skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One way to extrapolate: excess deaths. Look at the overall death rate for an area and compare it to the normal value when there isn't an epidemic going on. If there is a difference that is larger than your number of known Covid deaths (which is true for Italy by a factor of somewhere between 2x and 5x), you can assume you're undercounting your Covid deaths by that factor, and your overall Covid infections by at least that factor.
Diamond princess was tested early and often and therefore able to get immediate quality care before medical systems were overwhelmed. This gives something like the ideal minimum fatality rate if, for the most part, everything goes right with detection & treatment.

Out in the wild, this is very much not the case. Testing it still thin on the ground in many locales and the pressure exerted on the medical infrastructure is not evenly distributed, making levels of care vastly different.

Think of it like a highly treatable form of cancer: If everything goes right and it's caught in early stage 1, fatalities rates are much lower than when it's only detected after reaching stage 4 and fatality rates are much higher.

Diamond Princess, for distinct demographic group only, represents detection at Stage 1.
I hear these “Beneficial Earthquakes” are all the rage in the wellness community. Could be better than Probiotic Plutonium, Fun Flooding, and maybe even Happy Cardiac Arrest
I think that's mostly because the end desire is to have them forced to be dealt with like java's checked exceptions, which most people have a problem with. It's hard to make forcing handling something easier for the developers, but I would argue its better than having unknown failure modes in functions you call.
I add sour cream (much better than milk IMO), but have never added water.
> They invented a way to do contact discovery in a secure way:

Their solution is to run contact discovery on a DRM Secure Enclave system. Ironic that their privacy solution is to use a technology that privacy advocates say is the spawn of Satan because it hands over control of your machine to Intel.
Show HN: NuGetDefense – Check for known vulnerabilities at build
Fully agree. Now that we have actually 'flattened the curve' more than likely due to our actual behaviour 'things don't look so bad'. I am already feeling that and it's affecting my behaviour: today I almost bought take-out, whereas 3 days ago my personal policy was 'no'.

Given the reality of '2cnd wave' and also the gov. is going to run out of money to print and special programs, the next few months of 'undoing the ratchet carefully' is going to be the public/PR exercise of a lifetime. We'll be studying it literally for generations.
Anyone interested in how the downturn affects raises / job negotiations?
I personally am. I might be able to get some professors who teach negotiations and advise on job offer negotiations to run a free webinar. Anyone interested? If folks are, I'll put it together and share the Zoom (ahem, perhaps not Zoom b/c of security reasons) link here.
Really? If you're lucky enough to have one near you they are usually in stock and often on sale at Microcenter.
To play devil's advocate, advertising is a social good, and better advertising is even more of a social good.

How many times have you heard someone complain, "I just bought a desk lamp, and now I'm getting loads of ads for desk lamps. Don't they know I don't want another desk lamp?" And surveys back it up -- people would largely rather the ads they see reflect the things they're interested in. Because a well-targeted ad is good for the viewer. Sometimes they want the thing, and they buy it, and their life is improved.

If I'm statistically more likely to buy a particular item because of some demographic I belong to, and you have my demographic information, by all means use it to decide which ads to show me.

Maybe you having that information is a breach of my privacy, but if you do have it you should at least use it for something that'll benefit me.
Piotr and Anthony: any relations?
According to the first of the SRE books, engineers working under the SRE banner are expected to devote approximately 50% to operational activities and 50% to engineering intended to make the other 50% easier.

Given that the usual ration is 100% : -100%, 50:50 is going to be helpful in escaping capability traps.
Not exactly. The 22nd Amendment would prohibit the second election of someone who had served for more than two years without having been elected.

For example, if Gerald Ford had been elected president after he finished Nixon's term, he would be ineligible to be elected a second time, since he initially served for a little over two years and five months.

