skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On busy HN topics, you can assume downvotes are just part of the noise and not worry about it. The arrows in the UI are so close together, it’s easy to hit the wrong one by mistake.

(Less charitably, for a busy topic the odds are there’s someone around for whom it happens to be their conspiratorial hobby horse and this manifests as downvotes on anything “mainstream”.)
I think there are serious issues which we need to start addressing in this lockdown discussion;

1) Hospitalization rates have been shown to be about an order of magnitude lower than estimates.

2) The most effective treatment is no longer limited by availability of invasive ventilation but rather widely available non-invasive ventilation and frequent repositioning.

3) Hospitals across the country are mostly empty and furloughing workers because their “elective” (e.g. chemo and surgical) wards were all shut down and now everyone is afraid to go to the hospital even when they’re having a cardiac event or a stoke

4) A steady drumbeat of serological studies are showing IFR is lower than estimated, and asymptomatic or mild spread much more prevalent. NYC hospitalization rate is < 2% based on serology.

5) Now that the scale of the economic devastation is becoming clearer and the scale of non-COVID deaths caused by lockdown are coming into focus, a clearer headed calculation can be made about the true immediate trade-offs of a lockdown, to say nothing of long term effects.

I’m personally concerned that we’re going to blow our chance to gain significant widespread immunity during summer months where IFI prevalence is low and vitamin D levels are high. A surge next winter concurrent with a flu spike is the worst case scenario.

We’re also starting to see stress on the food supply chain, or if it wasn’t going to be an issue it probably is now with the latest media coverage enough to provoke some major hoarding of meats / protein in the coming weeks. It’s almost comedic when you can’t buy toilet paper, it’s a different kind of problem when major grocery staples go missing.

These are all important points which weigh on the side of lightening up on restrictions. It’s a spectrum, and right now we are pressing full tilt to lockdown when the actual purported and scientific purpose of lockdown is no longer being served.
Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.
I bought 2014 3 HB GT manual when it first came out. Even though I used to be a huge car guy, I just don't care to own nicer car. Maybe it's because I'm 40 and have owned nicer cars before.

Cars are so expensive these days, but a $25k compact car is so nice, why pay another $20k for incrementally nicer car?

Keep your Mazda 3 for 10 years. It's a good car.
Relax, I was complimenting the site, which performs beautifully on a mobile device. And rhetorically pointing out that it is rendered by browser technology (WebKit), which, last time I checked, was considered client side. But hey I could be wrong, so feel free to educate me.
For 1 because your trading existence in that universe would change the future which you can't account for. Your activity influences decisions of other HFTs in real time whereas with a static history you're claiming to be able to trade without perturbing the markets.
Speaking as the person you thought you were replying to: "younger" as in "than 85+", the context of the thread. "20 years old" is something you made up to make your argument look more sound than it is.
> Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

It already happened in New York. Maybe not quite at exactly the the same scale, but it looked like it was pretty awful just the same.
It seems to me that there is a financial motivation, they're for getting attention and monetize that attention. Both JP and his daughter are selling snake oil. Having said that, it's a huge turn-off to try to understand what his ramblings really are about.
So, you are right that the "correct" and reasonable thing to do would be to use the social distancing to buy time to set up things to control the virus when you relax social distancing.

Not so much a vaccine -- "18 months" is actually already very optimistic for a vaccine, it could be years.

BUT. To increase your medical capacity, so that when cases go up you can handle them. From making sure there's enough PPE to making sure there's enough staff-- to setting up things like daily checks on people isolating at home to see if their risk level has gone up and they should be hospitalized (people can go from okay to dead very quickly with this disease).

And then also -- setting up an enormous testing regime. If you don't know what the infection rate is, you are "flying blind" -- you need to know when you relax 'lockdown' in some ways, how much of an effect this has on infection, so you can adjust accordingly, figure out the ways you can optimize for maximizing social and economic activity while minimizing infection. You have to know the infection rate to do this!

And then, based on testing, you need contact tracing (and more testing) to try to catch infected people before they infect others, to keep slowing down the infection rate even while relaxing "lockdown". And you need comfortable (voluntary) isolation facilities so people can be isolated away from their households so their households don't get infected -- and can be closer to medical care should they need it.

And you need all kinds of education and social support to make people comfortable and secure enough to increase compliance with all of this.

So okay, yes, that is the point of the waiting. Or... it's supposed to be.

The problem is we're doing really bad at setting this stuff up. So that's the point... but it's not clear that's what we're doing. This stuff should have been ramped up, with a seriously "apollo moon shot" level of focus and investment -- starting in january. But at the end of April, we haven't made too much progress at much of it.

