skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
exactly. do we have data about whether contact tracing of this kind ever worked? S.Korea started testing+tracing somewhere midway in their epidemic, far earlier than where the epidemic is now in france, uk and USA. maybe other countries can benefit from this tracing, but it remains to be proved. In Singapore, which does well, apparently only 6% of ppl installed the contact tracing app. Israel seems to be using carrier data. People seem to be missing the forest in here

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/contact-tr...

> Let’s start with China, where citizens in hundreds of cities have been required to download cellphone software that broadcasts their location to several authorities, including the local police. The app combines geotracking with other data, such as travel bookings, to designate citizens with color codes ranging from green (low risk) to red (high risk). High-risk individuals can be banned from apartment complexes, offices, and even grocery stores. Many human-rights advocates fear that what has been rolled out as a public-health app is moonlighting as a tool of government espionage and mass discrimination.

> Next, let’s look at South Korea, a democracy that has arguably been more successful than any other in containing the spread of the virus. The government uses several sources, such as cellphone-location data, CCTV, and credit-card records, to broadly monitor citizens’ activity. When somebody tests positive, local governments can send out an alert, a bit like a flood warning, that reportedly includes the individual’s last name, sex, age, district of residence, and credit-card history, with a minute-to-minute record of their comings and goings from various local businesses. “In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet, and whether or not they wore a mask,” Mark Zastrow, a reporter for Nature, wrote. “Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted.”
Lyn's entire blog is worth reading. Very in-depth analysis and actionable conclusions. She builds mental models using data. I've never seen economics content like that anywhere.

For just one example, and a great backgrounder to the currency wars article, check out:

https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
Leakage paths for the Apple / Google Bluetooth tracing system
The trade-off, of course, is access. Now, computers are cheap and available everywhere. In the COBOL era, what percentage of a family's income would it take to purchase such a machine? How wide-spread were these machines in non-English speaking areas? How easily could a program from one of the machines be used on a machine built by a different vendor? Were said programs resilient to malicious actors?

As always, there are sacrifices, but in general I think we have made rational trade-offs in this realm.
Which part of the spec do you think people who care about privacy will object to? I agree with you that this is a poor choice of wording but I think your interpretation is uncharitable.

I think this is a very innovative solution that enables contact reporting without knowing location or personal details at all, and its exclusively opt-in.

I see some people arguing that "yes but it could be subverted" but this isn't a really good place to begin if you just want to monitor people and know who is talking to who, there are much better ways to do that already available.
0. Don't boil the ocean. Nginx on a single server is fine for 95% of deployments. I know it's not sexy, but it'll work.
He runs both of those companies. He's not a passive investor. He's CEO. He's highly involved at every level of both of them.
> often programming acts as a better lead into math rather than vice versa.

I suspect this is because programming is actually even more rigorous than maths. When you do maths, you can gloss over details, and sometimes delude yourself into thinking false things (that very same thing happened on my last HN submission: I failed to notice a data dependency in EdDSA, and thought an attack were possible, when in fact it wasn't).

Programming uses an external cognitive engine (the computer), that is faithful, exact, and ruthless. Your program has to work. And when it doesn't, you're forced to revisit your assumptions (as I was forced to revisit mine when I actually tried to implement that attack and failed miserably).

So yes, totally with you here.
If you haven't already, I suggest you read the rules for "Show HN" and consider posting it as a Show HN. It will tend to get more visibility than this format.

At first blush, this looks like it probably qualifies (though I certainly could be wrong and have been on other occasions when trying to helpfully suggest people consider posting as a Show HN).

Rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
This seems so much more work than [Netlify](https://netlify.com). Coupled with Netlify CMS it even gives you a nice interface to work with.
I think "identity politics" are actually just an artefact of commercially driven manipulation of government and media.

If you were to really get to know most people, you will find they have (obviously) the same basic needs and desires. Amusingly, this is even illustrated by the large percentage of Trump supporters who are heavily dependent upon government services (i.e. handouts).

At the end of the day, we all want food, shelter, safety, and some amount of personal privacy and freedom. These things probably comprise at least 70% of our needs and desires. The remaining bits get divided up somewhat, and I daresay only the last 10-20% are "identity". Identity really just means what you and your peers/neighbors think.

Nobody wants to be sick, or hungry, or in pain, or unappreciated, or discarded. Much of the politics we see is thrust upon us by a narrow few (powerful) interests with their own agendas.
Why a coronavirus vaccine could take way longer than a year
Personally, I think through writing. My first draft is what I write to help me understand a problem or an idea. That's good for me, but not so good for you. Useful writing addresses someone else's need. The questions are "who is your audience?", and "What do they need to know from you?" Writing for other people is communication. What are you intending to communicate? Technique, as illustrated in this article, serves that intention.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's book "Storytelling with Data" is a good book on technical communication. TLDR: it's a process, and it's not about you, it's about them.
Step 1: Write a JetBrains Cobol plugin
The guy from The Big Short was an MD.
I've never had a cold sore in my life. My first wife often got them.

