skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this context I think you can distinguish between three different kinds of location-related data:

* cell tower data

* phone GPS data

* Bluetooth data about proximity to specific other people

For most purposes these are increasing in precision and sensitivity. But also, governments can demand that carriers turn over the first kind, but the second two are generally under some kind of user control according to mobile OS designs. There is no single place that automatically gets this data about every smartphone user.

Some of the discussions about privacy for the kind of technology that Apple and Google are working on here are based on observations like

* there actually is no existing way that health authorities could get detailed Bluetooth proximity information about all smartphone users

* this information is potentially more useful for epidemiological purposes, and also more privacy-sensitive, than just GPS sensor data, because it may more reliably map individual people's interactions with one another (for example, potentially confirming that people were likely in the same room rather than just in the same building)

* there are cryptographic concepts that could potentially make this data useful for contact tracing, if users cooperate to a certain extent, in a way that would still make it difficult to obtain or use the data for a different purpose

Another way of putting it is that many people looking at this question think that there is an incremental privacy harm from disclosing Bluetooth proximity data (compared to data that is already available), and an incremental benefit to epidemiology from finding a way to process this data for contact tracing purposes (compared to data that is already available).
> Only an official effort, led by Apple+Google or maybe FB and then forced upon users, can reach the critical mass needed to make contact tracing viable.

This may be right, but how will said vendors "force it" on users? A system update? That still takes voluntary cooperation.
The biggest one is searching jsons. You essentially have a database that stores jsons and you can search it. Just dump a json and search it goes a long way. My problems are more the atomicity guarantees which are not very consistent.
That logo at the bottom gives me chills.
Dinosaurs said the same thing about HTTP and Telnet. You have a point, but its flat out wrong
Does anyone know why I've seen various reports that they think opening schools will have a low impact on the virus spread? Kids still get infected, so will spread the disease (and I would assume more than most people being careful) as well as then spread it to their households.

Is it because children rarely commute outside a community, so it wouldn't spread between communities, just within communities already infected?
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834959.
I get that it's a clickbait headline, but he doesn't seem to be making any coherent point.

Somehow billionaires, debt holders, etc will get wiped out, companies will go bankrupt and protect their employee pensions (what are those?), and then they will reemerge being partially owned by their employees.

> "“It would be better for the Fed to have given half a million to every man, woman and child in the United States,” he said."

What now? A $165 Trillion bailout?
Good. I always thought if we really want to implement this the two mobile giants need to propose a standard and implement it on the OS level. It of course needs to be opt-in and the privacy and security needs to be provable and auditable.
PDF of spec draft: https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
> The reason why the "wrong" way is used at all is because many old programming languages forced you to declare variables at the beginning of blocks. It was easier for compilers. It's no longer an issue, however. Not even in C.

It's still very much an issue for a certain compiler vendor without full support for C99.
They linked a study and then cherry picked some data from it. IIRC it was a controlled study of ~20 people, and the actual reduction % was "50-90% reduction" where every person ALSO washed their hands a minimum of 10 times per day.

I would also assert that they probably trained each participant on how to use the masks effectively, whereas I suspect OP (and most of the N95 mask hoarders) would contaminate them to the point of being useless.

edit Ah, you responded in a different place saying basically what I just said wrt contamination. Good on you.
If I understand correctly, it's up to every infected person to manually click "upload" (edit: here was "who I was close to", but it's not correct, see note 1 here) once he gets diagnosed, i.e. completely voluntary.

That is so that once one is diagnosed others can check if they were close to that one (and when?). And even these lists aren't supposed to be any typical metadata but something that stays local and the third parties can't reconstruct.

The idea is, again if I understood, that those who remain negative never have to upload anything that gives any traceable information about them.

See my other post here with other relevant quotes from the specification.

----

Edit:

1) Actually what is uploaded is: "the Daily Tracing Keys for days where the user could have been affected"

"Upon a positive test of a user for COVID-19, their Diagnosis Keys and associated DayNumbers are
uploaded to the Diagnosis Server. A Diagnosis Server is a server that aggregates the Diagnosis Keys
from the users who tested positive and distributes them to all the user clients who are using contact
tracing."

