skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something the article doesn't do a great job of covering is how overall emergency medical incidents went way down more than expected - which is what some of these field hospitals (and the Navy ships) were for.

The head of a local hospital network has tweeted wondering where all the heart attack and stroke patients went - both in my lightly impacted region and in disaster NYC. Did the rate go down? Or did people just die at home afraid to go to the hospital?

In SF in normal times, over 50% of trauma cases are from car accidents. My completely unscientific theory is that commuting/traffic is way more stressful and physically taxing than people think.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/half-of-injuries-treated-at-...
No, naming things is really hard. Well, giving things (functions, variables, classes, algorithms) _bad_ names is easy, giving them good names is hard. For instance, when did you last see a class called <something>Manager? Then consider the fact that “manager” means absolutely nothing.
I'm optimistic that a few things will help save us from ourselves: lab grown meat, electric cars, and solar power.

My undergrad degree is in biology and it was depressing to learn how humans have eviscerated nature. I remember joking with a classmate during my evolution class saying "what way are we going to learn about how humans destroyed nature today?"
Ive been toying with Racket and found myself admirig scheeme and recursion in general. It is so simple and yet so elegant.
We have never had time series data for any other illness, to this granularity. The data is also terribly dirty.

The CDC doesn't track flu. It tracks pneumonia deaths, and then retroactively uses surveillance data to estimate the number of deaths from different infections.

U Washington also seems to be using entirely different data sets than Johns Hopkins and the metrics for international data is not the same at all. I did a post on some of the issues I found:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/
Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
"So it appears the scientists/experts knew..."

The primary theme of this pandemic is that we don't know almost anything about what is happening or what is going to happen. The list of wrong predictions can and has filled thousands of column inches and hours of briefings.

We expanded our healthcare capacity because of Italy and the humanitarian crisis that was occurring there. It had nothing to do with emotion. If it made people feel nice then I suppose that was a minor unintended benefit.
> Why not shut down parts of the economy every flu season?

The flu doesn't threaten healthcare capacity every season. A lot of focus is on the death statistics, but if someone recovers this does not mean they aren't a drain on hospital resources. Quite the opposite, it takes many more resources to nurse someone back to health than if they had died quickly. Corona is more contagious, leads to more hospitalizations as a proportion of those who are infected, and those hospitalizations are twice as long compared to the flu. And yes, it's also more deadly. If a hospital system collapses, then all other causes of death skyrocket. Our hospital system can handle flu without the economy shutting down, it can't handle corona. That's why we don't shut down every flu season.

"Data from China show that 20% of COVID-19 patients, though, are serious enough to get sent to the hospital. That's about 10 times more often than flu. Even though a great many people are hospitalized for the flu — the preliminary data for the 2018-19 flu season is nearly half a million — the rate of hospitalization is far lower: 1%-2% of cases, according to the CDC."

...

"Once a patient with a serious case of the coronavirus is hospitalized, the average stay is 11 days, according to a study based on January data from Wuhan — about twice as long as the five- to six-day average stay for flu.

The additional days mean additional stresses on the health care system. "To take care of intensive, really unwell people can often require two to three medical staff at one time, all in protective gear, for hours and hours," says Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/20/8154082...
Just wait until you look at defense department contractor rates.
Oh, yeah, I do use that (well, Cmd-P over here in Mac-world). It's just when I get into Vim mode I type ":find" reflexively and I get disappointed for a moment. :)

(Ironically, there's a Vim plugin called CtrlP to do the same thing that I never use because I find it confusing and weird compared to everybody else's implementation of the same idea...)
Thanks for that, fixed now
Discussion on r/ProgrammingLanguages: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/gfgn0...

Discussion on r/rust: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gfgt1b/rustlike_langu...

I look at this and I think it's a innovative and promising idea - the freedom of a garbage collected language, but with the tracing done as a type-aware static analysis, and the cleanup code inserted at compile-time!
> I've always said that it's better to grasp Emacs with a vanilla config or a small starter kit and see if you can make it grow step by step in a journey that takes years.

I moved to Spacemacs becaues I wanted to write clojure without maintaining my own Clojure IDE in vim+tmux (this was around 2014, maybe 2015). I was productive in Spacemacs in around 10 minutes. I went from never using Emacs to fixing bugs and writing extensions in Emacs in less than two weeks because Spacemacs pervasively uses which-key to provide discoverability and had vim-style shortcuts I could use for real work (rather than learning a new set of keybindings). The groupings of things into layers makes studying what ecosystem packages provide what functionality much easier than blindly googling "how to do X in emacs" and getting 3000 "unique" (read: half-baked if you're lucky) solutions.