I put down my 'immunity' to having chicken-pox when I was somewhere around 3-6 months old. Looks like my young system got such a workout from it that I don't allow any herpes viruses to come near me.

Then again, I'm not going to tempt fate by going out and screwing a few girls with genital herpes just to be certain.
Yep, it doesn't work that way. First, the US isn't a big trader relative to the size of the economy. Second, depreciation doesn't passthrough to inflation 1-to-1. Three, because of the relative size of the US economy and the international use of USD, US imports are generally not sensitive to exchange rates in the way that you see in other countries.

Btw, I live somewhere where the currency has depreciated significantly, and we import almost double what the US does...prices go up a little but not much. And for most people, the difference is just zero (the difference for companies is often not zero...companies are often constrained in how they change prices, which is the reason for a lot of the point above, so they end up taking a lot of cost changes to their profit).
I was kind of joking around. That said, I don't think it would create as much inflation as it may seem. A carton of milk would still cost about the same maybe only 2x the price?

I think most of the money would end up in stocks, gambling, speculative investments, luxury goods and real estate (especially in big cities) so that's where the inflation would show up... Which is fine. So long as the cost of basic commodities don't explode, then we can afford it as a society.
Yeah and if webex suddenly got popular like zoom,it too will be massacared.

This stuff is common. You know how many populat windows software acts bad? Filezilla's installer for example would literally install a very nasty strain of adware (to their credit, they give you the option to opt-out)
That looks very nice, but you probably should include a video of some sorts to get a feel of what it looks like !
if you're a US Taxpayer, file a complaint with the SEC here: https://www.sec.gov/oiea/Complaint.html
People don't hate their jobs so much as they dislike having a boss. That's why fishermen, farmers and other bossless occupations stay working way past 65.
I disagree that China has not learned from the last one:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1
You know the phrase "walk a mile in someone else's shoes"? Considering and internalizing the meaning behind it would really help you here to be more empathetic towards what the majority of people worldwide are going through right now.
I think you are right, lots of people will be bored and looking for something to do.
Bloom filters aren't good for privacy because if there is a hit, you have to upload the id to check it. Which tells the service a) which ID you encountered and b) if it's an ID that was confirmed to be affected, whether you are affected by corona or not, something the system was designed to prevent.
Social distancing in a church, given a 6’ distance requirement, 2’ per seat wide, and 3’ from center of one row to the next, would mean that 1/8 of the normal congregation could fit in the chapel. Half are immediately out, because you would need at least every other row empty. In a given row, 1 of 4 seats would be filled, to maintain 6’ between individuals.

On Easter Sunday, churches are full to the point where they have multiple services throughout the day to accommodate everybody. So, while possible, it’s not reasonable to hold an Easter Sunday church service in these times.
1865, American English, probably from Dutch dialect pappekak, from Middle Dutch pappe "soft food" (see pap) + kak "dung," from Latin cacare "to excrete" (from PIE root kakka- "to defecate").

Wow, poppycock literally means shit pabulum. I had no idea. Puts a new spin on https://www.google.com/search?q=poppycock&source=lnms&tbm=is....
The whole plan is number 2. We are waiting until this burns out through the population, most people get better, and move on with their lives.

The purpose of social distancing is to slow the burn so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and won't have to triage coronavirus patients vs. people with any other sort of emergency coming to the hospital.

This practice will save thousands of lives of people with a bad case of coronavirus, but also the people who get into car crashes, or have problems with giving birth, or heart attacks, or any other reason that requires immediate emergency care.
Does this treatment you can't get include vaccinations? I'm not sure what you're getting at. Anyway, hydroxychloroquine is on the list of World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines.[0]
It's a widely available drug that can be found even in remote parts of Africa and India where malaria is prevalent.
[0]https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/325771/WHO-...
>it's actually an incompetently administered administration with human problems

Yeah, sounds like New Jersey. I'm surprised that they sacked the team, it would be a very NJ thing to keep them on and just handwave the costs away.
I can see huge problems with this, all the way from having to take 120,000 pound big rig loads to surface wear causing lowering of transparency by surface dirt by abrasion as well as obscuration of the surface by that dirt, as as dropped oil etc. Surface breakage by hard stones etc - the few test roads made were total failures.
True. Its also Common in many developing and undemocratic nations.
Why? Georists support taxation of land rents, also in the expetation that good governance leads to higher (ground) rents (and thus higher government revenues).