The matching is done locally on every device:

"In order to identify any exposures, each client frequently fetches the list of Diagnosis Keys. Since
Diagnosis Keys are sets of Daily Tracing Keys with their associated Day Numbers, each of the clients
are able to re-derive the sequence of Rolling Proximity Identifiers that were advertised over Bluetooth
from the users who tested positive. In order to do so, they use each of the Diagnosis Keys with the
function defined to derive the Rolling Proximity Identifier. For each of the derived identifiers, they
match it against the sequence they have found through Bluetooth scanning."
I'd argue that First Contact's critique of Federation ideals is uniquely pointed because it aims that critique specifically at Picard, who is constantly shown to be the conscience of the Federation, the one who insists on those ideals even when others argue that the exigencies of the situation demand compromise. His character mirrors Worf's in that way - just as Worf values Klingon ideals far more highly than the other Klingons we see, Picard does the same with the ideals of the Federation. It might be part of why they get along so well, but it's also worth considering that Worf's idealism is founded on detachment - he's able to indulge in it because he's in a position where he almost never has to deal with the messy realities that make idealism so difficult to sustain.

One wonders whether the same might be true of Picard. Unfortunately, we don't get a chance in B&B-era Trek to see how he reacts to the test of the Dominion war, but his behavior in First Contact is nonetheless telling. If even "the conscience of the Federation" so signally fails to live up to the ideal - if it's only the desperate intervention of someone from a time universally regarded in Picard's own as a cesspool of cruelty and horror that saves him from his own mad, vengeful hatred - does that tell us something about the merit of the ideal? If even the person who most exceeds all others in following its guidance can so signally fail, are we wrong to question its value as a guide for those less uniquely exceptional?

I can't disagree that Discovery and Picard are very different from what's gone before. But, then, the TNG-era works were very different from TOS, too. Where we differ, I think, is that I don't see anything wrong with that - indeed, I don't see how it could be any other way. The works are made in the context of, and in dialogue with, their times - as you yourself note with regard to TNG and DS9. These are very different times from those in which the earlier shows were made, and it would be much more of a surprise to see new Trek shows try to ignore that difference than to see them embrace it.

"Infinite diversity in infinite combinations." It's a worthy ideal, and an apropos one to see expressed in the same series of TV shows and movies whose own originator codified it.
Pensions are Federally insured (PBGC). As for 401ks -- the custodians aren't at risk. So are you asking, "What if I make a bad investment in my 401k?". You lose money. Investing in a bankrupt company would be a bad investment.
> most restaurants fail

I don't have the numbers but this doesn't seem to match my anecdotal experience. Yes, restaurants do fail but I really don't think "most" of the ones I have seen in various neighborhoods I lived in failed.

I haven't lived in Seattle for 4 years or Tucson for 7, but when I go back to those places, most of the restaurants I remember frequenting are still around.
Ask HN: What do you think of a 50$ raise?
I just had my annual review (first one over video-conference) and my manager announced to me that i'll be getting a 50$/month raise (after taxes).

My reviews were stellar, everyone in the company said great things about my work. My manager even told me that I was a his best recruitment for the year.

But when he told me about my annual raise I was so shocked that I just said Ok and couldn't wait to end the call. I know that these are not regular circumstances, but our business is doing great right now and this wasn't a financial decision.

To be honest I would have preferred if they'd said there were no raises, instead of framing 50$ as a reward for the exceptional work I have been doing.

What do you think this means? I can't wrap my head around it.
There are a lot of good answers to your questions here. On balance, I tend to agree the federal government should be doing more coordination, less official policy setting, but more collaboration with state governments to help them set sensible policies.

Regardless, I think part of the problem is visceral reactions like this. Understandable, considering the scope of the problem we're facing, but I'd ask people to exercise a little empathy for the other side, consider that our instincts may be wrong in at least limited situations, and generally do more listening. COVID had exacerbated the political problems in our country, but it didn't create them, and they'll still be here when COVID has been exterminated. Something for us all to work on.
> But Palihapitiya argued that rather giving workers relatively small $1,200 checks, the U.S. would be better off giving everyone larger payments directly, and skip businesses entirely.

> “It would be better for the Fed to have given half a million to every man, woman and child in the United States,” he said.

Yes, we can definitely spend checks notes 150 trillion dollars on that. How do people keep making the exact same arithmetic mistake? And why are we expected to listen to people who can't do simple arithmetic?

> Palihapitiya’s argument, basically, is: Let those businesses fail, but without layoffs, and let the rich stakeholders absorb the pain.

> When a business typically fails, Palihapitiya said, “it does not fire their employees,” instead going though a bankruptcy process that often preserves pensions, and employees end up owning more of the company in the end.

Sometimes bankruptcy works out the way he's describing. Sometimes the assets get sold for scrap and the workers are all out of a job. I'm less sanguine than this guy is that letting a whole bunch of companies fail all at once would be a windfall for workers (not to mention everyone else.)