So it can appear that all we're doing is waiting... for, like, some kind of miracle, or for it to go away. Which will not work.

So the arguments over the "lockdown" in terms of "have we waited long enough or should we wait longer" are totally missing the point. The "lockdown" sucks, it is TERRIBLE. But to end it, we have to as a society be doing things that we are somehow really failing at doing. It is somewhat baffling, and highly alarming -- how is one of the richest countries on the planet, a huge locus of medical and public health expertise -- doing so poorly at this. And instead of expressing alarm about this and collective resolve to make it better... people are fighting about "the lockdown" as if it is an independent "wait it out", have we waited it out long enough? As if it is unrelated to the things we gotta be doing to make 'long enough' happen. It is a mess. It's gonna get worse before it gets better, at this point.
>> The US beat every single expert pre-peak total deaths prediction; by a lot.

This is mostly because the UW IHME model was brutally terrible as was the Imperial College modeling. They predicted insane amounts of death that had no chance of happening while baking in social distancing orders.

We massively overreacted and the convenient out is "well, we beat the models, that's a good thing!"

Not if the dose was more poison than antidote. I could have predicted 5 million deaths pulling it out of my ass and I shouldn't get credit for the US coming in under that estimate.
Sure but being a good publicist doesn’t mean you’re a good CEO.
> but I would say environment variables are not React's concern; it’s up to you how to architect your code

I don't consider it part of the "code" but part of configuring the application based on the environment you're deploying it on(Precisely why the FE dev basically said its not his problem). The fact that a lot of people are suggesting you just build the app every time you deploy a docker container is really concerning to me.

> I wonder why it wouldn't be a good solution.

it just feels dirty. it's the fact that I have to add these into the code that it feels like a hacky solution for a production app. using a shell script to read read the OS environment variables to create an ENV file then convert that ENV file to a javascript file that is then read, it seems like many things can potentially go wrong.

Ideally they would just deal with this within the dotnev library
You used a throwaway account to say just that?
What has that got anything to do with the parent comment?
And how much of what the Fed is putting into the economy will end up in stocks? ;)

Of course, the Fed should just let bad companies fail! What they're doing will hurt the long-term prospects of the country as money is misallocated in zombie businesses, instead of in promising new companies with better technology.

This makes it even more important to invest in the few companies that are genuinely growing. It keeps you above inflation!
We're Hosting a Virtual Hackathon
Hey guys!

We run a website for sharing and receiving feedback on side projects and given how times have changed drastically, we wanted to try something different and host a virtual hackathon in an effort to hopefully continue driving creativity and problem solving. :)

If you’re interested in participating, feel free to sign up!

https://sideprojects.net/hackathon

We don’t have the details as to when we’ll be hosting it, what the prizes are, etc., but we’ll be sure to keep everyone posted.

Join the discord: https://discord.gg/RbF3RuS
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sideprojectsnet

Lastly, if anyone out there would like to sponsor the event please reach out to us via sponsor @ sideprojects.net
Peter Scholze -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scholze

And doubtless several more. By the way, not only are Scholze and Tao outstanding talents, but very nice and humble, as in ACTUAL nice and humble, and they (especially Tao) write in a crystal clear way so they are wonderful as expositors and academic writers. Makes one chuckle comparing that to so much unrestrained ego online.
It is bad when it causes excessive inflation. The "debt" in itself can never be unsustainable, since it is denominated in USD, which is a floating fiat currency that the US government controls. The US government is the source of all dollars, so it can never 'run out of dollars'. However, printing too many dollars can lead to inflation. So the deficit could be called unsustainable if it causes unwanted inflation.
However the history of flu in Italy is interesting— they have a much higher fatality rate in general than the rest of Europe. Their 2017 flu season killed as many people as Coronavirus killed this year. Italy doesn’t have a great track record with infectious disease and they also have among the fewest ICU beds of any developed country: about 8 beds per 100k while the US has 32 beds per 100,000 population.

They also have some ridiculous politics that led them to not closing borders sooner. Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives.
The ICUs aren’t even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.
That was the strategy. If that was still the strategy we'd be opening up much faster, as was observed in sibling comments, hospitals are laying people off now and other such things.

Since we are not opening up, that does not seem to be the strategy any more, regardless of what is stated. What is done matters a lot more than what is said.

What is the strategy now? That's a good question. Based on the actions I see, I find it hard to construct an answer to that question. But there sure does seem to be an unhealthy large dollop of deciding that Lockdowns are Rightthink and Opening Up is Wrongthink. I've noticed how few people advocating for continuing the lockdowns for months more provide concrete metrics for when we should stop.

Because most of the sensible concrete metrics you would have based on the whole "flattening the curve" plan have been met.... yet... here we are.