That doesn't change the fact that the 22nd Amendment only restricts the election of a president. If someone has already served in the office for ten years, they could still be the VP who upon whom the presidency devolves, because there is no constitutional restriction on such eligibility.
I wonder how Mark will explain Facebook to his daughter.
Farming developed so recently that its difficult to imagine a scenario where the ability to be attracted to an area that is good for sowing crops was such a strong life or death driver (as opposed to just being able to poke the soil to measure moisture) that we became that sensitive to petrichor that quickly. There were some other hypotheses in the thread about the scent indicating a potential abundance of plant growth and food, which could make sense. Especially if some of our closer relatives like apes have the same ability to sense petrichor- it could have been selected for over millions of years
Pot-Kettle Advertising
From Cloud Security Alert to OSS Bugfix: Going Deeper
Huh. Back around 2000, I had ~affordable health insurance through SBWA, while consulting. As I recall, it cost ~$400 per month.
There are a couple of reasons for that, most likely. First, only 4.5% of the known cases in Iceland are over 70 years old. In Italy, around 16% of the population is 70+, so given that this virus has much higher death rates for the elderly, we would expect a much lower death rate than Italy. Second, there are still 11 people in intensive care (compared to six deaths). I'm not sure what the mortality rates are for patients that require intensive care, but I assume they would be much worse than average. I think I remember seeing about 20-30% mortality for ICU patients from a study in Italy. Finally, the majority of cases in Iceland are still ongoing, whereas many villages in Northern Italy have gotten through the worst of it, with fairly few cases unresolved. I bet that the age adjusted fatality rate in Iceland will end up being fairly similar to Italy.
Wait, is that a bad thing?
Dead? We are all here and not going anywhere.
Microwaves offer additional features because it's really cheap, some of us like them (defrost is great!), and the features don't get in the way for users who don't need them. I don't think this is a useful analogy.
>because they can read it back to me when I call them, but the drivers don't seem to use it on the ground.

I guess the notes they can keep and the notes they put in the scanner are separate. Is the door a really really far walk or something? I can't imagine the drivers are just ignoring the note. I'm guessing that it's just not in the scanner. Really what I'd like to see is the ability for drivers to create/edit notes themselves, instead of having to rely on the operations folks to do it for them. Would be better to have all of the access codes in the scanner instead of a giant text message that we pass around

>Thanks for the inside baseball, it's fascinating to learn more about this process.

You're welcome! I still find it fascinating seeing how it all works. What happens in the hubs is basically a giant bucket sort with lots of conveyor belts and sweat
>Generally speaking, 40% to 50% of patients with severe respiratory distress die while on ventilators, experts say. But 80% or more of coronavirus patients placed on the machines in New York City have died, state and city officials say.
There is an argument to me made for the exact opposite. Those who are already sick will be treated according to their symptoms, a diagnosis has little bearing on the treatment they will receive and therefore low value. Meanwhile, proper random sampling of the population will give more accurate prevalence numbers and trends, allowing for much better epidemic response.

South Korea (and Singapore and HK etc.) had a specific policy of contact tracing instead of random sampling, which works if you start it early enough and can actually keep ahead of suspected contact spread.
Amazon RDS Proxy with PostgreSQL Compatibility (Preview)
The real experts were all saying ‘it’s too early to say for sure’ and he was saying, yes, but the worst case scenario is really bad and everyone should know that.
I forget what country it was... somewhere in northern Europe.

(looks like it might be Bangladesh (see below for link))

They passed legislation that allows a RIVER to have rights and lawyers can sue on its behalf.

We need similar legislation for reality. We have about 50% of the country that literally doesn't give a shit about lying.

The truth should have rights to sue.

Now I KNOW there is a fuzzy ground but there are also things that are clearly, provably false.

If a politician says he was in the United States, yet there are records, showing he was in Germany, and you can prove damages, you should be able to sue.

We already have limits to the 1st amendment. You can't libel or slander someone for example. The truth needs to be protected. Otherwise we're doomed.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/740604142/should-rivers-have-...
It can draw people to buy on credit, thus stimulating demand. And fundamentally businesses are taxed on profit, and advertising is an expense, so if you start saying advertising isn't tax deductible, you start fundamentally changing the way corporate taxation works and opening up a whole can of worms. Adding a tax on advertising spend like a sales tax would be far less messy - but it would benefit brands with large existing recognition at the expense of smaller/emerging companies. Without advertising, warby parker would never have been able to grow, leaving luxottica unchallenged as the largest frame maker. You'd just cement current market leaders.
The IHME model has been revised every 2-3 days.

It has always assumed that lockdowns would be everywhere and would be observed.

Every new revision in the last 20 days has been a revision downward in death rate.

10 days ago, the 95% confidence interval was 100k-240k deaths with lockdowns observed.

2 days ago it was 45k-145k, with prediction of 81k.

Today is is 37k-137k, with prediction of 60k.

IHME has no incentive to downplay the severity, yet every time the update the model, they have to adjust it downward because reality had failed to keep up with the model.

Meanwhile, reporting of fatalities has actually gotten looser, with all deaths of tested-positive or presumed-positive individuals reported as covid deaths, regardless of cause or comorbidities (that became universal yesterday, and is why yesterday saw a big increase in deaths despite a huge dropoff in hospitalization over the last 6 days)
This style of analysis has the implicit assumption that the timeline of confirmed cases is accurate. Despite the infection growing visbly rapidly in NY, it could be argued that increased testing in NY state has been a contributing factor to the perceived acceleration of the rate confirmed cases compared to other states with fewer tests. To this day throughout the US there are many reports of people who present symptoms at home and are not able to get tested. Without testing uniformly throughout the country, how can we make any kind of comparative analysis of how different state's infections are progressing?