Mind you, I do think that equity holders should be taking a big hit. (That's what equity holders are for.) I just think the details would be a lot messier than he's imagining.
More than half of passengers on board Antarctica-bound cruise have coronavirus
I think this is key.
They aren't. As you say, you are unable to hold large USD balances in China. Whenever an exporter's account is credited with USD, the Chinese bank will take that convert into RMB, take those dollars to the PBOC who will then give them a PBOC note.

There is obviously some kind of leakage occurring. Again, no-one where that is coming from because the PBOC is still holding $3tn.
How do mantis shrimp find their way home?
Understanding GADTs
I believe that performance is irrelevant without correctness and security.

My opinion is that C and C++ can't bring enough security and correctness guarantees for mere mortals (lack of tooling, language features...).

Yes some correct and secure programs are written in C and C++ but it's not and will never be the norm.
I'm not quite sure, I'm more of classic programmer, there is an ml guy in our team, that operates this layer
I built https://sneezemap.com/?zone=eyJjZW50ZXIiOlszNi4zODU5MTI3NzI4.... - a crowdsourced Covid-19 symptoms tracker & forecasting system with over 15000 participants. 100% anonymous from day 1.
I would really love to see a direct comparison for scaling MongoDB and PostgreSQL.

When do I usually need to scale up / out in either database? How do I assess that? And how do I actually go about scaling?

Specifically I would love to know how to scale up and scale out (what are the different multi-node options and what are the consistency / replication delay guarantees)?

The last time I used Mongo in production (2013) most startups eventually had to switch databases or hire a consultant to scale. This has always stuck with me.
So the government will step in and protect the upper 20%? That's the plan?
> Actually SARS-CoV-2 has been found to have a comparatively low mutation rate.

Compared to what, a rhinovirus?

> you're positing a very large undetected outbreak of an itself-undetected variant strain of COVID-19

From the linked study, it appears that at least one variant has been detected:

"Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date."

How would PCR test results give us any sense of the relative spread of these two strains (or indeed others)? Is it possible that you're motivated to dismiss ideas that challenge your understanding? I'm not convinced that it's the correct explanation for these observations, but the argument that it's impossible seems pretty weak.
How many of those people are wearing masks for selfish reasons , ie. they don't want to get infected themselves?
I'm describing how I experienced it as a young developer at the time. It was a weird combination.

Note in particular that a lot of people who jumped on the open source bandwagon were people who wrote some free software but did NOT want to only write free software. And there was a lot of messaging around social norms for how projects worked, why open source made sense, and how to do well by it.
I'm trying to indicate that I'm using your words. I have roughly zero experience with macos, and I don't know what native fullscreen means. In windows, I don't think browsers use any separate apis for rendering fullscreen, so I just don't really understand it.

> one of them is supported on macOS

Assuming "support" means it actually works, there seems to be conflicting information about which one is actually supported.
> Do these not have modern radar? The article said they were being purchased without any downgrades from their time flying with the RAAF.

They have something that would be considered a nice radar for a 4th gen fighter, 20 years ago. Whether that's a modern radar today...

And I imagine they can legally be outfitted with all sorts of things! Getting approval to actually use those bombs would be a bit touchy though. (And it's not like these have a huge strike radius, either - without tanker support, they won't be making it much past 500 miles before having to turn for base)
Ask HN: Interesting sources to learn search architecture and search advertising?
I'm a CS undergrad who wants to learn more about the business and technology side of search engines. Where can I start?
The WHO report out of China made it clear that the majority of transmission was happening within households (ie outside of Wuhan; in Wuhan it makes sense that this would be the primary route). Most people weren’t transmitting by casual contact, and “asymptomatic” transmission was essentially never happening. The media has blown the risk of these things way out of proportion.

While “social distancing” is a logical thing to do because of what we generally know about respiratory viruses, there’s actually little/no evidence that “shopping” is a thing that we need to specifically be worried about. It’s likely that we hit the point of diminishing returns once we shut down large gatherings like concerts and restaurants.
> Also, don't forget that 16 million(!!) Americans are unemployed right now.

It's actually worse than that. The 16.8 million figure is for new jobless claims over the last three weeks [1]. There's additional people who were already unemployed before this, and there may be even more who've lost their jobs but haven't been able to successfully file a unemployment claim yet (due to the systems being overwhelmed).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/business/economy/unemploy...
It's like you don't trust Weyland-Yutani at all.
I thought Nil was the answer to not using NULL ;)
> It just isn't being used right now.

The American public exercised their power to elect politicians who'd end the draft as the Vietnam War got progressively more unpopular. It's well within our powers, if we care enough.
I had the freakish opposite experience where I went from an 8gb linux machine that was scraping the top of that to a 16gb machine at the same time I switched from openSUSE's standard release to their rolling release (Tumbleweed). My memory usage immediately dropped by 30-40% and the bits that didn't were all Electron-based. Even Waterfox with 4K tabs dropped significantly. I have no idea how they managed it, but it was a pleasant surprise at the same time it highlighted that if you use a lot of Electron apps there are no good options.
> How is it very literally unprecedented?

