edejong

Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.

That needs to be part of our webring! I contacted the webmaster.

Absence of evidence of an effect does not entail evidence of absence of that effect.

After Okta rudely told us, a paying customer, to pay extra or leave, we decided to survey alternatives. Four years ago, we found Keycloak and never looked back. It’s stable, customizable, well engineered and relatively easy to work with.

omg, that brings back memories!

Yes, of course that number is sacred! Just ignore all the following examples: there are four bases in our DNA. Most animals have four feet. The vallancy of carbon (basis of life on earth) is four. We have four fundamental forces. The New Testament has four evangelists. Our economy runs on $, which happens to be above the number 4! Obviously, four is the universal balancing number! \s

Reflects my thoughts exactly. Also, all the amenities are overcrowded. I've seen photos (while doing research before writing GP) and I can't imagine having to stay in such an invested place for longer than a day or two.

The cruise industry is one of the most polluting and damaging industries in the world. It ruins cities worldwide. Their ships are petri-dishes for disease, spreading it directly into our vital cities. They are blocking perfect vistas of the sea. They are ruining local sea life and are spreading non-native species. Their exhaust fumes are extremely detrimental to local air quality in cities. The swarms of tourists are detrimental to local hotels and restaurants, since the swarms only buy souvenirs but lack incentive to spend big money on dining.

And all of that without paying taxes.

Let them go bust. Almost nobody is missing them.

Policy makers are often incorrectly or selectively writing experts to push their agenda. Confidence intervals become averages. Multi variate predictions become univariate. 30 year models become absolute truth. No wonder people lose trust.

I used (many years ago, with Mnemosyne) spaces repetition on CS and AI history. It is really useful to have this extra context available during my normal activities. It allows me to see modern development in a historic context.

HN is not Wikipedia. I am more than happy to provide evidence for my claims, but I'd be downvoting almost every single comment on HN if those were the requirements.

The CFR is easy to find with a Google search. There are multiple studies currently providing strong lower and upper bounds on CFR.

My second statement has the word 'likely' in it. W.r.t. Italy, I am talking about an Italian media article describing over-constrained hospitals and the provisioning of military field hospitals.

Third statement has some evidence in other parts of the thread.

Fourth statement: many, many experts are warning that we are doing too little to late. The need for a response is logical given the high R0, CFR and needed hospitalization. If needed, I can provide some links, but going to my next meeting right now.

The estimates seem to be reflected by international numbers to a certain degree, ranging from 1%-3%. With the disease in exponential growth, dividing #death/#cases is not the right calculation to make, as it might take 3-5 weeks before a patient dies from the disease. The Princess Diamond ship is currently at 1.2% iirc.

Your factor of under-representation of cases seems to cancel out the delayed onset of mortality at the moment.

The end of the flu season is incomparable with the demands on the health-care system due to COVID-19 since flu-demand is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller. The advantage of the end of the flu season is that we can identify cases quicker.

W.r.t. lesions caused by COVID-19 comparable to the flu. Yes, both cause permanent damage. However, COVID-19 seems to attack more of the lungs and in general, both lungs, whereas influenza often is isolated to one lung. I am not a specialist, but I have read scary descriptions of COVID-19 lungs from specialists.

The stringent measures are already happening and the effects are already being felt. The stock market has responded by evaporating 4000 billion in value. Given the past lackadaisical response of government, it is likely we will see further effects either way: response or not.

If nothing is done and millions of people will get infected (think: 2 billion people) in a short amount of time (1 year), we will see widescale breakdown of services, global turmoil and panic. Hopefully, we will be able to slow the spread, develop a vaccine and 500 million people will get infected instead.

Well, this [1] is an article describing extensive GGO [2] and subpleural parenchymal bands in recovered patients. I have read other reports from Wuhan doctors describing these effects, but some search terms seems to be censored these days. I am not a specialist, but it was described as lasting damage.

[1] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020200370

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-glass_opacity

Care to explain the down-voting?

This is way more serious than the flu in multiple ways. First of all, estimates show that the case fatality ratio (CFR) is around 2%, which is 20x higher than the flu. This number is likely to rise when ICUs are becoming over-constrained and cannot take new patients. This is already happening in the north of Italy as we speak.

Second, the transmissibility of the SARS-nCov-2019 (the virus causing COVID-19) is much higher than the seasonal flu. This means the period within which a demand will be made on healthcare services will be much shorter and much more intense.

Third, there are reports showing lasting damage to kidney and lung tissue (sponge-like structures). Even when surviving COVID-19, previously healthy people might become chronically ill.

Fourth, in order to prevent at least part of what I am describing, very stringent measures are required. These already have a historic impact on our worldwide economy and will hit developed countries the most (since they require a worldwide infrastructure). It is very likely that the impact will become unprecedented as various continents are considering and implementing large-scale quarantine measures.

Concluding, comparing COVID-19 with the regular flu is both simplistic and dangerous. Prepare yourself and your loved ones for a bumpy ride.

Absolutely. Many of Dijkstra's EWDs have aged remarkably well. [1]

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. " - EWD 340 [1]

[1] E.W. Dijkstra - The Humble Programmer, ACM Turing Lecture 1972 (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...)