How are any of these analysis taking testing rates into account to truly understand the spread of covid19?
So far only PCR tests are available at scale. Those PCR tests are very sensitive (e.g when detecting traces of long broken virus on surfaces) but even they are only reliably positive for a few days into the infecting. Apparently, the immune system wins the battle for the upper throat quite easily, even in patients who later die from pneumonia. If you did a random sample study with a test that only identifies a positive for a short time you'd still have a huge uncertainty from not knowing reliable averages about how long someone infected "lights up" in the test. There just isn't much information upside from background sampling PCR, particularly when serological tests (those than detect who already had the virus) will soon be available. Those are not useful at all to combat spread anyways, so they can be used for background testing without competing for more immediate use cases.
> I think it's simple. The US postal service uses postal inspectors to try and identify packages containing narcotics[0], and yet we don't make them liable for the packages they miss. Any attempt to moderate undesirable content on a website should not then make you liable for the content you miss.

> [0]: https://www.uspis.gov/about/what-we-do/

Then what about sites that would use this to their advantage and half ass the whole thing? (fwiw I'm with you, just entertaining the argument)

How do you differentiate between ignorance and malice in response? I guess via emails and memos that would come up in discovery?
I gave it a try today but couldn't get it working. I tried both Firefox and Chrome (in which seems to offer more features). Any help?
IFR is a really important peice of information as it effects the overall management of outbreak. consider these scenarios:
A) IFR is really low and most people dont seen anything past slight discomfort, so given the number of 'cases' being treated now it would mean a much larger portion of populus is already infected. translation we can reach herd immunity faster & more safely.
B) IFR is high (closer to CFR), which means the current case count is more or less in line with actual infected people. which means we really need to focus on lockdown and slow the growth so we can manage the hospital capacity.

as you can see both of these scenarios have different optimal responses but we cannot decide unless we get this info. so far we only have a few biased sample sets (from us pov) diamond cruise & skorea which dont shed much light on our situation.
I use https://github.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
Here’s a preprint of the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20050542v...
Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, because theoretically it got money from cable subscribers. Then they realized they could have subscribers and ads and make even more money.

The vast majority of sites don't treat "paying subscriber" and "sell information" as an either-or. They treat paying subscribers as people they get money and more information from.

Also, there's a third option: keep improving ad-blocker-blockers, so that they don't just block ads, they also block "we see you're using an ad blocker" messages.
Generics in Go – How They Work and How to Play with Them
Natural gas is second-worst after coal among the major energy sources, releasing about half as much CO2.

Leaving coal in the ground is both necessary as well as supremely effective to stave off the next global catastrophe.

It also drastically reduces other emissions, some of which have been implicated in the current catastrophe.

As a cherry on top, it upsets coal magnates, a self-selected group uniquely qualified to entertain us with their misery.
It's pretty difficult trying to run a country where you still have an extremely strong blockade against you ran by the strongest economy in the world.
From the last sentence in the conclusion: "Stronger antibody response was associated with delayed viral clearance and disease severity."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042382v...
Inbox was an experimental alternate UI for Gmail. Over time many of the Inbox features were added to Gmail, and eventually Inbox was turned down.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
> trivially tied to your full name

For a government perhaps, but not your average person. This is similar to claiming that my ISP provided IP address is trivially tied to my full name because someone could subpoena it.
Zucked
Testing should be saved for two purposes:

1) to guide care in a hospital setting.
2) to determine the current status of the population.

Randomized testing would give us a view into where the virus is spreading and allow us to allocate resources effectively. It would also give us a view into what percentage of a given population is a carrier, or has already recovered. All of these data would be greatly helpful. What isn’t helpful is using tests on people who aren’t either part of a study or under active care.
The idea that it is ok for Amazon to show you targeted advertising on their properties but its not ok for third parties to do so seems like a pretty easy way to entrench Google and Amazon.

In fact, targeted advertising is _already_ extremely low margin outside of Facebook and Google. The big dollar ad campaigns follow context (Ford doesn’t want to follow you around the internet, they want to show you every ad on ESPN.com and their other properties).

This is a proposal that would a) make Google/Amazon/Facebook even more powerful on the internet and b) kill small publishers.
This still involves guesswork wrt the ratio of deaths to infections (IFR). Proper statistical sampling is the only way to get an actual answer.
Wasn’t this common knowledge?
It continues:

At the time the investigation began, testing guidance recommended focusing on persons with clinical findings of lower respiratory illness and travel to an affected area or an epidemiologic link to a laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 case, or on persons hospitalized for severe respiratory disease and no alternative diagnosis (1).