The nicest and happiest interpretation is just lag time, since of course you can't turn on a dime and change policy on a metaphorical Tuesday at 3:14:34 pm just because you finally hit a milestone. I'd put more stock in that interpretation if there wasn't such substantial attacks being put forth on what seems to be the very idea that some places may be able to open up now. But if in the next couple of weeks we do start substantially opening up (NY may not be able to, maybe a couple of other areas) then perhaps it was just latency in the end.
Damn right I'm sensitive about Neo-Nazis gaining power and authority.
The WHO also retracted their statement later.

https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1254160937805926405
At 1:26, a car rolls through it too. Quite as a few, as he sort of points out near the end.

I like this as an example of a problem that can be solved by engineering far more easily than by changing human behavior.
"We massively overreacted"

I agree, but that was not an accident. Cui bono?

Seems worth repeating: "We can't let the cure be worse than the problem itself"

https://twitter.com/GPIngersoll/status/1255564315891032064
> It does not reduce the company’s cash, but it does reduce the company’s earnings.

If it doesn't cost the company any money, why is it defined to affect the company's earnings?
That isn’t entirely true.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-trump-fired-pan...
Have you tried quantpedia? https://quantpedia.com/

It's expensive but I find it a really good source for ideas.
Scary: rent strike planned for May 1. I mean, how's the market rising?
The scale is kind of the entire point. The logic behind Flatten The Curve is preventing excess deaths that result from a collapsed health care system. Even NY, which was literally sending covid-positive patients back into nursing homes, didn’t get there.
Yeah, those were (and maybe still are) CDC guidelines:

2 negative tests at least 24 hours apart OR

7+ days since symptom onset, AND
72+ hours without fever (with no meds) AND
significant improvement in respiratory symptoms
Far more in many respects. Treatment of Wozniak, the Apple II project, refusing to correct his vision on the Macintosh, etc. Treatment of key employees. It became public enough.
> Didn’t the mayor of Florence have a “hug-a-Chinese” day in February? There was so much political correctness around banning travelers from China that it probably cost significant lives.

They were one of the first countries to ban travel from China.

What you call "political correctness" was just an anti-racism message.

Italy certainly had some things go wrong in some areas, but they were also unlucky in some ways, being the first country to get hit hard.
BTC Tops $9k, Recovery Leaves Stock Market in the Dust
Gov should require source-code escrow for certain technology and products...
I went back to my home-town in mid-Feb and we had thermal screening at the Airport. All the staff working there wore mask and gloves. We were asked lots of questions, noted our contacts, backup contact just in case mine fails. The north-eastern region of India, including my home-town, have zero to low positive cases right now. We also border with Myanmar.

That same week, I flew in and out of Delhi, UP, Rajasthan, and Bangalore without seeing any screening.

A few days back (mid-APR), we (me, my father-in-law, and my wife) got calls asking how my Japanese friend is doing as he was there in my home-town too (in Feb).
That's a great way to go broke very quickly.
The Solar Zenith Angle is the most important. This is what changes from winter to summer and morning to night.

Vitamin D production is only made on the UVB range that is highest at midday. Both UVA and UVB causes erythema. Counterintuitively to common sense, it is better to sun bath midday than early in the morning.

If you sunbath at 8 you might need twice as many time to produce the same amount of vitamin D and you be exposed to much more UVA, thus more like to get burn.
I was also tested for Vitamin D deficiency and my doctor prescribed 50,000 ICU a week, followed by a much smaller amount per day afterwards. I noticed an improvement in my well-being as well (could have been psychological). My armchair hypothesis is that modern humans tend to be indoor creatures, yet our bodies evolved as if we were outdoor creatures, therefore we're supposed to be getting more sunlight and Vitamin D than we actually are.
I don't know about this, I've heard that limiting is often intentionally inconsistent because this makes people less likely to visit. I think Harlow did some similar stuff with his monkeys.
Taiwan did not warn the WHO. Go read the actual letter, it was verbatim of what was released by China.

Go read the WHO press release again. It literally said "no evidence of human to human transmission" at the time. It did not say "NO HUMAN TO HUMAN TRANSMISSION." Stop spreading FUD.
ISTM just looking at the federal debt as a single number is a bit misleading. Any treasury debut held by the Federal Reserve (in US terms, or similar central banks of other countries) is effectively interest-free, so it is certainly sustainable. The only downside there is the potential for inflation if it's done too much.

Debt help by citizens of the country is also somewhat neutral in terms of sustainability. The government needs to pay interest on it, but the money ultimately goes into the economy, so that might also be sustainable in larger amounts than might be intuitive.