As such, it helps to also study 4NF and 5/6NF (which are temporal normalisations). This allows us to refer a sale to an earlier 'version' of the product.

Your question is interesting from the perspective that the actor model could be seen as the precursor to modern object oriented programming. Both the actor model as defined by Carl Hewitt and the early object computational models as they are defined by Alan Kay (Smalltalk) originated during the same period and are based on similar philosophies of computation.

However, on the object oriented model track, due to practical reasons, its definition descended into a single-thread dispatch system with full message delivery guarantees. Locality was dropped (due to singletons) and the distributed model was not maintained. Method dispatch systems were later added, but could be considered a kludge. This also explains the mismatch between remote systems calls (SOAP, REST, etc.) and the internal language. Ideally, these would be the same.

With our modern systems design constraints, especially given distributed systems, we need to revisit those early decisions. The Actor model is a good blueprint for our designs. It is fundamentally decentralized, locality is enforced and at-most-once message delivery is assumed. These allow us to design and implement distributed algorithms which would be hard to implement using traditional OOP methods.

YAML is probably the least ergonomic configuration format available. [1] Even XML would be preferable, as at least most XML parsers are interchangable.

[1] https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

Ad 1) But is that realistic, given the existing LNG infrastructure? The story being told is that we can just pump H_2 into the existing LNG pipes.

Ad 2) Yes, in processing environments. The story that is told to us is that we can replace LNG with H_2 to heat houses (with minimal investments).

Ad 3) True, ICEs are grossly inefficient. However, as I've seen it, EVs are still twice (?, reference needed) as efficient as H2. Especially for renewable, efficiency is key, as the whole production line competes with the price of oil.

4) Capital Expenditures. The YoY ROI is obviously very strongly influenced by the utility rate.

5) Green hydrogen as it stands is heavily subsidized and it needs to be. The capital expenditures for a hydrogen filling station is more than 50% covered by subsidy. And that is optimistic. So, close to zero subsidies, is not what I am seeing.

Ad 6) This might be true for industry usage, but not for consumer usage.

I am not an expert on the hydrogen economy, but I've consistently seen a couple of important road blocks.

First, like you mention, the transport and storage of hydrogen is complicated due to hydrogen embrittlement of iron and steel. The Dutch gas companies seem to be very optimistic using the existing high-pressure pipe system crossing large parts of the Netherlands to transport H2. Question is whether long-term embrittlement might occur? how do we know? What about the smaller pipes leading to homes? The rate of embrittlement is quoted to be ten times higher. Do you have any wise words to add to this? Do you share my concerns?

2. Risk of hydrogen build-up in enclosures. Hydrogen's lighter than air property is often cited as a benefit, as it can evaporate into the atmosphere. However, in an enclosure, it might delay detection, since it is captured in the top of the building and presence might not be picked up with added odors. Some buildings open mostly at the bottom, such as distribution centers. Is this an unknown risk? We don't know, because it is actively being researched.

3. For powering vehicles, there is tremendous loss of energy from renewables due to transfer of energy and transport of gas. I think I've seen cited 30% efficiency.

4. There is an actual, continuous demand for hydrogen. However, for green hydrogen, we will need near 100% utilization of the electrolysis plants. That contradicts the premise to use excess energy from renewables to produce hydrogen. The electrolysis plants would shut down when generated electricity can be used to power industry motors directly.

5. Subsidizing hydrogen initiatives pulls subsidy away from Photo Voltaics, better electricity distribution and battery technology.

6. Long-term, we will end up with two infrastructures, with all the fixed costs associated. That might be more expensive than one (less efficient) infrastructure.

So, all in all, I am mildly skeptical on mass-scale hydrogen solutions. Perhaps you can make me more optimistic?

Thanks! I really like this critical analysis. Tbh, I didn’t read the article but it was on the Dutch news this morning.

Estimations work when dealing with symmetrical distributions. You might be wrong either way. But these distributions are fundamentally not symmetrical! Also, you should compare deaths with number of cases a couple of days ago (like 7), since that’s the time between diagnosis and death.

Frequent screening reduces mortality due to lung cancer by 24%: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1911793

Yes, but the mortality rate of the common flu is much, much lower. Mortality of admitted patients is around 11% according to latest Lancet article.

No, it does not give any information for a multitude of reasons.

1. Deaths are lagged by known cases

2. Both are skewed distributions

3. These people might have received professional care when it was available. During an outbreak, the available health care will decline.

I would turn that around. There is a substantial amount of healthy individuals who end up in in ICU or worse due to the virus. This is certainly different from the common flu, for example.

I am a bit more worried. There is a recent study that shows a mortality rate of diagnosed patients at 11% [1]. This is not the true case fatality rate, but a sample of patients seen in Wuhan hospital. The true percentage is probably lower due to bias.

We simply cannot calculate #fatalities / #cases, for a multitude of reasons. One, there is lag due to the clinical journey of the patients. Since both numbers rise exponentially, we really have to take that into account. Secondly, both numbers are most likely under-reported. In Wuhan, patients might not receive any treatment and might not be admitted to the hospital at all.

The short answer is: currently there is not enough information on the true mortality rate.

[1] Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a descriptive study https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

How do you get to that number?