Edit: If anything, the Landsburg policy is just a tepid approximation of Georgist finance.
Not relevant though, because the coronavirus is going to be killing many of even the previously long-established, previously profitable, well-run restaurants. It's a difference in kind. It doesn't matter so much when new restaurants churn (because that's the established order of things), but when all restaurants churn, now you've got a huge problem.
Gumroad Product Template (CSS)
Remember, there are a few studies out there which also confirm the belief that vaccines cause autism.
I would argue that, being stylistically inconsistent with the way most apl is implemented, that's actually not such a great resource. I found 'whitney c' surprisingly approachable, with just a little patience; despite no prior experience with it, I was able to make an apl-ish interpreter in 7kb and a few hours. If you're curious about implementation details, that might be a more worthwhile exercise. Be sure to check out the parsing section[1] of the J dictionary.

1: https://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dicte.htm
My bad, I guess I was the one who misread.
The level is when we switch to a food, guns, and ammo economy. USTs are so deeply interwoven into the very fabric of the world economic systems the only way to get out of it is for the whole system to fall apart.
The other thing about too many modern user interfaces is that they often get subjected to whatever fad is in vogue this week. Eye candy takes precedence over consistent user interfaces, and gratuitous changes are routine because a new fad has become the Next Big Thing.
The one that keeps on giving is doing things that a few years earlier I would have said “that’s crazy I would never do that.”
iceland launched the C19 app on april 1, 1 week after their epidemic had already peaked. I havent seen their install statistics , but i m not sure it s as effective as people here think it is
I'm beginning to think about it in a new way. The economy hasn't changed since we were all OK with it six months ago:

* No surplus sufficient to ride out a crisis

* No safety net

* Barely functioning public health system

* No preparation for a major disease outbreak

* Etc.

It's the same economy today, but slightly different operating mode, like a car with the same engine but in a different gear. I'm certainly hoping for a new normal.
> This looks a lot less like a computer problem and more of a process and institution problem made much worse by chronic underfunding and understaffing.

It’s a political issue. Some states are broke (e.g. NJ), and some are hell bent on not helping others in society so they handicap social welfare systems (e.g. FL). Real solution won’t come from a few COBOL programmers, it will have to be voters voting in people who will address the issues.
It's pretty bad. Actually, I would say it is the worst time period I have ever personally experienced. This feels worse than 9/11 because it is so drawn out, both physically and time wise.

I am mostly introverted, have some hermit like tendencies, and can't wait for this to all be over. I can't imagine how terrible the more extroverted, social folks feel. The mental toll of this is going to be enormous for many of us.

It's a dystopian nightmare... or at least the beginning of one. People are afraid to leave their homes. When you do leave your house, you can't go and relax anywhere anyway. Nothing's open obviously. Even a simple walk around town is depressing as hell. All the closed shops and restaurants, people in masks looking scared, worries if you're walking to close to someone... both for them, and for you.
And many of those who did not die were still infected and spread the disease to those they were closest to.

If given a bowl of skittles and being told that 2% of them are poisonous to those over 50, would you then hand that bowl to your grandparents? Would you take them to a normally attended service and hand them out to everyone within 6’ of you?
Instead of building things to make Notebooks play nicely with git, why not relegate notebooks to explicitly local exploratory work and when something needs to be deployed have it be turned into proper scripts/programs?
> We've had pandemics in the past, though not as serious as this one.

There have been much more serious pandemics in the past, way too many to even list here. I'll briefly mention two because we know them well in the western canon -- the 1918 flu epidemic and the black death.
> No they're not. The lifetime odds for the average American are. For opioids as an example, as someone who doesn't use opioids, my lifetime odds of dying from an overdose are essentially nil. The distribution is bimodal.

So now you accept that I wasn't off by 2 orders of magnitude, but are pedantically calling out that I wrote "your" even though I specifically wrote "Your lifetime odds in the US" -- which, if we're going to be entirely pedantic, applies to everyone on earth. Maybe look up your numbers and share them?

You're ignoring how people end up addicted to opioids. The shape of the distribution is both entirely irrelevant and you haven't cited your source.

This makes me think your goal is to win an argument instead of having a genuine discussion.

> You claim this with great certainty, but it hasn't been around long enough to know that it won't mutate in annoying ways.

I'm citing data from experts [1].

> ...we've had 4 or more dangerous flus that aren't seasonal (SARS, MERS, H1N1, H5N1, COVID-19).

SARS, MERS and COVID are not flu viruses, they're coronaviridae. H1N1 and H5N1 are mutations/subtypes of the Influenza A virus. The coronaviridae are different.

> And the flaws in that study have been noted elsewhere. SK is a better testbed since they also tested huge swaths of people, even those not showing symptoms...

SK has not tested huge swaths of the population, they've tested around 1%. [2] They may have tested more than most people, but that's not what you claimed. They've tested some not showing symptoms. Huge difference as compared to testing 100% of the population.

