skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. India has a death rate of 2.22 per million people, this is one of the lowest rates of any country in the globe. 2. Not only are they using Chloroquine but their government is so confident in the drug that as of yesterday wont allow its export to other countries.

I don't believe either of those points is valid or compelling.

'Death rate' ... is a highly ambiguous term.

Case Fatality Rate (or equivalent) is the measure of mortality (attributed to the disease) per identified case. Obviously this metric can be easily hacked -- test fewer people so you have fewer confirmed cases.

Infection Fatality Rate (or equivalent) is the measure of people we estimate had COVID-19 and died from it, even if they weren't confirmed via testing. In countries that have been very slow to test, this number is expected to be relatively high, though not as frequently reported on.

It's very unlikely that IFR would vary significantly, absent significant medical intervention, between races / cultures / locations / etc.

EDIT: Citing The Atlantic last month: "For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). "

As to the Indian government's confidence being high ... there's no shortage of political hubris going around, and Modi's not immune.

I note that at the end of March "a $22.6bn economic stimulus plan [...] to provide direct cash transfers and food handouts to India's poor."

This does not sound like something that anyone in India believes is 'under control'.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/in...
The phrasing chosen by the Eclipse foundation for the Theia 1.0 announcement was a bit unfortunate:

- It's not Theia versus VS Code

- Theia is not an "open-source alternative to VS Code"

- Theia is not a "rip-off of VS Code"

While confrontational narratives are appealing, it's more subtle than that: Theia is based on VS Code to address a different kind of need.

Much like TypeScript doesn't try to replace JavaScript, but builds on JS to address the need for type safety, Theia doesn't try to replace VS Code, but builds on VS Code to address the need for a framework to build IDEs for desktop (e.g. Arduino Pro, Arm mbed...) and for the cloud (e.g. Gitpod, Google Cloud Shell...).
> Does everyone still feel this way about Apple?

Nope. I basically cannot use earphones with my iPhone 10 because the connector is too flimsy and keeps disconnecting at random. I have tried buying new earphones but they had the same problem. So yeah, Apple is overpriced junk. Not saying Android phones are better, generally Android phones are utter crap, but I would rather pay $300 for some mid range Android phone I know I won't use for more than a year than $1000 for something that I don't want to use for even a year.
> hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?

What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19 causing the hospitalisation?

People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their lungs to push the fluid out.

What's causing that if not covid-19?
required everyone to wear masks in public of any type (this is rather important

Have any studies been done on this? It seems pretty tenuous to me and lots of assertions about mitigations (from drugs to masks) are being made just now without evidence.
> more complicated than "evil greedy hospital", or "evil greedy insurer."

Evil greedy medical industrial complex?

I think most of the issues in the US medical situation come from everyone trying to profit as much as possible.
I did not know that Restic was built on top of Rclone, but of course that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for contributing to a project that has made my life much easier!
What you're saying is that votes should be lost. Claiming that they will be is a stretch.
The Compounding Success Theory (2002)
State of Digital Advertising Amid the Pandemic: Publisher Perspective
Will do Will! Small world.
Quite probably the physician got 10-20% of that supposedly charged amount, possibly less, and from what (s)he received was paying a variety of expenses including a billing person to deal with the insurance company.

If you have the procedure codes that were billed you can likely look up the Medicare reimbursement rates for them. Private insurance would pay more than that, but not orders of magnitude more.
It's funny because I did exactly that (sticking to one project instead of jumping from idea to idea) because I had the same problem as the OP, but these days I'm getting the feeling this is also counterproductive. I spent a lot of time on a single project, learned a lot of things along the way, but progress was very very slow mainly because it started to feel like 'work'.

For me, these kinds of side-projects are all about learning new stuff, and sometimes to scratch some really small personal itch. So what I try to do now is to find projects that can be used a platform for trying out new stuff. For example, I've been working on an iOS game since 2014, but by now actually finishing it so people can play it is completely secondary to the personal satisfaction of incrementally refactoring and repurposing parts of the engine, using techniques and technologies that interest me right now. Becase even that started to feel like work at some point, I decided to also start some other side-projects that go in completely different directions, so I can switch depending on my mood and make slow but steady progress in each of them. I try to also incorporate some technology/techniques that pop up around my daytime job but which I never have time to explore at the office, some of that stuff is super interesting but I cannot justify spending company time on it.