This idea that you should suffer for hours/days/weeks building your init.el from scratch while adapting to terminology, keybindings, and a lack of familiarity with the ecosystem is absolutely insane. If you can use vi, you're better off with Spacemacs.
Just Released: How to Teach Dungeons and Dragons
Yeah, I do this a lot. But it’s a useful discipline to make sure you push your side project along.
How do you broadcast yourself coding? Is it terribly CPU (ie battery life) or network intensive?
We don't know when each country really got their first COVID-19 infections. That will always complicate analysis, and it will never be trivial. Never mind that we don't fully understand the virus itself, it's new.
Golden Rules of Input
I've had coughs that have lasted a month or more - including at the start of lockdown [#] (caught from my son, I think, who was coughing for 8 weeks or more). I've always assumed that this is because a virus can be kept at low levels, but can "hide" in the body not coming across antibodies that will harm it, but not spreading enough to create a heightened immune response??

Kinda like when you don't take a full course of antibiotics, the latent infection grows again to problem levels.

You indicate this is wrong thinking (not a suprise as it's just a null hypothesis from someone without biology training): so what is going on when you have a cough/blocked nose for weeks on end?

{# I'm very curious to find if the virus I had was Covid19; it sent me to bed with mild flu-like symptoms, gave a tight chest, had me occasionally [not persistently] coughing for weeks. No noticeable anosmia. Very little phlegm; no snot (nasal/sinus mucus).}
I was saying "Even if the US only incarcerated rapists and murderers"
I understand your point and I agree, but have you read the book? It's useful for managing stakeholder expectations and to fight scope creeping by keeping things simple.
> In the US, normal citizens are often legally armed, and criminals are very often illegally armed.

It's a fairly common occurrence in the US for the highway patrol to pull over a driver for speeding, the driver has a firearm, the police issue a speeding citation and everyone goes on their way.

How does that require the police to be armed? Do you think it likely that typical motorists would be willing to shoot a police officer in order to avoid a traffic citation? Or that the infinitesimal minority crazy enough to do that are going to be deterred if the police are armed as well?

Ordinary police officers don't need firearms because ordinary police officers are not especially likely to have anyone try to shoot at them.

The situation is different if they're executing a warrant on a meth lab, but exceptional situations are exceptional and routine situations are not.
TSA officers now required to wear masks at airport screening checkpoints
Tcl is awesome. You get that *nix feeling in a programming language, instead of the shell. It's quirky, but in a good way.
Dang, you're lucky, I had to go on a business plan to get a static IP from Charter/Spectrum...
I'm not an expert in this field or any related fields. I am, however, in a field where I have to frequently communicate on technical topics to a nontechnical audience. The following is a critique of the technical communication in this article, not of the science.

There are some more nuanced claims which are made or hinted at:

1. There's not adequate evidence to prove a difference in mortality between the L and S variations of the virus.

2. There's not adequate evidence to prove increased viral transmission over time of the virus.

And if your definition of the word "strain" is "reserved only for special changes that confer a new property to the virus", then both of those would be arguments that there's not adequate evidence to prove the existence of different strains of the virus.

However, is the definition of the word "strain" really the important point you want to communicate? Either point 1 or 2 could have been made without talking about the word "strain" (note how I sidestepped the whole strain/isolate issue by using the word "variation"). I would argue that either of those two points are much more important than the meaning of the word "strain".

Sure, using the proper jargon is a strong indicator of expertise in a field. But jargon arises from expertise, not the other way around. Correcting people's jargon before they have the adequate mental framework to differentiate between the terms just creates conflict and is counterproductive.
Interesting. I switched to the develop branch the other day (yes, just to try to get LSP working!) and ran into some glitch that I didn't have the time to investigate -- a complaint about the .spacemacs file missing a variable or something. I'll probably try again this weekend.
So, first off, Model Theory teaches us that there are an infinite number of ways to represent calculus (or any other branch of mathematics). So there is no 'true' way. There are only ways that we have discovered and used.

