditions, smokers, alcoholics, etc.
Jonathan Blow has a point that we cannot assume things will keep getting better. Although he says that we cannot fix software because we have chronically not done it for decades, his thesis is that the solution is to make software simpler. The issue I have with making things simpler is that if we don’t know how to fix things because we haven’t done it for decades, how can we make things simpler, when we haven’t done THAT for decades either? His argument rejects human exceptionalism, while also relying on it for his solution.

My point is that this absolutely is a funding and priority issue. I work as a developer who maintains legacy FORTRAN code. It was written in an era where global variables and Go To statements were the norm. Everyone who wrote it is retired or dead. It’s a pain to work with and there are parts that I haven’t yet gathered the courage to go in and change. However, me and my team have made substantive changes to it that are robust, that we have rigorously tested. This is not impossible, but it’s also not cheap or fast. It took me a year to understand how this blob of code works.

My team is young, we’re in our 20s, with backgrounds in CS, mechanical engineering, and physics. Certainly all systems are different, but if we can understand old FORTRAN, similar people can understand old COBOL. If people made it, people can understand it. We also know how to fix many broken things and how to fix many bugs. Often were told by management “not right now” and “we don’t have funding for that.” It’s frustrating, but that’s how the world works. They at least have funding to pay us to do what we’re doing now.

The point is that you can fix legacy systems, you can hire new people to do it, but it is expensive and it takes time. The whole issue is not whether we can or can’t, we can. The issue is: who can pay for it and will they?
Somewhat related, most academia is not focused on source code quality or its suitability for posterity. If you absolutely need to mime or plunder academia to succeed in your startup, pair that with a software industry veteran who can scale and secure your technology operation.
Yep, I noticed the new captcha a few days ago on a game wiki site just to view it but I think the site owner has the most strict option however where every visitor gets a captcha.

But anyways, felt the captcha lasted longer then it should. Was kinda starting to wonder if it’s ever end where very close to just exiting that tab.

I wish there was a more open way to stop spammers and abuse. For my project I want to do, you’d need to be logged in for most things anyways so probably just need it for signup, password reset and contact form - but plan is to only do that based on some private risk algo maybe, so not every user gets it.
Nice, a guide for how to survive an unique and ongoing crisis! It must be full of battle tested advice I’m sure!

For example, they suggest moving to someplace with lower cost of living, surely sage advice!
16 pt = 16 * ~0.353 mm = 5.644 mm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)
I could recover 2.4 Gb - thank you. Still a bit puzzled about 1 Gb from Mozilla.com since I don't use that site very often. But now I will follow it a bit closer.
No matter how much I hide at home and don’t do anything risky, I can’t help but worry about things like appendicitis. Something that most days would be dangerous but manageable if I catch it in time, would be much worse right now.