I think the main advice I have for the OP is to find one or two interesting projects that are diverse enough to be a platform for experimentation, instead of some very narrowly focussed problem that will inevitably start to become boring sooner or later. Unless you really want to create a product or something to show off with, the main purpose should be personal development/intellectual satisfaction, not reaching some predetermined goal.
Sorry, you are right, I missed that part! Really fascinating hack!
Thanks! Signed up.
> the provided scripts are useless to anyone without access to the academic datasets they use

Kaldi team shares all datasets when possible on http://openslr.org, a major collection of speech datasets. Librispeech and Tedlium were major breakthrough in their times. When everyone in research trained on 80 hours WSJ and Google trained on 2000 hours private dataset, 1000 hours of librispeech was a game changer.

> Kaldi is very cumbersome and overly complex to use and adapt (most of the toolchain relies on exact copies of entire directory trees)

On the other hand the Kaldi API is very stable. You still can run 4 year old recipes with simple run.sh. Any tensorflow software gets obsolete once in 3 months when TF API changes.

Kaldi recipe results are usually reproducible up to the digit and you can even see the tuning history (which features did improve, which didn't).

> Kaldi is a research tool by researchers for researchers and not in any way shape or form aimed at practitioners in search of a deployable solution

There are hundreds of companies all over the world building practical solutions with Kaldi. The only thing that Kaldi team should do is to ask users to mention it.

> Kaldi is very poorly documented (from a user perspective) and focuses on recipes for your own experiments, not writing applications and roll out

There are also dozen of projects on Github which enable use of Kaldi with simple pip install or docker pull. kaldi-gstreamer-server, kaldi-active-grammar, vosk and many others.
Peter McCormack on Silk Road and Bitcoin: As a Cocaine User–It Was Brilliant
> we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized awfulness

...because WHO and those local regions spend considerable time and effort preventing catastrophe.
Why? It's longer, more complex, and more highly indented than a normal if-elif-else.
I tried that the other day and could only get a 403. Is their web portal still active? I ended up just dialing in.
Marxian Alienation and Web Development
JPMorgan Chase Shareholder letter [pdf]
Ha ha, way over my head. I had one modern physics course; a little special relativity but mostly quantum behavior.

If you mean a perfect, isotopic antenna; I don’t believe it exists. Though I suppose it could, if you consider an antenna pattern to be a wave function. A spherical mass should be emitting black-body radiation with an isotropic pattern. Maybe only noise can be isotropic. If you try to encode information, it can’t.
Maybe this is how AC finally reversed entropy.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Vipps was developed by DNB (the bank) from the start, and outcompeted all other banks' offerings. It didn't have much to do with telecoms at all.
You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig).

Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these.

And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org
Does a Rock Simulate Every Finite State Automaton? (1996)
do you have an overview on how you did the weighing of various parameters?
I've heard Datomic was made by Clojure people and is really good software too, though unfortunately proprietary.
"we talk more about the good stuff than about the bad stuff,"

20:1 minimum good to bad. Minimum. Even one "bad" a week may just be too much.

Also, limit the relative number of times you approach with something that "needs doing". You can't let your relationship turn into mere help-mate-ism.
Wordpress. The speed at which clients are requesting new stuff is faster than one-man-Django can keep up
What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.

I'm not sure quality is the issue, all of my old Nintendo consoles still work years later (SNES, GBA SP, Gamecube), they simply seem to eschew cutting-edge (and often less reliable) technology.

I've owned four Xbox 360s, three PS1s, two PS2s and two PS3s...there's often a price to pay for packing too much new technology into a game console.
I've had no luck in trying to make sense of the video CDN infrastructure and ecosystem. They seem designed for something completely different to what I've trying to do, and inappropriate. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, or reading the wrong things, but people say "Just use a video CDN" and it just all looks irrelevant, inappropriate, or unusable.

Maybe I'm expecting it to be too simple and straight-forward, and everyone has to go through the same gazillion steps. No wonder YouTube is winning.

Quick example, fastly.com[0]

First 10 TB, $0.12. Sounds brilliant. Minimum per month, $50. Less brilliant.

Complete mis-match with my use case.

[0] https://www.fastly.com/pricing
That's what I'm planning. I've been happy enough with jitsi that I'm going to run my own and enforce auth policies.
For several weeks my mother hasn't been able to fill her regular prescription for hydroxychloroquine that has been an important part of managing her lupus for >30 years. The rush to use it against covid-19 is starting to harm some of the people that need the medication for other reasons.

