ericb

50 ms·

541.
by ericb 7y ago
Why not? Because math . This is a contagion. Read about the Spanish Flu. This looks to be both more contagious, and more deadly in most of the published studies. We hope they are biased and overly pessimistic, but whataboutism isn't
542.
by ericb 7y ago
This is what I've seen so far: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202002.0051/v1 There are also other hints that line up with this. The mortality rate in the recent 1000+ case study seems to be much higher
543.
by ericb 7y ago
Another possibility: the subsequent ARDS is catastrophic in smokers. In China, 41% of people smoke.
544.
by ericb 7y ago
Count me in! I am first initial (which you can see in my username) followed by "beland" on google's email service.
545.
by ericb 7y ago
When a building is burning, often, people's first reaction is to ignore the alarm and carry on with what they were doing. The first people to leave look like worry-warts. Those who make it out, though, are the ones who think for themse
546.
by ericb 7y ago
Not sure about betting markets, but I'd put the odds really really high. It has a near-perfect combination of traits that make it spread really effectively. A latency window long enough to let people get around the world, combined with
547.
by ericb 7y ago
Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?
548.
by ericb 7y ago
Sort of, but by introducing 5 more problems that no one wants to deal with.
549.
by ericb 7y ago
Are you sure? As a thought experiment, if you infected an entire city with the flu, the ones to show up at the hospital are the worst cases, and if you just built your data from those people, you'd get a really really skewed perspectiv
550.
by ericb 7y ago
Keep in mind, this is a self-selected group of people. There could be 10x more asymptomatic, or low impact cases who thought they had the flu, but didn't feel bad enough to go to the hospital. Imagine if I tried to capture the survival
551.
by ericb 7y ago
I submitted an Ask: HN to propose designing an open source ventilator. It was invisi-modded. From watching videos from inside wuhan, there seem to be hints that this thing is somewhat similar to the flu and I think it is possible, even like
552.
by ericb 7y ago
Is it an extraordinary claim? The sequence matching should be easy to verify as the genome has been published. If the sequences are short or common enough maybe it would be a more likely coincidence. That said: What are the priors on a &q
553.
by ericb 7y ago
The measure of transmissibility seems to be as high as the Spanish Flu, and the mortality rate is still an open question. The Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people. Worth reading about it.
554.
by ericb 7y ago
As an exercise in understanding exponential growth, for one month would you rather receive $20,000 or 1 penny on day one, 2 on day two, doubling each day until the end of the month. Try it with a calculator or program. People are concerned
555.
Ask HN: Open-source ventilator plans for pandemics–possible? Worthwhile?
2 points by ericb 7y ago|0 comments
556.
by ericb 7y ago
I can give an anecdote. I needed to design a load testing system that would ramp up to an arbitrary number of users of certain types, over an arbitrary amount of time. Rather than just make a loop and increment every so often, I made the sy
557.
by ericb 7y ago
Making debuggability (transparency) a first-class design criteria. For many (most) systems, there are designs that make perfect sense, but will be hard to debug. When I started designing so that programs could tell me what they are going to
558.
by ericb 7y ago
I have sciatic issues--my leg feels either numb, or on fire when it acts up. I bought an inversion table. I get in it backwards and hang from the affected leg (the other I leave free) for about a 40 count. It brings me from pain to fine i
559.
by ericb 7y ago
> I can't think of a single important scientific paper from it Surely you're kidding? https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study/research-results
560.
by ericb 7y ago
Yes, but I think there's a stage learning where you learn "this is how I work in a manner that lets me get along with others." There are a lot of ways to gain the knowledge of this stage. One part of it is working on projects
561.
by ericb 7y ago
> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) I don't find this is particularly
562.
by ericb 7y ago
Makes one think twice about the value of social proof. Epstein was like a landing page with customer logos from LinkedIn, Microsoft, MIT, and Harvard.
563.
by ericb 7y ago
I'll concede that, and also that my phrasing is off -- it should be "is most likely a negative." All that being the case, there's still a certain irony to this chapter in Thiel's book. Thiel thinks that thinking dif
564.
by ericb 7y ago
Exactly! According to the article, "most people think they are heretical, but are actually mainstream" -- that includes the interviewer ! Any candidate smart enough to have heretical beliefs is probably also smart enough to know
565.
by ericb 7y ago
Not too well. I feel like a chunk of them could still work for the next ten years. I think the timing is the tricky part. For example, for this year's 10 year predictions, my China prediction would be better off a little farther out to
566.
by ericb 7y ago
Ever meet someone with a startup idea that is really an insanely complicated way of achieving something people already can do? It's like, you want to tell them "people will never do steps m,n,o,p,q,r,s and t because that's n
567.
by ericb 7y ago
* VR finally takes off for real, creating the next app store style payday as killer apps come online. * A VR content studio becomes a billion dollar business * At the end of the 2020's, China hits a demographic wall it can't easil
568.
by ericb 7y ago
> Writing the simplest, most performant iteration of a site that matches the minimum requirements as you perceive them for today's users isn't that expensive. But that approach crumbled quickly as parameters change slightly. Ma
569.
by ericb 7y ago
I mean, yes, but from a broader perspective, didn't you create your "seam" by adding in an entire second application ?
570.
by ericb 7y ago
Often on Hacker News, and other places too, I see an argument where one person is hand-waving away a task and saying how easy and trivial it is. The simple heuristic for deciding which person is correct is that the one saying it is simp

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