skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the best forum for suggesting something like this without sounding like a monster, but to play devil's advocate for a moment:

What do the SE Asian countries that responded well to Covid-19 have in common?

A: They were more severely impacted by outbreaks of other influenza/coronavirus diseases in the last 20 years.

Is there any benefit to a population having had experience responding to outbreak occasionally so they have the ability to respond in situations like we find ourselves now? There are physicians working who've never actually encountered outbreaks of contagions before. There are politicians who have no clue what it means to lead in a time of contagion. Is it possible that in our pursuit of avoiding suffering in the near-term we set ourselves up for more and greater suffering in the future?

Please, for the love of god, vaccinate yourself and encourage your loved ones to be vaccinated.

And now I await the flood of downvotes because I dared to bring up an untouchable discussion point on hacker news.
Case Study on Ginkgo Bioworks
...what an asinine headline. This is open letter worthy from reputable epidemiologists. It's been hard enough to identify and asses data (and expert commentary) without unambiguously deceptive (and panic-riddled) reporting like this.
Thanks for sharing.

While there's a fair amount of criticism on here about this not being N95 spec, I do wonder if this helps at all in scenarios where doctors are working with Aerosol Generating Procedures without any proper masks (with the combination of facemasks, shield wall setups, etc.)

There are already recommendations that surgical masks are good enough for homepatient care scenarios / room cleanup, see https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/what-is-the-efficacy-of-standa...
> If you change methodology, you really have to go back and recast historic numbers. But that isn't being done.

This makes sense~ without some kind of reporting standard, every jurisdiction is free to apply their own methodology and we're prone to receive inaccurate (or politically biased) information. That might mean inflating numbers, or deflating (as is the case with China, an enormous country with miraculously no infections or deaths since the day they coincidentally kicked all western journalists out).

New York changing their methodology out of the blue this week puts a curious asterisk on both the numbers we're getting from them now and the numbers we got from them previously. Why the sudden change?
How do you spread it without also spreading the stronger virus?
To be fair, shelter at home not appearing impactful earlier on had as much to do with testing capacity ramping up + delayed results. If you’re massively undertesting, even if new infections are decreasing, you’ll likely see growing rate of confirmed positives as you scale daily tests.

Similarly, if the results are taking 5-7 days to return, it is entirely possible for new confirmed positives to skyrocket just as actual new infections are tumbling.
might be nice for employees but borders on negligent when private markets are practically begging for you to take their money and going public has alot of hoops and disclosures
The know that presymtomatic people are highly contagious.
I wear my respirator with P100 cartridges. Reusable and creates a perfect seal.
When the very adjacent sentence is “Poets have to write poems”, I think this question is like asking “what kinds of poems, not for the sake of poems, can you actually write…”, then ask about how they change the world, etc.

Even poets don't write poems just for the sake of poems — they write because it gives them pleasure, because they are moved by some strong feeling or because they have some irresistible urge to say something, etc. (And sometimes because they're being paid for it, or hope to be.) Anyway, here are some reasons (in no particular order, and not mutually exclusive—there's some overlap) for Knuth to write programs:

1. Because it gives him pleasure.

2. Because he wants to find out the answer to some question — for instance, how many knight's tours are unchanged under a 180° rotation?

3. Because he wants to experiment or gain more experience with some algorithm(s) or method(s) that he's learning or writing about.

4. Because he wants to collect data on their performance, so that as a scientist when he makes a statement like “a program using this algorithm finds the answer for N=13 using only 0.3 billion memory accesses”, it is a correct statement.

5. Because he wants to understand something better (e.g. his program for linear programming where he says he understood the simplex method clearly only after implementing it).

6. Because he wants to "debug" or interactively see what sub-components of some algorithm do.

7. Because he has encountered (or been posed) a hard problem and wants the challenge of solving it.

8. Because he has seen a beautiful program and wants to translate it to his preferred style, as he'd like more people to appreciate its clever ideas. (E.g. his reimplementation of the original "Colossal Cave Adventure" game of Crowther and Woods.)

