skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been wondering about the effect of the degree of initial infection. I kind of assume the virus grows exponentially inside the body and would dwarf the initial constant. If a low initial dose affects the severity of the disease, I think that would be incredibly useful to know. I also wish there was info on percentage of infection via fomites vs inhalation.
If you want to feel more optimistic, The Martian seems apt.
Show HN: Asktrump.co – a press conference simulation (built with NLP Compromise)
For some reason, the code is not cited in the paper, but you can find it here:

https://github.com/TooBiased/growt
> and even fewer will hold China accountable

Accountable for what?
Game dev frameworks Unity and Unreal also have good coding support for things like developing shaders, AI behavior trees, or just regular game logic.

There are benefits to visual coding such as being able to visually group or cluster related code, being able to use zoom in and zoom out to create 'region's of code visible from further out with large labels, and being able to follow the lines connecting your code and state visually.

But also there are big big big drawbacks, I don't need to mention the literal visual spaghetti code or the more difficult search / find and replace, regex find and replace, any text manipulation tool not available in visual coding. Hard to say whether visual coding in game frameworks is a boon or a curse. For large teams that include non-technical folks they do seem to be a net benefit.
Agreed 100%. Here in BC, public health wasn't even saying, "It's not known whether asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus," but actually, "Evidence suggests asymptomatic carriers can not spread the virus." Something that as far as I can tell was never actually true. This was reported in public briefings, was repeated by public health nurses on the call-in lines, and was distributed as the government's official position to daycare workers, presumably among others. Really mind-boggling to me. I can only assume somewhere along the line lack of evidence got confused for evidence of lack, and just kept getting parroted from there.
I have the fear that the same Americans that want the "Swedish approach to CoVid19" are the ones against the social safety nets that has made it possible.

I believe you're right about that. The cynic in me thinks Georgia is only 'reopening' to avoid paying more unemployment. Maybe it's my own Swedish ancestry that compels me to want an strong social safety net and a softer lockdown?
However you choose to define the term "excess deaths", the fact remains that there are tens of thousands of people alive today who would be dead if we all took your advice and ignored the notion of social distancing. Does that make you a sociopath? No, it simply makes you wrong, policy-wise, if you value human life. Unless you really are a sociopath, and advocate the policy precisely because you don't value those lives. I can either give you the benefit of the doubt morally, or intellectually. Which do you prefer?

You are correct that social distancing and flattening the curve protects the health care system from overloading. That doesn't mean that it is the only purpose, or effect. If we took a poll among health care policymakers about the benefits of flattening the curve, I'd be happy to bet any amount you'd like to wager that "buying time to develop effective treatments or a vaccine" would be on their list.

This is the key takeaway from “flattening the curve”. It cannot and will not decrease the total number of people who are ultimately exposed at this stage of the pandemic.

This is just mathematically untrue. There is clearly a point where the curve is so flattened that the number of deaths under it is less than a baseline "no action" scenario. If we could somehow get everyone in the US to truly isolate for three weeks, the virus would die out entirely. So clearly there is a spectrum of actions and their corresponding outcomes. The number of infected (and dead) is not a fixed number with only the duration of the outbreak changing.

If your premise were simply that the current measures are unsustainable, I couldn't agree more. Fortunately, those measures have bought us the time to take more focused, informed action based on the latest data. In a crisis this fast-moving, every day is time to update the policy.
Their unsexy paintings are fantastic
> Five time a tiny number may still be a tiny number.

A tiny proportion of a gigantic number is still a massive number.

Plus, most of the population has some level of immunity to the flu. Meanwhile, for coronavirus, every human being on the planet can be infected except the tiny number who have already survived it.

> The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.

Until we have longitudinal studies showing that there's nothing to worry about in the long term, this is a reckless assumption.
I think the hope is that we could be closer to herd immunity than we think.
There’s a great book I can’t recall the name of that puts forth the notion that we commonly make the mistake of modeling the human body as a compressive structure, when it is just as much or more a tensegretic structure.

We aren’t piled bone on bone like a concrete block house.

Fascinating idea.
Doesn't account for epidemic overshoot. The faster the ramp up the more it overshoots herd immunity. The more people sick at once the higher the fatality rate.

That said permant economic damage will be due to politcial policy choices not due to a two-three month lock down. Consequence of protecting the rentier class instead of businesses and people.
AFAIK asymptomatic means you show no symptoms but your body fights and creates antibodies just the same. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor.
> his is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing

Maybe, but they'd be wrong. I didn't grow up using classic Mac OS much, but in hindsight I'd definitely agree that it put more thought into user interaction than anything else I've ever used.
This is the relevant response. What the commenter is trying to imply is that the authors of this study are so staggeringly stupid that they overlooked the possibility of false positives when designing this experiment.