> Lupus doc called me again expressing she wants me very isolated for the next 3 weeks especially because of my lungs and heart and no meds available. I never thought my lupus med would disappear. [...] Kaiser is refusing to give it to thier long term Lupus patients.
> Audiobooks could be another resource

Yes, that's in fact the source of the commonly cited LibriSpeech dataset. It used publicly available recordings from the LibriVox project and has done some cleaning steps as well as alignment of the transcript with the audio to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up audio.

The M-AILABS dataset uses LibriVox as well, among other sources, to arrive at 1000 hours of cleaned up data in various european languages.

Overall there's still a large untapped potential in LibriVox data: https://gist.github.com/est31/1e195c55fab8f95a72393db1519da1...

But you'll have to give up properties like gender balancing in your dataset that then has to be counteracted during the learning process, e.g. by having gender-custom learning rates.
I recommend John Ruskin's classic "The Elements of Drawing".

"Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin at once."
Why the Pursuit of Scientific Knowledge Will Never End
(Disclaimer: I also work in the field.)

I would disagree with most of your points.

The provided scripts are available for a huge number of datasets. Many of the datasets are also useful for use in production. And it's very simple to adapt the provided scripts for further data.

Kaldi is complex and big, yes. But you don't have to use all of it. And it is that way because doing STT properly simply is complex. At least for the conventional standard hybrid HMM/NN models. You could surely go some of the end-to-end ways but that will lead to other problems in production. And once you need to deal with these problems, it might become even more complicated. (This is a whole topic on its own...)

Kaldi is used in research as well as in production. It can be easily deployed.

Kaldi is very well documented. Just check the homepage of it. In addition to it, there is a huge community (both academia and industry).
"our full engineering analysis determined that the degradation in all cases was the result of hardware related issues with earcushions, aftermarket parts, or mechanical integrity"

Specifically, damage caused by the customer from use or misuse, or buying inadequate replacement parts from 3rd party manufacturers.
XCB is actually lower level than xlib, in that sense it is more directly using X11 because unlike xlib it only really implements the client protocol and wraps it up into an interface.

I was however planning on trying out Xlib anyway on my path of exploration from simplest/lowest level to complex/higher level libraries: fbdev, DRM < DirectFB, libdrm < XCB < Xlib < SDL et al.
30 Books That Every Software Engineer Should Own
We are building the LITIC platform [0] for self-service decision analytics apps. There is a visual drag-n-drop language for formulas and optimization models, charts & tables with interactive features, and a visual WYSIWG app designer.

[0] https://litic.com/showcase.html
Traces of ancient rainforest in Antarctica point to a warmer prehistoric world
But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.
I know you're saying that in jest but it's a good idea. If my wife wasn't sometimes active with a NPO, I'd have it filtered at the network.
>Really the primary goal shouldn't be to care about who you are.

i don't understand at all what you're talking about. privilege isn't about you. it's exactly about other people relative to you and empathizing with them despite being that much more privileged.
I graduated MIT without takings the sat’s
My dogfood company was just funded by General Mills and I graduated with a physics major from MIT. I never had to take the sat’s for this. How do I pass this kind of ingenuity onto the next generation. Admittedly it was lucky but I’m looking for feedback as to what I did correctly.
Per the repo:

> All of the data is currently generated from the animalcrossing Fandom wiki.

>

> We have a static process which will scrape the site, download the images, and generate files to be used by the main app.
Show HN: Covid-19 interactive national mortality trajectory analysis
>because they are what, too stupid?

Because they are inconsiderate of others who do not want to smell the fragrances.

Think of it like smoking. Annoying and offensive to people nearby. No need to hone this.
Oldest ever human genetic evidence clarifies dispute over our ancestors
The only thing remaining to have a complete developer experience on Windows would be to convince Apple to allow building of iOS apps on other operating systems.
It's interesting, but any reason why the age limit is 89? And when I adjust for co-morbidities (presumably adding them) my chance of hospitalisation and/or death actually decreases?
Every Vaccine and Treatment in Development for Covid-19
hehe yeah, was thinking the exact same thing
I'm aware different cultures have different attitudes toward the problem of outdoor cats. As a species, they're in a weird semi-domesticated state, so perhaps more intentional domestication is the solution.

However, that doesn't change the objective reality that they are in more danger (and cause more harm) than indoor cats. People who adopt cats should accept the extra responsibility and work of keeping them indoors, as you have. Thank you for being a good cat owner.
Find a problem you want to solve for yourself and then build a solution.

