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> I don't know how you could conclude they did not fuck up

I explained in my comment - the sudden increase in cases in Wuhan in January, was not that much worse that what we're seeing in S Korea, Iran and Italy right now. These latter countries are also less dense than Wuhan, and also had plenty of warning time. Nobody was imprisoned in Italy, yet despite that we still have several hundred cases today. This suggests that this single imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on the epidemic in Wuhan.

> by far the best chance at containment

What does it mean to have a "chance" at containment, and what makes one "chance" "better" than another "chance"??

> the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout

If you acknowledge there's a possibility that no "other countries will fare much better", why maintain such an accusatory tone? No government can control where an epidemic starts.

By your logic, if the epidemic had started in the US, the government would be at fault if it prevented the epidemic from spreading to any other countries? Is that what you're saying? That's an extremely high bar, probably unrealistic.

> the people infected in Hubei be at 60,000 or so now.

The people infected in Hubei are at about 60k or so now. Actually slightly lower. Were you trying to say something else??

60k is pretty impressive considering all the other apocalyptic "worse case" scenarios being published in various academic journals a few weeks ago based on "conservative models".

Your comment is very reasonable and informative, please don't let the Hacker News anonymous downvote thoughtpolice mafia discourage you from posting comments to this site. They are the ones who should be getting banned.

The recent explosion in cases in South Korea, Italy and Iran would seem to suggest that in fact perhaps the officials in Wuhan did not fuck up handling the early part of the epidemic, at least much more so that the officials in these other countries.

There are some indications of officials playing down the threat and lying, but this was also reversed quickly by higher levels of the same authoritarian government. Did this lying have a significant impact, more so than presumably-less lying in South Korea and Italy, that resulted in the same order-of-magnitude in explosion of cases, even though the world media was already on high alert?

Don't be so overconfident at fitting world events and a few selected media stories into your prejudicial ideological convictions.

That's a good start. I forgot to add though, to actually make group membership private for real-world practical purposes, you have to achieve all of the following:

1. group crypto can't give away the identities 2. your identity system can't give away the actual people 3. your distribution system can't give away the locations of those people

It's a hard problem, nobody in the world has done it yet. Signal seem now to have some concrete thing for (1), by your link they are supposedly working on (2), but (3) is also needed.

> Enabling group administration was also a hard feat, as Signal has to give administrators the ability to add and remove members without its servers knowing who's part of the conversation.

I was chatting with Trevor Perrin about abstract crypto relating to this when he was presumably working on this, and never got the chance to ask him - even if the group crypto hides this information, the Signal server still has to physically deliver the messages to the correct people in the group, whose phone numbers are all known by the server, so isn't this exercise a bit pointless? Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?

> People on FB and Reddit are just upvoting Twitter-screenshot-style pictures and screenshots of headlines with no sources [..]

Those are much less sophisticated than the sorts of stuff this enables.

Pointing out a qualitative similarity does not mean quantitative differences don't exist, and quantitative differences sometimes create qualitative differences as emergent properties on a higher level, e.g. that of society. Denying this truth (and downvoting me for saying so) is idiotic.

Those have taken much more time to produce. Now it will take just a few seconds.

Failing to distinguish "woke" from a genuine desire and effectiveness to help the world, is itself not helpful to the world.

I've seen plenty of people "talk the talk" but act in a way that is completely disingenuous, manipulative, harmful, and often hypocritical. Other people don't examine their words too carefully and suck up to them just because they "talk nice", leading to various degrees of cults of personality.

It's exactly the same as pretending to have e.g. Christian values to gain popularity and respect but not following any of the principles, only you've replaced Christian with climate change or LGBT activism or charity or whatever.

More and more often recently, I find downvoted comments that I thought are all perfectly useful and reasonable to the discussion. I in fact thought the downvotes were neither "useful" nor "contributing to the discussion". I would rather like to downvote the downvoters to reduce their karma and their power to perform these downvotes, but the only mechanic I have on HN to express my preference is to re-upvote the comment, which is not in fact its original intended purpose.

Rather, I would like to ignore all downvotes made by particular downvoters because I believe their judgements are highly flawed, independent of the quality of the original comment that was downvoted.

https://abstrusegoose.com/527 is highly relevant.

Random feedbackless downvoting is more and more being clearly abused to censor seemingly random and perfectly acceptable comments. The fact that talking about it is against the site guidelines only makes the problem worse. HN needs to deal with this.

PG seems to understand that a community censorship mechanism needs safeguards. From http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html :

> I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.

How can editors be "kept honest" if a bunch of their minions can just downvote users for no reason and any complaining is forbidden?