At the time, the standard was to test people with travel history to affected areas or when they were hospitalized for unexplained respiratory illness.

Compare that to testing people that went to urgent care because they felt sick. There's a difference.
I did write a library management program for a large insurance company in Prolog, around 1988.
Or you could just use Crystal Lang and get types and 20x performance instead.
> Saw this thread -- thanks for sharing again!

Thank you for sharing this on HN. You are the Co-Founder and posted on Show HN[1] before this thread but this thread posted by someone else gained more steam.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814387
There's an easier solution: drop the word "targeted", and ban all unsolicited advertising. You have to define "advertising" either way, and this way you don't have to define what "targeted" means.
Italy is testing at a rate less than NY. I live in NY and I personally know over a dozen people with presumed COVID-19. Only one has been tested as he is a first responder.. The others are not in the stats. I know this is anecdotal but it appears that there are WAY more people that have this than the official tested positive number.

It seems once this takes a hold in an area that it really gets a lot of people. Me and my wife also had lung congestion, cough and brief fever but will never know if we had it until widespread antibody testing occurs. But it seems very likely there are many more cases than reported and 10x could be possible.
I wonder how many of these institutions will take modernization projects more seriously now that
their leaders see the cost of immense technical debt starting in front of them.
Its really hard to get a job at DESRES.
Preliminary results from a Dutch study I was reading about a few hours ago, in Dutch, that I came across through news.google.nl - although because I'm in a different timezone now, google news has been refreshed, and I can't find this specific one any more. So take that as you will...
This shouldn't even be a devil's advocate point of view. Targeted advertisements have been just about the greatest value-add in the world of business in maybe the last twenty years.

Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste. European baby formula manufacturers advertising to middle aged single men in Wyoming shouldn't happen, and it's because targeted advertising that we prevent that waste. We are all better off for it.
I'm curious if there is an equally high quality more recently written piece. This one looks great and I'll enjoy reading it, but something that covers quic and other more recent additions would be a nice addendum.
Sick people should be tested when they require medical intervention as it guides their care. It would be a shame to assume COVID when it might be something treatable.
There cannot be two tyrants. Two sysadmins in, one sysadmin out.
They're different reasons.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 discusses who "shall be eligible to the Office of President". AOC doesn't meet the requirement of being 35 years old, which means she's not eligible in the first place.

But the 22nd Amendment refers to who "shall be elected to the office of the President". That's not the same thing.

Sorry to follow up with a second comment; it's too late to edit my original.
I mean, apes look a lot like us. Even a spider monkey is uncomfortably similar in some ways. They have the same body plan, they have hands, etc. We and chimpanzees are not very different in how we look at all. An elephant, to become more dexterous, would either have to do some magic with its trunk or create a new appendage. And the great apes are pretty close to bipedal, elephants would have to restructure their body plan so deeply to be able to stand up that at that point, they'd just be the ancestor species of whatever the later descendant is.
And it's nothing like stalking in the sense that there's no chance it'll do you grievous physical harm or ruin your career and relationships.
Test a group known to be 10x more likely get infected and you can get meaningful results with a much smaller sample size. 'sentinel surveillance sites' to try and catch the wave before it sweeps through the general population.
Ah, the good old days. Newspapers were a primary news source, humor was an art form, and a particular news provider could be enjoyed by everyone of every political persuasion.

Aside from the dead trees aspect, I wish those days could return.
Honest question, what problem would this litigation solve? Can you provide an example where the Truth would litigate?
I think they're pretty reputable, regardless.

"Author affiliations: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA"
Probably not directly, but the mechanisms we evolve are generalized to some degree, i.e they often end up being useful for things our ancestors never encountered.

Perhaps the method by which we smell give us a similar sense for some similarly hazardous molecules. According to the wiki O3 smells much like Chlorine, they are both highly oxidizing which is why they can be hazardous.
If anyone loves both Prolog and Python, I wrote a mini-prolog interpreter in Python just over a year ago which you can check out here: https://github.com/photonlines/Python-Prolog-Interpreter
I think there's a good chance Wave could have been Slack, if the team had focused on businesses instead of consumers. But at the time Google wasn't culturally set up for that kind of business, and gave up on Wave instead.

(Disclosure: I work for Google)
> Plain EC2, backend in PHP.

That's slightly horrific. Weirdware NIH deploy system, no containers, PHP.
The biggest problem we had trying to use it (in two different organisations) was that we couldn't get the entire team on it as it was invitation only, with limited invites. That completely killed any reason to use it.
You'll see twice as many ads, and most will be irrelevant to your interests.

It's better to see half as many and have them be able to pique your interest.

The publisher wins, the advertiser wins, and the consumer wins.