Second, I don't know anything about the debugging of the Euler characteristic, but I suggest that the issue here is better characterized as taking decades to discover the correct representation. Sort of like Edison finding 1000 lightbulb ideas that didn't work, before finding one that did. (Don't take that analogy too far... I'm not suggesting that physical things are discovered in the same way that mathematical things are discovered. (But I'm also not suggesting that they are not.))
Surprised to see this comment come so late. It's true. The regular hospitals were hotbeds for covid infections, so it made sense to keep the non-covid patients as separate as possible from the covid ones. Hence, the field hospitals. It would be terrible to come into the hospital with a broken bone and come out of it with the virus. It makes sense to avoid transporting infected patients whenever possible because it could lead to a new outbreak in a different location.
My first ‘real’ program. Written in VB6 in 2005. It connected to a state message switch using dmpp2020 protocol. It function was to run drivers license numbers and return a photo for Police Officers. It had two components- a back end that connected to the state and a web based front end. They were connected through a sql server. The front end wrote a request to a table and the back end monitored that table. The response from the state was then returned into another table. It was used by a couple of agencies including our 911 center. This was necessary as binary objects were a new thing at the time and neither our CAD or RMS system could do anything except plain text. So the subject of this - do you ever go back and admire your code - in this case I go back and wonder how it ever managed to function lol. Seriously. In reality though my admiration was in how rock solid it was. It’s last use :( was in 2017 so it was in service for 12 years and during that time it crashed literally never. I can’t say the same for the our other interfaces to the same message switch. So thanks HN for the opportunity to remember that!
Show HN: Emailbin.dev – Pastebin for Emails
I was recently putting together a desktop PC for some light gaming after being out of the market for a long time, and I couldn't believe how incremental Intel's progress has been in the CPU space over the past few years.

I know there's a non-trivial mobile performance penalty, but a fourth gen mid-range i5 I got on eBay for $30 has nearly the performance of the 8750H in last year's Dell XPS (my work laptop). Even when you get away from mobile, compare two i7 chips that were released five years apart for basically the same price, and userbenchmark.com shows just a 21% overall performance difference in them:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4790-vs-...

This windows shrinks even further when you look at what overclockers get out of the older chips with fancy cooling setups. But yeah, when else in the history of personal computing has five years of progress yielded such small gains?

I know eventually I'll upgrade my system for real, probably to something AM4-based, but when I saw these numbers, it became a no brainer to just bump up the CPU on an old LGA1150 system I had lying around rather than spend a bunch of money on an all-new motherboard, new RAM, etc.
Authoritarian politicians are drunk on power they've only dreamed of before. They won't give it up easily.
Yeah, I would have missed it too, if you hadn't mentioned it. The sidebar is not visible unless the browser is fullscreen. That's fine, but then the button on the bottom that continues to "II. Mobile dev agencies >>" should be above the founder pictures. That way, it'd be clear to those who the sidebar is not presented to that the content continues. If that's not appropriate because the founder pictures are meant to be part of the content, then perhaps they should be on the last page, because it does kind of signal the end.
Yes that's of course what the CEO wants to say, because professional airbnb = hotel company not playing by the hotel regulations/license rules, plus it's pushing out locals. So he downplays that and wants to make it seem as if airbnb is majority-driven by mom n pop folk, who make available a free room or their home some of the time to supplement income a bit, harmless.

In reality, a typical person (like me) would rent out their space about 10 days a year, while an airbnb company aims for 365. Could very well be that 2/3rd of listings are average-joes and 1/3rd are professional.

But in terms of nightly stays, it could still be about 20 professional to 1 average-joe. And those nightly stays ultimately reflect the revenue that drives the economics of these properties, airbnb's business and the impact on the local market.
> With no passengers to look after and their quarantines completed, the employees are left wondering why they haven't been allowed home.

Because it's cheaper to anchor at sea for free, instead of paying dock fees. Especially if you don't pay the workers so trapped.
Why is Lisp not as popular as Python?
Keeping Up Appearances: Non-Native macOS Light/Dark Mode
If it captures you back then yes, your writing is so good that it doesn’t get in the way, you don’t even notice it. I am not a natural writer and have to always make an effort to make something sound the way I want to. Quite often I cringe at my old scribblings and that sometimes without a reason..
Maybe the focus should be on server-side privacy. That's the part that is behind the curtain.
And the risk seems fairly small if you look at the numbers. But then you're some sort of conspiracy nut. In Philadelphia, half of the cases are in nursing homes, and more than half are of people older than 60 years of age. There is risk to opening the country, but telling old people to stay home seems more sane than keeping people from being able to make ends meet
from 2 weeks ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ECqDaPjjV0 a video to explain this
Expert Tips on How to Effectively Teach Any Course Online
Hello All!

I built a little tool that allows you to send emails to a unique address and view details about the email (source, mobile/desktop/plain text view, image links, a links, attachments, etc).