In reality, this test would need a false positive rate of over eighty percent to explain this kind of asymptomatic infection rate.

Also, prisons are useful because due to the close quarters it can be taken as a given that a substantial proportion of the population is infected, further minimizing the danger of these sorts of errors. The choice of population suggests a sophisticated experiment design, and the commenter is implying that the study authors made a statistics 101-level error.
Saluton!
Hey yeah, please send me an email directly travis@saasify.sh
Might be a bug, anything in the console?

(I'm not the author of chessboardjs, just stumbled over it)
In what circumstances, generally speaking, do you think visual programming is more desirable than textual programming? Amateur programmers? Media production? Something else?
Where is the cutoff between "way too many deaths" and not too many deaths? I don't mean to be glib, but it is an important question that needs to be weighed against destroying all of our economic institutions.
$1200 is not going to everyone. Some get $0.
Why not a bidet? I'm surprised more people dont nuke TP completrly.
What exactly do you mean by "critical"? Do you mean "expansive" maybe? This site tracks startup layoffs: https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/
I thought watching the "The Thing" was mandatory initiation for polar expeditions.
Hey, it's all built and designed by lil old me with React & CSS.

It's also all open source: https://github.com/saasify-sh/saasify/tree/master/website
Ragged right is not somehow inferior to full justified. It automatically creates rythm that keeps you engaged. There is reason most graphic profesionals prefer look of ragged right.

It's also pretty hard to have quality full justified text. To keep spaces consistent you need hyphenation and advanced typography algorythms like latex microtype package and paragraph composer like the one in Indesign. And it will still not be enough. You will need to have experienced human make adjustments - fix hyphenation and fiddle with settings. When you see full justified done well there is someone putting quite bit of effort so it looks well.

The reason it is so hard is that if you take somehow optimal length of 70 characters you will have only about 10 spaces on line add to that limit of 2-3 consecutive hyphenations at the end of lines and few longer words will get you to pretty tight spots. It's a balacne battle. Sure increase number of characters on line and then it will look even but long lines make things much harder to read and its the worst problem because you will not be able to catch next line.

Most often you will see justified text full of rivers or crazy big differences between space widths - both more distracting than ragged right. For some reason some people think its more grand and authorative but it is quite dogmatic view.

The main reason why it's used in books is that it saves space. On 400 page book it can make difference. But the publishers employ dedicated expert who does this work and goes page by page so everything is in order.
I'll finally be able to afford to attend this year!

Since it is free, and you do not have to log in to view the event, there might also be non-Lispers interested in a few of the subjects listed in the itinerary. Obviously it is Lisp-specific, but some of the subjects are a little more universal.
> because the state unemployment benefit offices are steeped in bureaucracy and aren’t processing these claims fast enough

When Norway went into lockdown, they predicted a similar problem. We have decent unemployment safety nets here, but the process takes a bit of time and the fear was that the bureaucrats would not be able to process the applications fast enough.

However they rose to the occasion and managed to come up with an online-based solution in 3 days. There's an interesting write-up here[1] (in Norwegian, but Google Translate should do a decent enough job).

A key point was that the legal department managed to find some wiggle room in the rules to allow them to pay out in advance of the application getting officially approved. However there was also some legacy systems to contend with, and of course the web site had to be secure since it had to process our equivalent of social security numbers etc.

The result was that in a few days they processed more applications than they typically do during a normal year, and people got their money.

[1]: https://www.kode24.no/kodenytt/slik-koda-nav-ny-dagpenge-los...
> because that way counting is much more unambiguous: dead is dead

Unrealistically low death stats coming from Turkey compared to cases easily refute that argument.

Dead is dead, unless the state finds a way to claim that it was not a COVID19 dead.
Yeah, we too. I just meant, that language is a process that involved millions. And it does not make sense to me, that millions should speak the language only one person created. (even though I like the intention)

I often also observed, that 2 people, who spend lots of time together, also kind of develope their own language, that others have it hard to follow.

That can become extreme, there was a russian family, living 40 years in isolation, the russian the daughters spoke, was not understandable at all to other people

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
You don't need to have a placebo to do a controlled trial, you can just have a control arm of people you administer nothing to. How are you going to know if you have an improvement if you don't have something to compare your treatment to, though?
Awesome - we've received a lot of inbound interest lately. Please email me directly travis at saasify.sh or DM me on the Saasify slack.
Smoking weakens your heart and lungs (and probably doesn't help high blood pressure) so what makes you say that?
Yeah, one leap I often see made is, say a study shows "only" a 0.5% case fatality rate, about 5x as bad as an average flu. It's natural from there to then think letting it run unchecked would only be about 5x as bad as a flu. Very bad, certainly, but perhaps manageable. But that ignores the fact that there is a flu vaccine, and even without one the natural rate of spread of the flu is lower than this virus. So without measures, many more people would be infected and so it would be much worse than 5x an average flu, even if the CFR is indeed 0.5% (for example).