9. Because he wants to provide this program as an illustration of some idea or algorithm mentioned in his books.

10. Because someone has asked him for the program.

One can easily imagine more reasons. Though at the rate of five a week it would be more than 7500 programs over the last 30 years, he has given a few examples on his webpage: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html (Many of them are in CWEB so to help people who don't have `cweave` installed, I typeset them in 2017: https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-programs/tree/m... — I ought to update the repository sometime.)
Does anyone have any recommendations for other "background" videos? I like to watch nature videos on YouTube, but they often have ads every 10 minutes which pretty much ruins the experience.
there are dozens of us! dozens!
Always LINQ:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g...
Diagonally. The length of a side is considerably shorter (1/sqrt(2) times shorter, actually) than the diagonal.
You are right of course. My mistake. Marketing is where they spend their money!
I've found the HP Z230 SFF to be very silent and available for only ~$150.
I'd still be using my 6S+ if this hadn't happened to me. Apparently there's a software problem with the optical stabilization, and it goes haywire. A fix is to override the stabilization solenoids with a magnet next to the lens. Not happy that Apple never fixed this bug they introduced.

The other thing that went wrong, also apparently in an OS update, is that TouchID won't work anymore. The hardware isn't recognized.
2 ways of looking at this:

1) The main cause of infant death due to coronavirus seems to be complications from early labor and the baby being premature. Also related to hypertension in the mother. But it's only the leading cause due to lack of other causes, not necessarily because it's common.

2) Pregnant women also have a non-standard, somewhat suppressed immune system, since they're basically tolerating a (half-)foreign 9-month infection of sorts. It also explains, as you mention, being vulnerable to various types of infections.

But if one of the causes of death for covid is cytokine storm, which is basically an over-responsive immune system failing to regulate itself, then it makes sense that pregnant women, with an over-regulated immune system, might have less risk from that aspect of the disease.

More info on it if you look at theories on placental development and why women are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. Pretty fascinating stuff.
I'm not saying I trust their exact numbers, I'm saying China is the only country right now with open Apple stores. No matter how much they fudged the numbers, China has undeniably stamped down the crisis and gotten much of their economy back online. Very few other countries can say that right now, and the U.S. is the one poised to have the longest and biggest crisis out of all of them.
Don’t you think that anyone who got the “slight sore throat, dry cough and mild fever” or milder symptom variation would be unlikely to get tested or talk about it?

The disconnect between the definitions of “mild” as in “passing without hospitalization” and “mild” as in “easy to bear for most people” is part of what grants weight to the message that the new virus is extremely bad even in the mild version.

It could be worth applying the falsifiability check here. What are the chances you could hear a message contradicting this observation?

I’m going to imagine a possible counter-message and its optics. “I was exposed and got sick, symptoms seemed to match up but they were really weak and not enough to get tested”—this would be unlikely to gain any positive attention. On facts it’d be very unspecific by the nature of it, on emotional level it might seem unfair to the suffering of other patients, from social/mass media point of view it’d just not be news- (or share-) worthy at all. Even if this case was much more common, the message has virtually no chances of ever being expressed and heard under current circumstances.

This line of thought, of course, should not lead to a conclusion that the prevailing variation of the virus is really mild. It only points out that the accounts we get the chance to hear may not be enough to judge the general severity of the symptoms.
With some people protesting the quarantine by gathering in the street I highly doubt it.
Based on similar things he's said in many previous interviews, I think you should read "success in life" as "happiness in life", etc: read the quote as something like: A person’s happiness in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you enjoy something a lot but there are other things which make you miserable, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything is enjoyable (or at least tolerable) to you, then you’ve got a good life. — see the example from the article where he got uniforms to make toilet-cleaning more fun.
Not exactly a scandal there...I would hope that a congressional staffer would handle all mass communications with constituents.
Euromomo data is really interesting to me because of these two points:
1) the spike in death rate caused by Covid-19 this year is of the same magnitude as the normal flu season spike in 2016
2) this year's flue season spike was low compared to recent years. Maybe due to a warmer summer?

One interpretation could be that a large number of vulnerable people escaped death from regular ILIs this European season, only to sadly succome to this pandemic.
Not sure why pessimistic views are downvoted. You are just expressing your opinion and providing a reasonable reasoning.
One difference: Tampermonkey is closed source while ViolentMonkey and Greasemonkey are MIT licensed.
I’ve had this experience on every MacBook Pro I’ve ever owned (starting with an ‘08 MacBook). On the older models, they’d run if you plugged them in and completely removed the battery, but it the battery was in, they wouldn’t boot until the battery had a certain minimal charge.
Can someone clarify something for me please?

Is this (and others like it) just a new Citrix-type system? Or is this actually something new that changes the game?
If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate more recently, it’s the unbelievably huge value we get from vaccines. The portion of the population that remembers Polio firsthand got too small, and some of society started to go insane.
Ask HN: WTF Facebook Redesign?
Is it just me or facebook got converted to a strange version of twitter?
Diagonally, because the hole is 1.4 times wider diagonally than the cover is on each side
Another quote relevant to Feinstein: Truman's "An honest public servant can’t become rich in politics."
That’s bullshit. It’s a statement designed to sound intellectual, but it’s tired and unhelpful. Climate change is a tangible, human made problem, and it can be solved for the betterment of future humans. If we care to.
That video cuts off the best part, where he says "Godspeed".
You could create a basic profile for Firefox and load it on their computers. That would solve the issue of different UI’s initially and on-boarding would be easier.

