drtillberg

Comments from previous threads about the Santa Clara study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22903284

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22899272

There are several variables here but it's also important to keep in mind that the 36% positive rate in this cohort presumably does not include people who had the virus and recovered.

The Boston Globe this morning ran an op-ed advocating testing a random sample of residents to get a better sense of community-wide infection rates.[1] It's amazing that this needed to be stated in a major market newspaper four weeks after most business and school was stopped due to the virus. Goverent is doing some interesting things, random sampling apparently isn't one of them, for reasons it's hard to understand.

[1]. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/15/opinion/how-get-bette...

So next does Google get to dictate ownership of the Trello account, since there's an @gmail.com login?

One could write this article about Bloomberg ... or one could write this article about China. I think the China part of the story is more relevant and newsworthy at this point, considering how things have unfolded in the years since. The news company probably didn't decide all on its own to pursue this remarkable effort to kill a story that had not much to do with itself.

I would be really impressed if it were possible to control for the differences that would occur if one state did a very good job tracing potential cases and then testing them (Massachusetts), versus more ordinary blanket efforts elsewhere.

Inkscape was the only free, viable vector image (svg) application in Linux that I could find a few years ago. On the other hand, GIMP is the Linux go-to for raster imaging (everything else) but AFAIK GIMP only works with vector images by converting them to raster.

I think it would be interesting to see a tabulation of all the implied government guaranties compared to the practical limits of the government to generate money by "printing" dollars. The first category is practically unbounded and dynamic, I think. I wonder under what circumstances it could swamp the second category.

Pensions are Federally insured (PBGC). As for 401ks -- the custodians aren't at risk. So are you asking, "What if I make a bad investment in my 401k?". You lose money. Investing in a bankrupt company would be a bad investment.

We wouldn't insist that people 'stop breathing' to prevent the spread of coromaviris. It's only somewhat different to insist that we all stop living and working.

Masks and gloves, plus generally keeping 6ft apart and routinely testing and contact tracing/quarantining infected individuals... what's the effective rate there? 95%? The modern medical establishment would move heaven and Earth, and incur thousands of dollars per person to get that last 5%. Most of us routinely ignore them in this regard, with respect to our own personal health, as we live our daily lives.

There just isn't a lot of evidence for the case that the choice is shutting the economic or killing millions.

You mean down-voting and incivility? It depends on the topic.

As long as there are a few cases in the community-- and there always will be-- the end of each lockdown potentially will trigger a surge of cases, and thus a new lockdown.

I think what is really going on here is world leaders assume China is most knowledgeable about this virus, because goodness knows its labs probably have been studying it for 15 years, they don't have confidence that China is forthcoming about what it knows, and in a few nations globally the effect borders on catastrophic so it's not something to be ignored. So, governments have copied the more knowledgeable actor, which happens to be an autocratic communist government, in hopes that it's approach is the best informed and effective scientifically .

Thus, the answer to 'when do the lockdowns end' really is: when we feel more knowledgeable about the virus than the nations that resorted to placing their populations under house arrest, and therefore feel confident enough to stop following China's example.

Executive leadership is directive, actionable, factual, simple. It's not about taking direction-- at least not overtly-- it's about giving it. You already sound like a great person. Some great people also are leaders and executives but I find as often that is not the case. Great people who learn the executive mindset can be truly extraordinary leaders. They'll ask the question on everyone's mind, and then outline a simple plan to solve it. They will break the ice in a group, rather than wait for it to be broken. They will concede as much of a point as necessary to establish and maintain their credibility. People will trust them not to always be brilliant, but to do the right thing competently and on time.

We all have some work to achieve that kind of stature, but from your question I also sense the people you reported to were not a good fit for what I perceive to be your likely leadership style. Don't take it personally, they dont have all the answers.

The article referenced a closure of beaches. New York recently closed "parks." This is counterproductive. People need spaces in order to be socially distant. If you close all the spaces, they will not be distant.

Studies have suggested that something like 80% of Covid-19 infections in China were not reported. In addition, recently there was credible reporting concerning the numbers of cremation urns released post-lockdown. I don't think it's reasonable to talk "tin foil hat". I do think it's reasonable to continue to seek factual answers to important questions.

This Gates dude has a 66,000 sq/ft house. Easy for him to say that everyone should just stay at home with no access to public parks and beaches. And he has a private waterfront.

For the rest of us, there's no no scientific study that says staying 24hrs/day in our little hovels is more healthful than occasionally walking and enjoying public amenities while maintaining appropriate physical separation from others.

There's a pretty big difference between doing zero in response to a dropped pulse on a Covid-19 patient and 30 people rushing into a room with no protective gear. While I understand that physicians are confused and frustrated by the lack of resources, phrasing the discussion around 'mandatory DNRs' is alarmist and unhelpful.