Of course, that doesn't mean these numbers aren't useful for planning and determining what degree of intervention is warranted, as you say.

Edit: could one of those down-voting explain? If I'm making a mistake here I'd like to understand it.
In war time we accept the kind of government control that we would never do in peace time. Law is suspended. Freedom is removed. Elections is historically often put on hold.

During war time people genuinely believe in the superiority of government wisdom. It is sad aspect of how people work during a crisis, and it has enabled many atrocities which we in peace time can't image a human being could commit. Thankfully in peace time people tend to build up some resistance and recognize government wisdom for what it is. Sometimes it is right, sometimes it is not, and only through open dialog and free communication can we determine which is which.
> The practice [of two spaces after the period] originally came from typesetting

I'm just challenging that assertion, which is commonplace, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary, many of which you can see with your own eyes.
Pardon my sloppiness, it is .1% as I'm the one off by a decimal.
Ultimately this has exposed that WHO is a malicious institution which actively undermines the public health for Tedros Adhanom's personal relationship to the cause of the CCP and of fascism more generally.

Each of our government's dangerously false statements has come from the WHO, and trusting them has been the primary mistake made in assessing this threat.

"no evidence of Human-to-human spread" when they had evidence, "no evidence of asymptomatic spread" when we all had evidence, "no evidence of aerosol spread" when there was evidence in public view: The WHO been there at every step to cast doubt on the seriousness of this threat, and to discourage us from considering and addressing the avenues of spread.
“I haven't looked particularly close at it but I'm sure someone could spot why mine is almost 2x as slow.”

Isn’t that the whole point?
> being able to visually group or cluster related code

Text can be grouped as well.

> being able to use zoom in and zoom out to create 'region's of code visible from further out with large labels

Can you elaborate on this?
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.
Search for templates. HTML templates, react templates, Gatsby, Hugo, wordpress, insert anything else etc templates with whatever you want them for.

You can also check out market places like envato.

There are free open source illustrations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858822
Nanohybrid Drug Delivery Vehicle
That is the problem with free markets

In a centrally planned economy all supply chains would be stored in one large database and it would be easy to identify all essential supply chains.
Nitpick section:

> We went to agriculture because otherwise we'd starve. (...) If you think their lives were better because of no machines, I frankly cannot understand that.

It's not like that. We were forced to start doing agriculture by competitive pressure; the people who did could conquer the people who didn't. Agriculture essentially gave us everything we consider achievements and civilization, so I'm glad that it happened, but there is a point made by some historians that the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture marked a significant quality-of-life decrease for individuals, and we've only rebounded from that in the last few centuries.

> Mechanized agriculture has virtually eliminated starvation.

+/- supply chains. As we're about to see with COVID-19, just because we can sow and reap efficiently, doesn't mean people won't starve.

--

Anyway, GP's point here isn't that cutting bushes by hand is somehow better - but that the reason most people worry about those bushes, or have a lawn in the first place, is technology. The point may not apply to houses on the countryside, which have to fight off the wilderness for practical reasons. But there's a curious co-dependency between lawnmowers and suburbs. The reason you need a lawnmower is to maintain your lawn. The reason you need to maintain your lawn as a flat sheet of grass is because your HOA wants to make the area look nice (to some standard of aesthetics). The reason they want that is because they can. The reason they can demand that is because cheap and available lawnmowers exist.

If I'm to believe Wikipedia[0], lawnmowers were created to help maintain sports grounds and large gardens. It seems reasonable to call the homogenized looks of modern suburbs to be in big part a side effect of that invention.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower#History
now they are product matchers
I think he meant that your percentage is off. COVID by itself has a 1-2% mortality, not .1%, and has a rapid infection rate. The combined direct and indirect mortality is trending much higher, perhaps double.
This is actually not such a bad thing. It means that the true case rate is much much higher, and thus the true fatality rate is much much lower.
Because double spaces mess up their formatting tools. So they need to purge them always. If they miss one sometimes it means they need to go back, remove the errant double space and start over. Bonus getting a proof back and the customer put the double spaces back in.

Source: Way way too OCD for me ex-gf.
HN seems to have forgotten what happened in Wuhan, Bergamo, and New York in its newfound polemic of "the death rate is just like that of the flu" in the comments of the recent headlines.