I use daily at least 3 Firefox profiles - Plain, Work, Personal

I have others specific to clients. Firefox containers are an option now (although my setup predates this). This still allows extensions and everything to be encapsulated.
She's not like this because of her age. It's because she leans more towards the authoritarian side of things. That's not a new position for her, it goes back decades. Hell, she voted in favor of adding a "disrespecting the flag" exemption to the 1st Amendment
http://www.euromomo.eu/

Looks like they are catching up from 2 years of mild flu seasons.
Trapped – Investors Unable to Exit Markets
> We could create a browser extension, but that means developing one for all major browsers.

Personally, I use most of the extensions I've written in userscript form via Greasemonkey for the convenience of being able to drop straight into editing and testing it when I spot something which could be added or needs to be fixed.

If your userscript doesn't depend on any APIs provided by the userscript manager you're using, you can package it up as a WebExtension by adding a manifest.json:

{
"manifest_version": 2,
"name": "Your Userscript",
"version": "1.0",
"content_scripts": [
{
"matches": [
"https://example.com/*",
],
"js": [
"./your-userscript.user.js"
]
}
]
}

Once you've dropped a manifest.json in, web-ext [1] is handy for running extensions in Firefox and Chrome in a temporary profile/developer mode. It also reloads the extension when you make changes.

This is particularly useful if your script grows to the point where it could benefit from an options screen, as you can configure `"options_ui": {"page": "options.html"}` instead of having to hack an options UI into the target site yourself.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext
Do we have any solid evidence for seasonality being a factor?
I'm a frequent user of SO, but I find leetcode [1] much better when I just want to practice coding / problem solving. Their free account is more than enough to have some fun ;)

[1] https://leetcode.com/
This number included "probable" deaths that had not been included before. This is an improvement in seeing the totality of the situation. However, if you want to track change you can see deaths by the old methodology are level:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1250917711586168835
"If you change methodology, you really have to go back and recast historic numbers. But that isn't being done."

That is completely inaccurate. The deaths were added to historic numbers, and the "garbage number" is what was added to the total cumulatively to-date, and did not represent a 24 hour number on official stats. See the graphs on these pages. As you can see there is no discontinuous jump.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronav...

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
If nothing else, the virus is more effective at spreading than common influenzas so people who would have never gotten the flu, are getting Covid and dying from it.
if you head to purse.io you can see what they offered, right below the jumbotron header.

> Shop & Save

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You forgot the most important thing - a 2 year runway.

There is a trick to speed things up a little with Enterprise sales - find out who is an approved supplier for the enterprise you want to sell to and get them to “sell" your product for you under some sort of licensing deal, but where you actually do all the selling. This cuts out a huge amount of pointless activity dealing with said enterprise’s lawyers and purchasing people.
Enough business is a lot of business though, I just emailed them about this and they said to even talk to the department that considers you, you need 3 straight months of $100k+ MRR.
How the coronavirus is driving new surveillance programs globally
It's not (or at least, not only) a delay, but a change in methodology of classification. Previously, all patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were counted, regardless of their cause of death. In the new methodology (in order to ensure that false negatives aren't missed), people with a pattern of symptoms are also counted, regardless of their cause of death.

So, many, many more people are counted than those who died directly from complications arising from Covid-19.

This is not altogether unreasonable; we want to know how many people are dying after contracting the virus. However, it is being reported as though the virus is the cause of death, when nobody doing the reporting is claiming that it is. It's a total mess.

Here's the actual data sheet: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
FWIW, the liberty Franklin was speaking of was the liberty of Pennsylvania to tax land, specifically the Penn family's lands. The Penn family was offering to make a one-time contribution to Pennsylvania's military defense in exchange for Pennsylvania forswearing the power to tax them.

The point was that the state should jealously guard its powers so that it has the flexibility to enact policies that secure the long-term safety and welfare of its citizens, even if that comes at the literal expense of some, such as the Penn family.
Encrypted mail will not be “solved” until Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft decide you do something about it. Until then it’s just a pipe dream.

Yes that’s harsh. Yes that’s what I truly believe.