Since we already know the virus shared up to 96% of the same DNA as horseshoe bat virus collected by Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2003 from a cave 600 miles away ... why are researchers still agonizing over all these alternative theories? The only place near Wuhan the virus existed prior to the outbreak was at the institute of virology. And the first places the outbreak occurred were in the immediate neighborhood of the institute. I'm really genuinely curious why bigtime news outlets keep talking about Vietnamese pangolins.

[1] E.g., https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/17/coronavirus-start-chinese-lab...

I was referring to reading a stock certificate. Stock is a nuanced and highly specific legal claim on a sliver of the capital structure of an artificial entity. I was referring to reading the terms, conditions and property embodied in the stock. I'm very diligent about such things and I personally never have read that, nor has anyone ever suggested I should ... because ... well ... I'm not sure momentum investors really care 99% of the time about the intrinsic value of whatever they're spending money on.

Gold is a natural element with scientific properties I'm generally aware of, even if I've never personally audited them.

[p.s. - I was also was referring to the historical value of the dollar. A "dollar" literally was at the time of adoption in the U.S. a fixed amount of precious metal.]

Finance is a mountain of complexity piled on an 'IOU Nothing'. Next time you log into Robinhood and pour your IOUs, stop and think if you've ever-- and I mean EVER-- examined precisely what it is you are buying.

What makes gold valuable is exactly what used to make dollars valuable. No BS and you'd be nuts to borrow to buy and hold them (because no yield and storage costs money). That means, in boom times they don't bubble (as much) because ppl aren't buying on credit, and in busts, people see both the intrinsic credibility and price action as a sign of strength.

Silver is a thin market more easily classified as a commodity somewhere between oil and gold. The oil market is in a very unusual situation. When that dumpster fire dies down look again at the movement in the gold/silver ratio.

It's too bad that Comcast chose to have inferior upload speeds, about 6Mbps on standard plans in my region, no matter whether it's 100Mbps down or 1,000Mbps down. When we're talking work from home, online learning, video conferencing, upload speed matters. Comcast tries to bury the upload number, I'm kind of surprised to see it printed in this article, and when I realized the reality I thought there must be some mistake. There is no option for a higher upload speed at less than $300/mo, which pays for a full fiber. It's great to have an option but too bad Comcast chose to make their service inflexibly inferior in this way.

I generally agree with the folks who flagged this posting on HN (I didn't though) because the thought of ... airborne, highly contagious HIV in an early phase pandemic ... is a really very un-HN-like thought ... the mere theoretical possibility it could be true is the sort of thing I'd hope might inspire a generation to make our leaders globally take a time out on heated rhetoric and the ongoing technological arms race.

As a child I thought it would have been completely hilarious if the leaders of the free world solemnly decided to destroy it by a large scale nuclear exchange, only to find much to their surprise that none of the warheads functioned due to age and lack of testing.

I say leave the missiles and warheads exactly the way they are and let anyone with the temerity to order a first strike deal cognitively with the risk that the world might survive their decision.

I appreciate that you are passionate on the point @dang, but I read those comments you link as confirming there is a perception among users that folks are flaming and downvoting on HN to pursue a political or ideological agenda. They flame and downvote each other, I guess. I love HN, but I'm not impressed by the quality of this discourse or by labels like 'flamebait', anecdotally it's getting worse, and I'm not even convinced the activity even is that authentic or organic.

Looks like from a prior HN discussion, maybe if he published a book and mailed it to the conference, it would be ok?[1]. But export of electronic code is not ok?

I also am under the impression the case is about unlawful export, but perhaps they're concentrating on a different theory.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885238

That's part of it. But I think it's bigger-- when it comes to topics like this, especially legal/economic ones, a community that ordinarily impresses on technical and scientific subjects as wise and timeless, displays a bizarre groupthink that levels at a secondary school-level sophistication. It's sad.

I don't understand the waves of down votes in this thread. Not very HN-like.

Is the logical endpoint that any U.S. person with a "technical" blog might need to block IPs from NK, Iran, Venezuela, etc? At some point the rule swallows the exception in an open, democratic society.

From a U.S. perspective, I question the categorical statement about 'legality.' See, e.g., Operation Varsity Blues.[1]. Maybe 'commonplace', but unless the folks involved have happily run it past their GCs and the local U.S. Attorney, don't get ahead of yourself there...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib...

Independent tech in the 2010s is like independent banking in the 2000s. You find a decent partner and 6 months later you roll over and see BigCorp beside you.

I struggle to see how this even is consistent with the spirit of the Fitbit terms-- the purchase of the company transfers ownership of user data, which Fitbit assured customers it would never do. Time for some common sense concerning this consumer-unfriendly trend.