Let me know what you think!
Basic surveillance self-defense skill: Email encryption
An AI can simulate an economy millions of times to create fairer tax policy
Marc Cuban Audited Protocols of Re-Openings in Dallas for Health Compliance
Agencies like Reply, Accenture, Avanade and Engineering are quite overcharging other companies for their consultants in Italy, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of big companies are hostile to keep devs in house (almost all of the big banks for example). I had the chance to see for how much I was being sold as a consultant some years ago and it was almost 3x the salary I was going to get (3 x 32k before taxes).
Use the spikes in excess death rates, then.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
Well, the justice department decided to let Michael Flynn go free, so the US is still the land of the free for certain definitions of free.
SGX is trusted third party hardware.

The best thing that you can say about this is that it is good for some corporate mockchain use cases as long as the existing attacks against it aren't used and worse ones aren't developed.
Workforce participation dropped from 61% in the US to 51%. That means that 10% of the US are no longer working.

That comes out to 33 million people.

10/61 is 16.3% jobless, but there is "only" a 14.7% unemployment rate. Some of the balance is retiring, some are hospitalized.
> the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

I think that's overstated. Many only look to their /own/ future, not the species/collective. Maybe the family unit, so humans with children may have a longer term outlook. Also, many people's economic situation makes immediate or short term needs (food, shelter etc.) more pressing. I agree that current trends are disheartening.
Original source isn't necessarily the best place to consume the information for many people. (In general, I have no opinion in this specific case)

I feel like HN has an original source fetish. I remember there was an IPO and the HN submission was some weirdly formatted document submitted to the SEC, it took me a while to understand what it is about. It would be better to simply link to some article which would contain a link to the document for the 1% of people who are interested in reading it.
> Prior to 2016 most US politicians never went past Omit.

Bush 2.0 did a good job of making the media toe the line by shutting out any dissenters. This was the beginning of the neo-con manipulation game.
I don't think anyone knows for sure, but imo these are 3 possible reasons (all of which are flawed and can't explain it entirely):

1. All of these declines were "priced in" (which frankly is a bit of a meme now) and they ended up not being as bad as expected. If there's there's a record new unemployment claims of 6m but the expected number was 10m then the market will love it and go up even though it's the worst in history.

Counterargument: The economy is still fundamentally weaker, so while we can go up when things aren't as bad as expected, we shouldn't be recovering as much as we have.

2. Technically the stock market is a predictor of future returns, and I guess many investors are confident that most of the major companies will survive and continue making big bucks in the future. People don't feel the same way about, for example, the airlines, which is why they have not made nearly as much of a recovery as the rest of the market. If the long-term impact for most companies is just -2 years of revenue and then everything is back to normal, it's almost negligible in the long run.

Counterargument: Well-run big corps can probably survive a 2-year loss of revenue (and it'll probably be less than that in reality), but many SMBs can't and will close. Waves of SMB customers closing would obviously have long-term implications for all corporations.

3. Governments worldwide are going all out to prevent a collapse of the economy. If the government will literally just pump out money to save the economy, then why should the market bother going down at all when it can just keep going up and take all those free government bucks?

Counterargument: A huge amount of money being injected into the economy for free doesn't seem healthy for the economy. Right now there's deflation because of reduced demand, but we could see major inflation since those dollars are out and in circulation now. And actually, the rise in stock prices maybe already reflect incoming inflation.
Ask HN: What to $600 AWS credit only valid for 7 Days?
I don't have any active project to host but got this promotional credid. What will be the best use of it ? Trying to do some POC around kubernets and MySQL but I doubt I would be able to spend that much within 7 days.
Very different than Hammurabi's code.

> If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death. [0]

[0] https://fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/
In most IDEs, they're the same key combos I use in non-IDE products. I'm on a Mac, so Cmd-X, Cmd-C, and Cmd-V work pretty much everywhere. They even work at a terminal prompt, and the latter two work in vi.

I did learn vi years ago, but I'm sure I still don't tap but 10% of its power, despite using it daily, precisely because the key combinations seem arcane to me.
Measurable in, what, a few hundred nanoseconds... I'm going to _guess_ that most people won't notice.
Even if humans did care, that doesn't mean they could organize a meaningful response.

COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again.

We just have a fundamental coordination problem. A lot of foresight and resources are required, and only a Central Overmind that mind-controls everyone would be a practical way to implement that kind of coordination. When the price of non-coordination is extremely jacked up, like in a crazy future where anyone can cook up an antimatter bomb or an extinction-tier supervirus (or super AI?) at home, it's obvious that the only tenable mode of operation is massive surveillance + censorship (and perhaps hivemind motor control) by a Central Overmind. :D
Sure, they're going to have to ride the rollercoaster up and down for a while. I suspect we'll absolutely see further lockdowns; the question is going to be how long we can go before declaring one.

More data is good for determining how far we can let things grow before locking down, but it's confounded a bit by social factors like people getting tired of the bumpy ride and not following them as well after a while.