Either this is actually HN's denial of what's going on, or we are witnessing paid shills overwhelming actual users in the number of comments and votes.
This is absolutely my reading. That someone is not really observing or listening to prisoner symptoms with much care either because of distrust between the prisoner and the medical technicians or because prisoners receive such poor care.
It derives from another: MYOB.
First thing I thought of when I read that line was a keyboard with no shift key. If you want capital letters you really have to MASH THOSE KEYS TO MAKE YOUR POINT!
> the R0 is much higher than other Coronaviruses

R0 depends on the population you measure. In a high contact, crowded place, the R0 could be very high. In a population staying at home, the R0 could be very low.
> small business == 500 employees per location is a farce

This particular definition was inserted by the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, led by Marco Rubio (FL). You can also blame the other GOP Senators on that committee: Risch (ID), Paul (KY), Scott (SC), Ernst (IA), Inhofe (OK), Young (IN), Kennedy (LA), Romney (UT), Hawley (MO).
The pertinent details are that he eats a person's pet in front of the pets owner! His motivations don't matter! His motivations do not absolve him from his actions. No Seinfeld character comes close to this level of sociopathy and I challenge you to come up with an example where it does.

And just for the record I like peep show, and I think the holiday episode is funny if a bit disturbing.
Note that until this past week, officially, the symptoms had to be the first three defined by CDC, not the eight or so CDC have expanded now: fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, repeated shaking, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell, could all appear between two and 14 days after exposure.

In the field it appears many/most of the less severe cases don’t exhibit the initial set they had defined, so patients experienced illness written off as not COVID-19.

From what I’ve heard from the field, a careful patient history finds there was typically a bout of unusual “but it can’t be COVID” illness with a set of the expanded set of symptoms in almost every “asymptomatic” patient.

It’s further speculated these variations may have to do with level of exposure and path of infection, along with the earlier noted lung health and comorbidities.
Wolfram Physics Project
Lovely stories hamstrung by the perceived need for a moral.
Maybe they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a second job?
"Flatten the curve" was built on the premise of keeping infection (and eventually hospitalization) rates low to not overwhelm the healthcare system.

Since enacting social distancing, closures, etc we have two bits of good news: a) outside of NYC (half of the US cases), no one was overwhelmed and b) the infection -> hospitalization rate is way lower than projected.

Either one of those make the case that we can loosen things a little. School shouldn't go back into session, dance clubs shouldn't open, but going shopping for "non-essentials" should be considered as long as patrons can respect social distancing policies and the stores are sanitizing things well.

There are still risks no matter what but there is no "risk free" situation in reality.
Leaked Data of 267m Facebook Users Costs $543 on Dark Web
> Why can't methods (for instance) get displayed as convenient, without worrying about where they are in the file?

Get displayed as convenient what?

> Limiting programs to fixed-width, single-font text also seems like a historical artifact. (The Xerox Alto allowed full WYSIWYG text for program code.) Having to draw diagrams with ASCII graphics just seems wrong.

I can imagine benefits of better diagrams, for documentation, but how would more fonts in the code help?
> Law and the government are there to do what benefits the society that grants them their power. Blindly upholding contracts does not benefit the society that grants them their power.

That is but one (very left) interpretation. Good luck getting everyone to agree.
"I started out believing lockdowns were necessary, but I've found myself drifting towards believing this is all complete madness"

You 39 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22598242

"I manage a fund for a living" ... "We are committing suicide" ... "We need to immediately change our approach and adopt what the UK is doing. AMA"

People are often incredibly insincere on here (whatever pads and provides a moral buttress for the argument at hand), but claiming that you're a converted lockdown advocate is seemingly dishonest.

Another interpretation -- guy who desperately needs the market to recover think we should just let a lot of people die because he's personally impacted. Here's a cute anecdote to support the argument about this mom & pop couple.
I thought we were supposed to blame the World Health Organization now.
You can get a license key on eBay.
iPhone SE and the Commodification of the Pocket Computer
Would definitely give that a try, Liero has fond highschool memories for me.
“Author Martha Hamilton introduced the term as the title of Chapter VII of her book The Great American Grain Robbery & Other Stories, as part of an allegation that the U.S. government was robbing American taxpayers in order to support grain trading companies.”
Its the same story in Wuhan, probably quite a few asymptomatic carriers until the death toll start rising because of the exponential growth and came on the radar.
I wish people would stop obsessing about this.
-You can colour the background of the card according to any property of the card (e.g. its priority or the date due)
-Cards can have any number of properties
-You can store various 'views' (e.g. view 1 is x=status,y=person,colour=priority, view 2 is x=person,y=department,colour=due date)