I created https://myhikes.org as my side project in 2015 because I hated the existing public trail platforms at the time - a lot of things have changed since then, but so has my skill set, data set, the way I write, the way I think about features, the way I weigh pros/cons of features and time.

Don't aim to solve the world's problems or make money with a side project, aim to make your own life easier or more enjoyable in some way. You never know what will come of it later if you continue using, building, and growing your idea.
bit out of the box, but you could probably be successful with twitch.tv, getting them on there take some extra time tho
This was a very quick and exploratory proect using JHU data. It has some features I could not find elsewhere: polynomial fits to national trajectories and population normalized mortality rates.
Flu in the US: 0.13-0.28% mortality [1]

Covid-19 in China: 0.50-0.66% mortality [2, 3]

I mean from numbers it is indeed not much worse than flu, but we don't know the potential extra deaths caused by running out of ICU beds.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327

[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
Trump has cited a drug used in South Korea, it is not a miracle drug but a current practice. My question is, why people are so excited that one hospital decided to stop using it? How about the other 99% that did not experience the same?

I wonder when the Y-Combinator has become such a hate filled place.
As an immigrant, and I'm sure many foreigners would agree, this is extremely American.

People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite answers. This is science and science doesn't sell.

Politicians and media types are sales-people.

This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up around and are engaged with generally in life.
Google Squashes High-Severity Flaws in Chrome Browser
If you give a fully loaded programming language to a programmer to write configuration, It's almost a certainty that you will end up with a program in your configuration file.
With great power come great responsibilities but unfortunately not all of us are super heroes.
CFR in Italy and Spain is elevated greatly because they are overwhelmed and are not testing/counting people with mild cases of the virus.

The 1.67% CFR from South Korea is similar to other countries that have not experienced overwhelmed health systems.
Yes but when someone mentions Eclipse all I can think of is that huge, slow, bloated, ugly IDE I was happy to flee from many years ago.
Platform to Validate Ideas?
Hi,
I was wondering if people knew of any platform or service whereby you can assess whether people really want your idea (if it exists).
I am kind of imagining a "Product Hunt for Solvable Problems" - where people can approve or disprove relevant startup ideas.
This is an idea within itself, but I was curious to understand how people currently go about the initial validation process and whether any tool remotely similar exists (it would be very useful right about now!).
Thanks :)
Airbnb hosts defy lockdown laws with 'Covid-19 retreats'
Room temperatures and the weather are usually in Celsius, but I find cooking temps more often in Fahrenheit. We're just all over the place.
I faced this. Start a website then lose it because I would be losing interest in few weeks.

The thing which I followed is to fix my routine. Joined a Gym, it helped a lot on focusing on things & made me mentally strong.

Take off time, started travelling & took a long break & then get back to work. A step closer to nature made me fresh & met people who are really working hard despite the lack of resources. This made me think about how am wasting my time, despite having all the resources.

Sat one day & written everything on things I wanted to do. Made a weekly task, monthly, quarterly. Then started steps to accomplish it.

At first it wasn't easy but slowly I made a habit & then finally get used to it.

Just follow something for 21 days, it will be a habit.

All you need is 21 days.
Very educational!

My takeaway: while primates have done very well (lots of branching; lots of species), Wow Rats! Such detailed diversity!
JavaScript: The Nullish Coalescing Operator
What information are you logging? IP addresses and responses?

What is your data retention policy? Privacy policy? Who will you be sharing the information you collect with?

What if you tell someone they have low odds of death, and then they take more risks as a result of what you told them? If they were to end up dying of COVID-19 because they are induced to take more risks, do you think you will have exposed yourself to any legal liability?
Maybe it's just me, but I like that I don't have to spend time preparing myself for work, travelling to the office, hunting for launch, etc. I'm not moving a lot on a daily basis, but I don't feel that hurts my productivity. Although I have a daily routine I'm trying to follow as much as possible (get up in time, do my breakfast, get some housework done before starting to work, etc).
For the curious, we also published how we assemble these kits:
https://karuna2020.org/guides/ration-and-safety-kit-assembly...
I had a horrible problem with space leaks when running weeks in production, didn't help that I used a pure Haskell db at the time. :)

Here are some more info
http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/05/space-leak-zoo/

It's been almost a decade since though. Maybe the compiler catches more nowadays.