And yes, unfortunately I’ve been right about this since 2005 when arguing about it with a colleague (Although I may not have mentioned Gmail in the list back then).
Significant progress was made towards vaccines for other diseases closely related to Coronavirus such as SARS and MERS before funding dried up. While a SARS vaccine probably wouldn't be effective against Covid-19, there's no reason a priori to assume covid-19 has some special quality that makes it substantially more difficult to develop a vaccine for.

HIV resists attempts to produce a vaccine because of its high mutation rate. There are too many strains out there for one vaccine to ever be effective and no guarantee that new strains won't pop up. Had HIV been caught and contained early on, a vaccine cocktail could probably have been developed that would be effective, but now you'd still have to worry about any HIV positive person having a strain you are not vaccinated against and thus would have to take the same protective measures.

Covid-19 has been mutating slowly thus far, so there is good reason to believe that if a vaccine is developed, it would be effective. It is possible and even probable that covid will remain endemic in some regions, particularly those with poor healthcare systems, and thus new strains will have time to emerge. We thus may need new vaccines for seasonal strains, similar to the flu, but still it will be much more manageable.

At the end of the day though, a vaccine may not be necessary for life to go back to something close to normal. The US already has about 1.3 million community spread pneumonia cases per year on average which has a substantially higher mortality rate and we get along just fine. The issue with Covid was that we were unprepared for it - hospitals did not have adequate amounts of supplies and equipment to handle the sudden spike in admitted patients. This leads to worse outcomes for those who catch the disease and extreme measures to limit the rate the disease spreads. If all the hospitals already had tons of extra ventilators lying around and if everyone already had face masks at home and if businesses already had adequate plans for sick leave in place then this outbreak would have been a mild inconvenience. While we obviously can't go back in time, we will be prepared moving forward.
That's basically the opposite of what he is saying, it is a glue code, just automated glue code.

The idea is about using views and row security to control data access, and simply exposing that instead building some kind of REST/GraphQL/etc API
I’ve been really into using scripts to enhance my browsing experience, so much so that I’ve spent the last 6+ months developing these extensions to curate my experience on the Web:

- Intention (https://getintention.com) - Pauses distractions so I can scroll less and do more

- Hide Feed (https://hidefeed.com) - Replaces feeds with my daily focus

- Hide Likes (https://hidelikes.com) - Hides vanity metrics for a more authentic experience online

They’ve made a significant difference to my browsing experience —- give them a try!
Why did we let the ICANN go? Could we take it back?

Wasn't Verisign a problem before ICANN became a non-government entity?
NY still has their old number of "confirmed deaths" which they were using previously and continue to report as a separate number from "probable deaths".

The article linked to doesn't mention that but what NY is doing makes sense. It lets us see the general trends using the old methodology while still being smart about counting going forward.

It is very open and every state + country should do something similar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronav...
"If curb-side pickup becomes more popular they would increase available slots by allocating more resources. What is happening right now is you have one or two managing curb-side and a ton inside managing everyone else."

You're ignoring how it's a costly loss-leader for them. The pickers cost money. The storage space costs money with additions of new customers using the space designed for less until an expansion happens. One, little building might be in the six digits. The IT systems are probably older ones designed for lower volume. They have to integrate with all the other enterprise systems. There's a lot more going on in big companies scaling up than just add more people or slots.
Are they including the people who die at home?

They weren't including these results previously as they were overwhelmed with testing the living, so weren't testing suspected deaths at home
What I really enjoy about this merge request are these comments:

> Rename _Suffix_fn to _Fx, again following the papers. Note that in the usage below, there is a semantic change: _Suffix_fn stored 0-based values, while _Fx stores 1-based values. This undoes a micro-optimization (_Suffix_fn avoided unnecessarily translating between the 0-based and 1-based domains), but with the increased usage of f in the Rytter correction, I wanted greater correspondence with the published algorithms in order to verify the implementation.

And

> Rename 1-based _Idx to 1-based _Jx. (While the code was correct, I found it confusing that _Idx was 0-based in other loops but 1-based in this loop.)

Naming is one of the most strangely difficult aspects of programming, but if there is one rule it's be consistent. I really hate code that uses a variable name to mean one thing in one place and other somewhere else. I just learned what that meant! Why change it?! And yet this is common, and sometimes a comment about it in code review might get a response like "the code works, why does it matter?" This. This is why it matters. It causes confusion, which makes code difficult to verify, which causes bugs.
Columnal
Good point! Although, we really haven't stopped the spread of the stronger one, bending the curve is just slowing it down. Maybe the milder one could be spread faster if it were intentional?