> The CFR of the flu is .1%, which would make COVID more contagious, and 30x more deadly.

The study I referenced mentioned 0.1% for the flu vs 0.37% for COVID. Feel free to read it. That would make it 3.7X not 30X. Because the flu has been around so long the fatality rates are largely determined by mathematical modeling, and are very close to the actual fatality rate. On the other hand, we're still figuring it out for COVID.

Yes, its is more contagious. Nobody's argued that.

> And the risk from COVID goes up if everyone catches it simultaneously. The CFR goes up even further if hospitals are overwhelmed.

Which is why, scroll back up, we isolate the vulnerable.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-coronavirus-isnt-m...

[2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/south-korea-coronavirus-cov...
> Modern web apps, each unique and confusing, with no reliable way to move focus around

If accessibility is set up correctly, you can still move focus with TAB and activate widgets/buttons with SPACE or ENTER. No different from any terminal app. If client-side JS is being used, the web page could even display additional forms in response to a keyboard shortcut, with no network-introduced latency.
I worked for a company that had one of these ancient (probably mainframe) systems for inventory, business analytics etc. Users at the factory would access it via 3270 terminal emulators. It was clunky but usable.

Until they wanted to stop paying for terminal emulator licenses and replaced it with a web gateway that translated the 3270 pages into HTML forms. That was pretty horrible to use and of course people began “forgetting” to record inventory moves and process steps. This was for six figure aerospace components so at the end of the day someone knew where they all were and what had been done, it just made it a lot harder to bill for milestones and wasted tons of time. Of course the software was like $15 a seat.
A simple solution using virus properties would be to just delay the release of the last id. It takes a while before the viral load inside someone becomes high enough to be infectious, so there is no significant harm in the last id being delayed by 24h in the worst case.
People aren't going to be buying stuff with this. They will be paying rent, other bills, and debts, because a lot of people have been laid off already with more layoffs coming every week. These people are going to be in a world of hurt without any intervention; 4 in 10 americans can't come up with $400.
Cheers! I want to add that I'm impressed by the depth and breadth of your lore. :-)

BG is better, yeah, but having thought about it I should have said Andromeda! :-D
Thanks for the detailed answer. Everybody in my team uses Slack threads properly, so I guess the difference for us would be minimal. Also, I think people who lack the discipline to use threads might also undermine Braid's system by just keeping one #dev tag open and posting everything in there.
but we would lose herd immunity for the flu
The alternative approach to contact tracing means that a central server can learn most of or the entire of the social graph. This is a considerable reduction of power in comparison.
Shi Zhengli Ran Coronavirus Research in Wuhan After US Project Was Shut Down
> Trouble is, if these get widespread enough - they won't look out of place but the moment they become widespread is the moment updates get pushed to make them obsolete. It's an unescapable situation.

Did you just say recurring revenue (for the clothing makers)?
Surely, you'd need to understand COBOL to translate it first?
This is may be the first time I’ve seen downvotes for a proponent of transparency in government.

Government provides a nice website (BLS) with explanations and empowers its citizens to analyze it, and the government is still doing something wrong.
The estimate for the "no mitigation" scenario by the Imperial College is 2.2 million deaths [1] in the US. There is a large range of estimates that have come out since then to take into account the mitigation that has happened and how effective they have been. Lately things have been looking better but without some comprehensive contact tracing and isolation system we cannot "reopen" and drop those mitigations without moving back into the range of hundreds of thousands of casualties.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/imperial-college-epidem...
Ask HN: Paper capital contributions as YC SAFE that converts to common stock?
I am slowly ramping up on the options my co-founder and I have to make capital contributions to our bootstrapped C Corp. When we incorporated we each purchased 40% of the available common stock and set aside 10% for early staff leaving 10% available. My proposed strategy is to track all founder capital contributions as SAFEs that will convert to equity issued from the remaining 10% common stock in Series A. All other stock (ESOP or VC) will be sold as preferred stock. Is this a sound strategy? If not, how would you adjust it for a founder team that would prefer not to track capital contributions as debt?
Things feel painfully normal in spite of the complete chaos of the pandemic. It's like the worst aspects of self-righteousness and amateur-technocratic opinion broadcasting all just amplified x1000. I still actually think social media is a net positive but there's certain aspects that are especially unbearable during disasters.
Then you'd take a deep breath, pull up a chart from any other recession in history, and see that you and the market index will be back to where you were in 2-5 years. This would be a good time to buy, and average down your positions.
Why prohibit all services just because we cannot accomodate everyone?
> Britain

> no loss of free speech or press and no descent into tyranny

That's a good one!

Not saying it isn't still one of the best places. But the trajectory is sadly quite clear.