> To contextualize when Wuhan had O(1000) cases, before full quarantine, the infection was growing at a rate of 50-100% per day. In contrast all of the aforementioned provinces are now currently keeping growth below the target of 10% per day.

This is how the figures have grown for confirmed cases, i.e. number of positive test results that came back. Not "actual real number of cases", which I'm sure the healthcare professionals and politicians in China are all aware of, as everyone else should be. It's already been clearly recognised that Wuhan/Hubei botched the early part of managing the epidemic, so the discrepancy you point out is pretty expected.

Is someone able to properly translate this graph? https://img1.dxycdn.com/2020/0210/392/3395802964777411656-13....

Seems like someone is estimating 250k "potential" cases? Google Translate isn't very clear here.

I gave you some extra upvotes on your past comments because I think these unexplained downvotes are despicable too.

If 1% of all (medical) scientists is 500 then that means there are 50k (medical) scientists in the whole world. With some basic web searching, that would appear to be an underestimate; "thousands" would be a better estimate.

Someone has changed the title of this submission on HN. (The remote web page still has its original title.) And I don't see anyone else complaining about the title on this thread. So I suppose that part of my comment got through.

If you have a feedbackless censorship mechanic like downvoting, one expects people to complain when there's a clear pattern of it being abused; this is exactly what happens when posts in China get censored - people complain. Before my comment, several other very reasonable comments were downvoted to grey as well.

Literally thousands of other people have the same qualifications as him and are also not freaking out over Twitter. I'd say the data leans more heavily in the other direction.

As I said in a different comment, 5 million people leave Wuhan every year around this time, and the model that made this 99%/25% prediction is using data that already takes into account this mass-migration.

I am replying to the correct comment. Like I said, the model uses input data from Jan 2017, which will contain exactly this same migration as what you're currently discussing. This lockdown is strictly an improvement on the modelled situation. Read the paper describing the model, then come back and reply.

It's not. The model used historical figures from Jan 2017 as its input data, so would also be taking into account these New Year's mass-migrations. Also, this year's stopped at a relative early stage.

Sure, if you want to get precise, you can model a 0% reduction in traffic for the first 10 days, then a subsequent reduction to 99.99%. The numbers will be completely different than modelling a reduction to 99% for the whole period.

Quoting numerical estimates without understanding how the underlying model compares to reality, is just stupid.

The guy needs to Chill T F O. R0 of measles is like 12-18.

And with the city-wide quarantine people should be modelling 99.99% reductions in travel not 99%.

Why are you assuming that epidemics only stop growing exponentially when they reach population saturation? That is not the case for all the recent respiratory epidemics.

Even if they do, why is 20 a "low" number? They are talking about estimating the current real figure, from the current laboratory-confirmed figure. 20 seems pretty reasonable if a little high, assuming the epidemic is indeed still in the exponential phase.

> reduction in travel alone will not do much to stop the spread.

This is exactly what you can't conclude from the analysis that was done, the numbers matter significantly.

If a 99% restriction locally gives a 25% reduction globally, that tells us very little about what happens with a 99.99% restriction, which is probably closer to what has been achieved.

What about a 99.99% reduction in travel? Wuhan has 11 million and 1% of that is 100k, I'd imagine the quarantine is more successful than preventing 100k people from travelling.

The exponential growth always slows at some point, so unconditionally multiplying by 20 is unrealistic.

I know. I was responding to this overall thread, which started:

> Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability, even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.

and it then continued:

> The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at Go.

I was making the point that, even though there have been AI advances since the article was written about chess, defeating its immediate point about chess, these advances have also come with their own caveats. ("Oh this technique that beats chess perfectly can't hope to beat Go". "Oh this technique that beats Go perfectly can't hope to beat StarCraft".) These caveats serve to reinforce this article's broader point - that AI has limitations, that humans can complement, and vice versa.

It's interesting that AlphaStar was "only" able to get into the top 99.8% of human-level play for StarCraft 2, though. By contrast, AlphaZero was able to surpass human-level play for Go quite easily.

One wonders whether the inherent approach in AlphaStar (supervised learning) can only ever hope to imitate the best, but surpassing the previous best seems to still be a human domain for now, at least in SC2.

The title is like the opposite of clickbait & would have been better named "AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation"

> At first, Garry wasn’t surprised when a human grandmaster with a weak laptop could beat a world-class supercomputer. But what stunned Garry was who won at the end of the tournament — not a human grandmaster with a powerful computer, but rather, a team of two amateur humans and three weak computers! The three computers were running three different chess-playing AIs, and when they disagreed on the next move, the humans “coached” the computers to investigate those moves further.

> [..]

> When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”.

> It’s the “+”.

Saying someone's "patch is boring" is also harassment.

Selling food is a bit different than selling drugs.