What's unprecedented is the reaction... some might say overreaction.
The same here. I maybe had the virus. Symptoms that felt different, but nothing to worry about, a little headache and a little cough.

So I never got tested.

My wife and kids also had this but also nothing to worry about.
And at the same time other Carona types are going around with mostly the same symptoms. So who knows what we got.

But when it turns out people get resistant after having COVID-19 I would like to know if I had it. Because then I don't have to worry anymore about infecting others.
My mother-in-law had an awful fever and dry cough unlike any I've ever seen in mid-February that lasted for ages. Chalked it up to the flu. Went to the doc and everything, but this was before Covid-19 had officially landed anywhere near us.

It's certainly possible that it's been around longer than expected, growing exponentially, hidden in the flu season, but we just recently reached the exponential turning point that makes it a big problem. It only starts killing when it's saturated enough of the population that the at-risk start dying in greater-than-usual numbers, which might take quite a while even with a relatively fast doubling rate.
They're still in the "we'll see" category. According to the data, they're at 78 deaths per million

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-mi...

This compares reasonably well with other countries with trustworthy data. Not as good as the US (50/million), but certainly better than France (187/million), Italy (300+/million) and Spain (300+/million).

The curve of their daily deaths does not look too bad.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-3-day-...

Of the European countries in that chart, Germany looks like it is doing the best. It has 8x the population of Sweden.
https://sfist.com/2020/03/30/super-spreading-event-in-washin...

"Members of the choir were already aware of the COVID-19 outbreak in their state, particularly around the Seattle area, which is about an hour south of Skagit County by car. Hand sanitizer was dispensed at the door of the practice that night in March, no one shared sheet music, and people were conscious not to stand too close to one another or engage in their huggy greetings. Also, no one remembers anyone coughing or sneezing, and no one present felt ill at the time. Nonetheless, a huge percentage of people present later tested positive for the virus."

My point is that the original article said that it's hard to get infected. Assuming that everyone was asymptomatic, and there was no coughing or sneezing, and everyone stayed away from each other, it's actually not that hard to spread the infection. In fact, if there was a single person who was asymptomatic and they infected 45 people, that means it's very easy to get infected.
I've struggled with this. News and social sites like Reddit are what tipped me off early this was going to be bad.

Yet I empathize greatly with OP. It takes massive energy and time to deal with the sifting.

I've started trying to develop mental filters and guidelines for things I went let myself dig into, like opinion pieces and their comments. It helps a little. I suspect I need to do more though but don't want to risk being out of the loop on major global and local happenings.
People die every day. Malnutrition has killed more people this year than covid. Where's your perpetual handwringing for those in impoverished far off countries? Or are you just emotional because it's YOUR people dying right now?

Keep your myopic melodrama to yourself.
The Italian data is skewed old. We're not seeing that so clearly in Spain, France, or the UK.

https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1246866119597621248
"Building better worlds."
Is joining on an fkey any more performant than without it assuming the same indexing is applied?

When you say difficult do you mean from a developer ergonomics standpoint (knowing there's data integrity), or from a database optimizability standpoint?
Not only do they by default hide that, they've also removed the preference to show it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1627988
1 > 0, but if you have details on why that is not indicative of reality please share.
Leading Startups Through Crisis
Stuttering DNA orchestrates the start of the mosquito's life
Is contact tracing technology categorically different from mass surveillance technology?
This definitely isn't "private". It's just obfuscated.
> Any feasible plan starts with massive testing, completely subsidized by the government. And yet just yesterday the president claimed we don’t need mass testing.

This is something I've been saying from day 1: short of universal vaccination, the only way to get back to some form of normalcy is widespread testing of the population. Any government with some sense of reality would spend billions in testing, to avoid losing trillions in the economy. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the US government has any notion of how (or desire) to do this.
Please don't go into nationalistic flamebait. It just leads to worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Rust's expressiveness of complexity is mirrored by its complexity of expression.

I don't think that Ok-Wrapping hides complexity. I think it's a filled in pothole for sum type semantics in Rust. I don't think the best solution is sugar, but completely redoing the syntax. And that will likely never be possible in stable Rust.
He's spot on that equity risk should actually have downside. But the idea that a whole bunch of massive corporations can fail and no jobs would be lost seems like a real stretch to me. In fact, it's strange to think that a company wouldn't have fewer employees coming out of bankruptcy if one of the causes was being overextended.