Foreign-held debt is another matter, and I'm not enough of an expert to speak on the ramifications there. But I do think in general it's important to recognize that national governments which control their own monetary policy are a very different beast than a household or a business, and so their debt liabilities can't necessarily be thought of in the same way.
I add another point. All cyclists are also pedestrians. Maybe not in the Bay Area but pedestrians often run traffic lights when there are no approaching vehicles. A cyclist feels closer to a pedestrian than to a driver in my experience. So, no traffic, no danger, run the traffic light. The same cyclist (and pedestria) will stop when driving a car.
> How do you put this genie back in the bottle?

You don't. It's over and done with. It started with Microsoft shipping Windows with Internet Explorer. And it probably ended with Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp.

Long gone are silly, goofy, pointless GeoCities sites, webrings, and phpBB forums for just about every topic you can think of. I mean, just think about how ridiculous it is that WikiLeaks has a Facebook page or that Snowden has a Twitter account. The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems. You've still got a couple of crazy idealists out there like Stallman, but they're far and few in between.

The open web is dead. Long live the open web.
Sorry but this sounds like junk science.

Nurses and doctors work in close proximity to people who are sick. So 50 cm compared to 2 meters.

This is why their viral load would be more.

Given a default R of 2 to 2.5 what model are you implying makes this worse in terms of viral load given a reduced R? How would this work?

This bit need explaining because it sounds like you are implying with a R of 2 to 2.5 then the average person might get a higher viral load than if R was .9 lets say.
RSUs for rank and file employees usually vest over time (e.g. quarterly), so you keep any that have vested but lose the rest.
> They literally fenced off a village that had one known infection.

Some countries frankly have a different arsenal of tools available to them in how they can respond.

It’s sad but true that the more authoritarian regimes are able to lockdown harder and faster.

When Trumped raised the notion of fencing off hotspots, Cuomo called the idea of a physical cordon 'totally bizarre, counter-productive, anti-American, anti-social'
Added that such an order would be tantamount to a 'federal declaration of war' and a 'civil war discussion'.

I do wonder if the intent is to lockdown and contact trace their way all the way to the point until a vaccine is developed, tested, and can be administered widely, and if that is the intent if they will ultimately be successful and at what cost?

Depending on the overall timescale, this could amount to judging the race after the first few miles of a marathon.
Freehand, Fireworks and Director all great Macromedia programs killed by M'Adobe. RIP.
> In its simplest form, it will require a user to input their health information into their phones, then health organizations can build apps to consume that data. Then, using bluetooth technology, they will be able to analyze a users behaviors and whom they have come into contact with. Building a web of social behavior information.

I think this paragraph, particularly the last sentence, is misleading. Apple and Google are working to implement this at the operating system level in a way that does not share any information about you at all, with anyone [1].

If you want to have technologists read this article and get past that point without a huge grain of salt, consider reviewing the specs and revising that description to be a little more correct.

1. https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing
>> And his erratic and reprehensible behaviour is degrading the Tesla brand as well as reaffirming the long held idea amongst shareholders that he is too unstable to be running the company.

Good point. Stock is collapsing relative to SPY and the Q1 report was just brutal, wasn't it?
I think to some of us "flatten the curve" is starting to feel like a March strategy to a May problem. A month ago everyone was concerned about ventilators and hospital beds and as far as I know the USA never hit capacity outside of, possibly, New York City. It's fantastic that we never got there, but now we need to focus on the new problems, which are vastly more complicated. We flattened the curve, but now we're staring down the barrel double digit unemployment, food shortages, businesses and jobs which will never come back, and probably many things we can't even imagine at this point.
I do find some rumors on Reddit [0], which says IPv6 is a low priority project that gives its way to other projects.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/ec8i7y/github_still_d...
Zoom is convinced that my slightly old CPU is too weak to do its background removal, so I can't even try and use them. It's pretty annoying- I don't know what CPU feature they'd even be relying on that isn't in the perfectly good i3 processor I have in there.
Pandemic, Parents, and Schools
Google Translated (license, film names) https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
What's New in Fedora 32 Workstation
Pragli is totally free until at least June 1 to be helpful during COVID-19 - we haven't determined our pricing model past then, but it will probably resemble Zoom or Slack (a free tier + a paid tier that's priced per user per month).
Or perhaps he’s sincere, not sure why that is so unbelievable and everyone is imagining ulterior motives.
I thought their statement was that there was 'no evidence' of human transmission (which I believe there wasn't at the time), rather than a definitive statement that there wasn't human transmission.

I could be wrong, there's a lot of information out there and I'm not keeping up
I am like that too but to me having a child has helped me narrow down on interests and made me focused on what is important for now, the life's experience. I used to be a lot less satisfied before this stage in life, now I am really content.